Gender, Place & Culture

A Journal of Feminist Geography

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The Penumbral Spaces of Nella Larsen's Passing:

Undecidable bodies, mobile identities, and the
deconstruction of racial boundaries

Perry L. Carter

To cite this article: Perry L. Carter (2006) The Penumbral Spaces of Nella Larsen's Passing:
Undecidable bodies, mobile identities, and the deconstruction of racial boundaries, Gender, Place &
Culture, 13:3, 227-246, DOI: 10.1080/09663690600700972

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09663690600700972

Published online: 15 Aug 2006.

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Gender, Place and Culture
Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 227246, June 2006

The Penumbral Spaces of Nella Larsens Passing:

Undecidable bodies, mobile identities, and the
deconstruction of racial boundaries

PERRY L. CARTER
Department of Economics and Geography, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas, USA

Abstract Nella Larsens 1929 novel, Passing, is a psychological drama centering

around two fair-skinned women. One, Clare Kendry, passes as the White wife of a
financially successful racist; the other, Irene Redfield, is a race woman living in upper
Manhattan during the era of the Renaissance Harlem. Clare and Irene are undecidables,
neither White nor Black, fluid subjects traversing the boundaries of racepassing.
Passing is an act of insinuating oneself into forbidden spaces by jettisoning former
identities. It is as much a transgression of spatial boundaries as it is of racial boundaries. In
the novel Clare passes by merely crossing from Black space into White space, and along the
way shedding a Black identity for a White one. This paper examines the mobility of
identities across racial geographies and how this movement destabilizes notions of race and
of raced spaces.

We encounter the world in our bodies, and through our bodies most
exquisitely sensitive sense, our skins, we take the world into ourselves.
We have made and remade a world where nearly every experience is
shaded and shaped by the color of those bodies, the tones of those skins.
(Jane Lazarre, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: memoir of a White mother
of Black sons, 1997, p. 94)

Introduction
Abstracted from its historical setting, Nella Larsens second novel, Passing, seems
phantasmagoric. A fair-skinned Black woman leaves her community and weds a
successful White entrepreneur who presumes that she too is White. She marries
not just any White man but a racist whose language is liberally seasoned with the
profanity Nigger. Moreover, despite her fear of being outed by an African
avatarAfrican features emerging on an ostensibly White bodyshe begets a
child by this man. More than 70 years removed from its original publication, the
plot seems bizarre and the story line implausiblehow could anyone live day to

Correspondence: Perry Carter, Department of Economics and Geography, Texas Tech

University, Box 41014, Lubbock, Texas 79409-1137, USA. E-mail: perry.carter@ttu.edu

ISSN 0966-369X print/ISSN 1360-0524 online/06/030227-20 q 2006 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/09663690600700998
228 P. L. Carter

day under these conditions, constantly living with the fear of being exposed as
being not what one appears to be? This novel was written in the middle of the Jim
Crow era, a period in American history when Blacks and Whites were more
segregated than at any other time in their shared history (Delaney, 1998, p. 95;
Hunter, 1997, pp. 4 20). From 1884 to the publication date of Passing, 1929, more
than 3600 African Americans were lynched (Bennett, 1988, pp. 511 30; Nederveen
Pieterse, 1992, p. 179). Between 1910 and the release of the novel, more than
1,500,000 Blacks left (fled) their homes in the South and migrated to Northern
cities, and from 1880 to 1925 another type of African diaspora had reached its apex
(Bennett, 1988, p. 344): In this 45-year time span an estimated 25,000 Blacks
migrated out of their racially ascribed category into Whiteness (Davis, 1991, p. 22).
They surreptitiously crossed the the color line (Du Bois, 1903, p. 3). Set within
this context, Larsens story of race, identity and gender does not appear so
strange or incredible.
Larsens novel deals with boundaries and transgressions, rootedness and
mobility, bodies and identities, color and race. As a work of literature it is
compelling, but as a text documenting America at a certain time and as a certain
place, it is also highly informative. Texts are the progeny of authors who are
embedded in particular socio-cultural frames of reference (Malchow, 1993, p. 3).
Hence, texts are reflections of times and of places mediated through the psyches of
their creators. This article employs Larsens text Passing to deconstruct the nexus
binding race to space while calling into question the stability of raced, gendered,
and sexed identities and bodies. It attempts to make conspicuously perceptible the
constituted nature of race, as a visual apparatus utilized to mark and categorize
bodies. Raced bodies are linked to socially, culturally and historically constructed
sets of identity categories or roles. The article examines how certain bodily
ambiguous individuals, undecidables, have a choice as to which racialized roles
they wish to perform. Certain individuals are able to make this choice because
identitieswhether based on race, gender, sexual orientation or classare not
fixed but fluid. Yet often space acts as a fixing agent, binding identities to certain
places. Consequently, when these subjects deracinate and transport themselves,
their identities become unstable, allowing them, if they so choose, to perform
entirely different identities.
For the two female protagonists in Larsens novel, before a choice and a
performance of Whiteness can be staged, a decoupling and a passage takes place.
The decoupling occurred at birth when these two women entered the world
lacking the bodily markings of Blackness. Their fair complexions, fine hair and
angular physical features belie their essential racial identity. They possess bodies
not easily read as African. They are White Black women or Black White women.
They are undecidablesneither one nor the other (Derrida, 1991). Black people
live in spaces that constitute them as they in turn constitute it. For undecidable
subjects, Black White women/White Black women, to perform Whiteness they
must choose to leave Black spaces and inhabit White spaces. Thus, passing is a
transgression, a move out of ones ascribed place, not only of racial boundaries but
also of spatial boundaries; it is the ability to move across racial, social, cultural,
and spatial boundaries. This ability is poignantly exemplified by critical race
feminist Cheryl Harriss description of her grandmothers life in 1930s Chicago:
Every day my grandmother rose from her bed in her house in a black
enclave on the south side of Chicago, sent her children off to a black
 The Penumbral Spaces of Nella Larsens Passing 229

school, boarded a bus full of black passengers, and rode to work. No one
at her job ever asked if she was black; the question was unthinkable.
She quietly went about her clerical tasks, not once revealing her true
identity. She listened to the women with whom she worked discuss their
worriestheir childrens illnesses, their husbands disappointments,
their boyfriends infidelitiesall of the mundane yet critical things that
made up their lives. She came to know them but they did not know her,
for my grandmother occupied a completely different place. That place
where white supremacy and economic domination meetwas unknown
turf to her white co-workers. They remained oblivious to the worlds
within worlds that existed just beyond the edge of their awareness and
yet were present in their very midst. (1995, p. 276)
Harriss grandmothers daily circumnavigations of Chicago were also
circumnavigations of the color line. Her commute to work makes distinctly
visible not only how certain subjects can alter their racial identity by simply
moving; it also exposes the unnaturalness of the dogma of essential racial identity
(Somerville, 2000, pp. 136 7). In this article I illustrate how space need not be a
tether circumscribing subjects to preconstructed racial identities; showing
simultaneously that space is neither Black nor White but penumbralliminal
rather than distinctly bound.

Racialized Gender/Gendered Race

It is unlikely that Larsen decided arbitrarily that the two main characters in
Passing would be female. Both Clare and Irene appear to be reflections of their
creator. Like Clare and Irene, Larsen was born in Chicago and like Clare and Irene,
significant events in Larsens life occurred in the New York City neighborhood of
Harlem. Although there is little evidence that Larsen could have passed for White,
there is ample evidence to suggest that she would have liked to have had the
choice to do so (Davis, 1994). Apart from personal reasons as to why Larsen might
have wanted to make the protagonists of her novel heroines, the story follows a
particular genre of American literature, whose focal point is the tragic mulatta.
The mulatta is a reoccurring character in American fiction that originates with the
White-looking slave Clotel in William Wells Browns 1853 novel Clotel, or The
Presidents Daughter: a narrative on slave life in the United States. Mulattas were tragic
because they were so near White and Whiteness yet they were out-of-place raced
Others, which made their inevitable falls pathos inducing (Andrews et al., 1997,
p. 513). Moreover, Larsens focus on heroines speaks to her cognizance that
womens bodies are the battlegrounds over which definitions of race were
frequently fought.
Race is a fiction of difference, but it is a fiction that matters: African Americans
are significantly less materially stable, disproportionately more likely to be
incarcerated and still extremely more spatially isolated than Whites (Gould, 1981;
Bennett, 1988, p. 641; Livingstone, 1993; Marshall, 1993; Tucker, 1994; Hacker,
1995, p. 41; Baker, 1998; Steinhorn & Diggs-Brown, 1999, p. 34). Race is, in
actuality, a visual apparatus used to label and order individuals based on their
skin color, hair texture, and body structureLook, a Negro! (Fanon, 1967, pp.
109 40; Wiegman, 1995, pp. 21 42).1 It is a device camouflaged as a fact whose
application produces marked bodies, i.e. non-Whites and as a byproduct through
230 P. L. Carter

contraposition, unmaked bodies, i.e. Whites (Doane, 1991, p. 231; Dyer, 1997, pp.
44 5). Corporeal categories, the products of the apparatuss employment, have
associated with them various discourses; discourses which normalize unmarked
bodies while simultaneously stigmatizing marked bodies (Goffman, 1963, pp. 48
51). This apparatus and its discourses constitute a racializing regime of corporal
visibilitya way of seeing (Wiegman, 1995, p. 4). This way of perceiving the
world assumes that bodies are legible texts and that the essence of individuals can
be read from the surfaces of their bodiesthat seeing is knowing (Dyer, 1997, p.
20; Bowker & Star, 1999; Dwyer & Jones, 2000; McKittrick, 2000, p. 228). Race then
is a way of seeing, a way of reading bodies and projecting our hopes, fears, desires,
and fantasies upon them. The raced Other is a reflection of ourselves:
race itself is, in its most emotive sense, a construction of romanticism.
Imagination literally gave birth to reality. Prejudice, like the imperialism
which is its crudest manifestation, worked to produce the abject
degradation and dependency which it expected to find in the Other.
(Malchow, 1993, p 154)
Within a framework of naturalized racial categories Black miscegenated
subjects who are able and willing to pass as Whites are undecidables
(Derrida, 1991, pp. 169 99; Bowker & Star, 2000, p. 304).2 The concept of
undecidablility originates with the Czech mathematical logician Kurt Godel. In
1931, he proved that some questions that arise within mathematical systems
are ignorabimus, unknowable (Regis, 1987, pp. 48 54). Later, Jacques Derrida
borrowed the term and used it to show that language, like mathematics, is not
an all-encompassing or all-defining system (Derrida, 1991, p. 187). There are
entities that resist definition, that can be neither true nor false, one nor the
Other, but rather multiplicities, liminal beings inhabiting categorical border-
landspenumbral spaces (Anzaldua, 1987; Haraway, 1992, Bowker & Star,
2000; Derrida, 1991, p. 187; Johnston, 2002). Undecidables have the potential to
destabilize and threaten essentialist categories, just as passing figures
destabilize and threaten essential racial categories (Sibley, 1995, pp. 32 46;
Cresswell, 1996, p. 26).
Within this discourse of miscegenation, it is assumed that if the pollution of
consanguineous Whiteness is to occur it will occur at its aperturesthrough its
women (Nagel, 2003, p. 111). Because White women within White patriarchy are
viewed as the quintessential embodiment of Whiteness, much of what we think of
as racial condenses to a policing of White womens bodies, to a fear of being
cuckolded by dark male Others (Dyer, 1997, p. 36). Contrarily, White males have
been largely responsible for the miscegenation that has taken place in the
Americas.
It is estimated that in the United States, 80% of all African Americans are
branches of White bloodlines (Haizlip, 1995, p. 48). Most Blacks in the United
States are miscegenated subjects and, conversely, many if not most White
Americans are also miscegenated subjects (Davis, 199, p. 18). Taking an absurd
concept, hypo-descent,3 to an absurd limit would lead to the conclusion that the
United States today has, at the very least, a Black population significantly greater
than its recorded 11.5% and that there is a reasonable possibility that African
Americans comprise a majority of the nations population (Davis, 1991; Bennett,
1988, p. 325; Haizlip, 1995; Piper, 1996).
 The Penumbral Spaces of Nella Larsens Passing 231

Miscegenated subjects, individuals with both Black and White bloodlines, come
in various body types and shades. Some are of obvious African descent, but it is
difficult to read and map Africa from the surface of the bodies of a few
undecidables. Undecidables, who by definition are also miscegenated subjects,
pose threats to Whiteness. Because membership within the White racial category
is almost always judged by visual cues such as skin color, undecidable-passing
figures destabilize and make risible not only the notion of White but also the entire
idea of race (Johnston, 2002, pp. 84 8). The inability to distinguish who is Black
from who is White renders meaningless raced ontologies, as well as undermining
dogmas of White superiority and White privilege. An example of how
undecidables can render racial categories precarious and fatuous is illustrated
by the state of Virginias attempt to pass anti-miscegenation legislation in 1924.
The New Virginia Race Integrity Law was a strict re-definition of a white person
as anyone with no traces whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian. It was
constructed to prevent undecidable miscegenated subjects from passing and
accessing Whites-only educational institutions, neighborhoods, employment and
profession opportunities and civic positions. However, support for the legislation
quickly evaporated when a New York Times column pointed out that if the act
passed the Virginia legislature, then many of the states most distinguished
families would be reclassified colored (Bair, 1999, p. 402). Undecidables reveal
race for what it is: a body of fabricated social categories.

Racialized Space/Spatialized Race

Racial identity and spatial identity reflect back upon themselves ad infinitum
(Delaney, 1998, pp. 6 11; Pred, 2000, pp. 123 25). Racialized body spaces are
synecdoches for racialized physical spacesWhere you are becomes who you
are, becomes how you are [under]classified (Pred, 2000, p. 125). Power is in part
the ability to regulate the actions and movements of Others, thus racialized spaces
are manifestations of White power (Cresswell, 1996, p. 25; Delaney, 1998, p. 5).
As noted above, the Southern restoration period (1877 1915) was the height of
miscegenated undecidable subjects transgressing of the color line into Whiteness.
This was a time of extreme and often violent Black circumscription. This period in
America history saw a distancing of Blacks from Whites both socially and
spatially (Doane, 1991, p. 234). Jim Crowe laws pushed Blacks to the spatial
margins (Delaney, 1998, pp. 98 102). There were at least three reasons why
Whites, specifically White males, felt the need to exercise the power to control
space: an alarm over the rapid economic gains African Americans were achieving
after the Civil War, a spatial response to a racialized sexual fear of Black
masculinity and a panic induced by that which they, Whites, had begot, passing
Figs (Hale, 1998, p 21; Bair, 1999, p. 399).
It is believed the term passing is derived from the pass, a slip of paper that
granted permission to slaves to move about the countryside without being
mistaken for runaways (Bennett, 1998, p. 36). Thus, passing has always been
associated with movement, a lack of restraint. To gain rights and material benefits
forbidden them, passing figures claimed Whiteness while concealing and/or
renouncing Black identities (Haizlip, 1995, p. 48). White anxiety over passing
figures was simple: if you cannot identify by sight a Black person, then how can
you be sure that you are not Black?
232 P. L. Carter

All passing figures possess two traits: undecidable bodies and a will to displace
themselves. Passing is not so much a change of identity as it is an uprooting and a
displacement from the place in which the passing figure was once embedded
(Alexander, 1999, pp. 520 1). Passing is figuratively and literally movement
across social and physical space (Ginsberg, 1996, pp. 2 3). It is a migration across
emotional, material, and cultural landscapes (Lawson, 1999). Like all migrants,
passing figures leave certain things behind:
My fathers sister had, in her youth, been the first black woman at a
Seven Sisters undergraduate college and the first at an Ivy League
medical school; had married into a white family who became socially,
politically, and academically prominent; and then, after taking some
family mementos my grandmother had given my father for me, had
proceeded to sever all connections with her brothers and their families,
even when the death of each sibling was imminent. She raised her
children (now equally prominent socially and politically) as though they
had no maternal relatives at all. (Piper, 1996, p. 243)
This family narrative by the African American artist and philosopher Adrian
Piper is a mapping of the emotional landscape that the passing figure traverses.
Passing is, fundamentally, a choice. It is a choice of whether to perform ones life
as Black or to cross a socially constructed and maintained color line to perform
Whiteness (Mills, 1998, p. 57). It is a choice that only a few miscegenated subjects
have the option of making. Imparted in Pipers story is the cost of passing
passing figures abandon friends, family, home, past identities and past lives.
Passing figures are mobile subjects who evade social, cultural and physical
ghettoization. Part of being Black in America is either being actually fettered,
against ones will, to undesirable social and physical locations or having the image
of such locations fettered to oneself. Passing figures use their undecidablity to
penetrate White spaces and through White spaces Whiteness itself (Berlant, 1991;
Mohanram, 1999, p. 82).
The two female protagonists in Larsens novel refuse to be fettered, to be told
that there are certain spaces that they are not allowed to occupy because Black
blood runs through their veins. They pass as an act of resistance against White
hegemony. Of course resistance has its costs. Undecidables who choose to become
passing figures must not only leave behind spaces of origin but must also closet
themselves in White space. Passing figures are mutes.

Unsettled Subject
The life of Nella Larsen/Nellie Walker/Nellie Larson/Nellye Larson/Nellie
Walker Larsen/Nellie Marie Larson/Nella Marion Larsen/Allen Semi/Nella
Larsen Imes severely calls into question assumptions of a coherent essential
self (Bloom, 1998). Larsen and the protagonists of her novels (her alter egos:
Helga Crane, Clare Kendry and even Irene Redfield) are unsettled subjects
fragmented, irrepressible, mercurial women; women who constantly and
aqueously seep across boundaries into and out of spaces (Lurie, 1997; Miles,
1997, p. 135). Larsen and her female creations are complex and mobile. Marita
Golden (2001, p. vii) describes Larsens female characters and indirectly
Larsen as:
 The Penumbral Spaces of Nella Larsens Passing 233

heroines [who] are emotional nomads, women whose intelligence and

genius for rebellion make them ill suited for the proscribed existence
ordained by whites and blacks in 1920s and 30s segregated America. . .
[T]hey are driven by the impulse to shape their lives rather than suffer
them, even when their grasp is unsure and they are careening full tilt
towards disaster.
Larsen consciously reconstructed her identity throughout her life. Born Nellie
Walker in Chicago on 13 April 1891 (she would later change the year of her birth to
1893 to coincide with the year of the Chicago Worlds Fair), she was the child of a
Danish mother, Mary Hanson, and a Danish West Indian father, Peter Walker.
Hansons mother objected to her daughter marrying a Black man, so it is believed
that Peter Walker became Peter Larson and moved out of a Black world and into a
White one (Davis, 1994, pp. 21 27, 182; Larson, 2001, p. xx xxi). Despite
Walkers/Larsons racial migration across the color line, there remained a
problemNellie. While her mother was White and her father and younger sister
were White enough to pass, Nellie looked like a Black child. A victim of African
avatarism, Nellie was marked. Nellie was a dark presence in a White household, a
presence that must have been difficult for the family to explain. This problem
probably motivated the family to send their oldest child at age 16 away to finish
high school and later teachers training at Fisk University (a historically Black
university) in Nashville, Tennessee. For unknown reasons Larsen never returned
as a student after her first year at Fisk. She also never again returned to her White
family (Davis, 1994).
From 1908 to 1912 there is a lacuna in Nellie Larsens whereabouts and
biography. She reappears in historical records in 1912 when she enrolls in a
nurses training program in New York City as Nella Marion Larsen. She
graduated, worked as a nurse, and in 1919 married the African American
physicist Elmer Samuel Imes and became Nella Larsen Imes. Larsen lacked self-
confidence, particularly in dealing with her husbands upper-middle-class family.
To counter her insecurity Larsen emphasizedwithout going into detailher
White, Scandinavian ancestry (Davis, 1994, pp. 128 30). Within a color-conscious
Black society, links to Whiteness were assets. Larsens first published work
appeared in 1920 in Browies Book. It was entitled Three Scandinavian Games.
Three Scandinavian Games was a description of games that Larsen learned as a
child, presumably from her mother (Davis, 1994, p. 138). She would later go on to
write short stories (for adults), often under the pseudonym Allen Semian
anagram of Nella Imes (Davis, 1994, p. 173). Larsen became a recognized author
with the publishing of her first novel Quicksand in 1928. Quicksand is the story of
Helga Crane, a White-in-appearance, miscegenated subject, a White Black
woman, but not a passing figure, who struggles to find a place both the Black and
White worlds and who ultimately finds herself alienated from both. Helga is a
tragic mulatta and her story eerily mirrors the life of her creator. Reading
Thadious Davis biography of Larsen, Nella Larsen Novelist of the Harlem
Renaissance: a womans life unveiled, and Larsens Quicksand, it is difficult to avoid
concluding that Helga is a fictionalized version of Larsen.
The success of Quicksand made Larsen a prominent Harlem Renaissance figure.
The Harlem Renaissance was . . .[B]ounded by Central Park, Fifth Avenue,
St. Nicholas Park, and One Hundred and Forty-fifth street and located
somewhere between 1919 and 1930, but in terms of the intellectual and artistic
234 P. L. Carter

creativity that radiated from this place at this time, it ostensibly had no bounds
(Lewis, 1981; Larsen, 1986, p. 46). Harlem started out as an upper-middle-class
White suburb, but by 1925 it had a population of 175,000 African Americans, West
Indians and Africans. This change in demography led to the creation of a highly
race-conscious community and transformed Harlem into the cultural capital of
Black America (Andrews et al., 1997, p. 340).
Larsen achieved even greater acclaim in 1929 with the publication of her second
novel Passing. The following year she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to
work on her next novel. Larsens life seemed to be in ascent, but it had actually
reached its crest. In the coming years, Larsen would be accused of plagiarizing one
of her earlier short stories, her husband would have an affair with and eventually
leave her for a real White woman, and despite her Guggenheim grant she would
never finish her third novel; in fact, she would never write again. Instead, Larsen
returned to her first profession, nursing. With the end of her writing career she
severed all relations with her pre-1929 friends and acquaintances. After her
estranged husband died in 1941, for some unexplained reason Larsen reclaimed
the name Nella Imes.
It is difficult not to view Larsens life as tragic. In her later years, she dropped
out of public life entirely and her work went out of print and was largely
forgotten. The year before she died, Larsen experienced a period of pronounced
depression after visiting her sister, her White sister, Anna, in Santa Monica,
California. Anna refused to let her older sister into her home because a Black
woman inside a White womans home in a non-servant capacity looked
unseemly and could call into question Annas own racial identity. Interviewed
years after her sisters death, Anna was quoted as stating that she did not know
that she had a sister (Davis, 1994, p. 444). Larsen died, reading in bed, some time
before 30 March 1964. Larsen appeared to have left no legacy, yet in the 1970s a
new generation of African American writers and readers would embrace her
work. This resurrection continued into the 1980s and 1990s, as feminist and queer
theorists also began to embrace her work (Somerville, 2000, pp 145 6; Wald, 2000,
p. vii). What attracted these diverse readers to Larsen was her acute ability to
illuminate and thus make visible the constructed nature of identity. Nowhere is
her gift of illumination better revealed than in her last novel Passing.

Passing: A synopsis and various interpretations

Passing is a story of two undecidable miscegenated subjects negotiating the
racialized landscape of America during the roaring 20s. One, Clare Kendry, is a
passing figure; the other, Irene Redfield, self-defines herself as Black but refuses to
be racially circumscribed and intermittently employs her undecidablity to pass
and gain access to the privileges of Whiteness. The story takes place in two cities:
Chicago and New York. More specifically, the New York portion of the story takes
place in two Manhattan locationsone south and one north of Central Park in the
community of Harlem. Irene and Clare grew up together on the South side (the
Black side) of Chicago. Irene was raised in a stable upper-middle-class family;
Clare was not so lucky. With the death of Clares father, the young womans ties to
the Black community were involuntary broken and she goes on to pass as White.
She marries a well-to-do White man who assumes that she too is White, and
disappears completely from the world of Black people.
 The Penumbral Spaces of Nella Larsens Passing 235

The novel begins with a chance reunion of Irene and Clare in Chicago. Irene
feels both contempt and an undefined attraction toward her old neighborhood
friend. Clares meeting with Irene kindles something in her that she had not felt in
a very long timea desire to be Black. The two part company and Irene returns to
her home in Harlem, where she starts to receive regular letters from Clare
requesting to visit her in Harlem. Irene never replies, but one day Clare appears at
Irenes door. It is Irenes intention to reject Clare, to send her away, but there is
something about Clare that is seductive, something to which Irene cannot say no.
Irene and her physican husband Brian, a physically marked Black man, end up
introducing Clare to Harlem society. Months go by and Clare, whenever she can
sneak way from her husband, continues to make the journey from her White lower
Manhattan home to Irenes home in Harlem.
Clare relishes being immersed in Blackness, but Irene comes increasingly to
resent Clares presence. Irene and Brians marriage is frigid at best, but since Clare
has reappeared in Irenes life Brian has become more distant than usual. Irene
suspects that Brian is having an affair with Clare (although there is no evidence in
the novel of an affair and by the books end the reader is left to wonder if it was all
a fantasy). Irene seems not to fear Brian leaving her so much as she fears the loss in
social standing his leaving her will precipitate. She is in a state of barely concealed
panic that propels the story to it tragic ending.
Irene is shopping on 5th Avenue with a friend when she runs into Clares
husband John Bellew. This is a pivotal moment in the novel. Irene has been
introduced to Bellew before by Clare; however, at that time Irene was passing as
White. Irenes friend is visibly marked as Black. Bellew must wonder why his
White wifes friend is so familiar with this Black woman. To keep from outing
herselfand, by extension, Clareas a Black woman, she could have fabricated a
lie to explain the situation to Bellew, but she does not even make the effort. Rather,
she hopes that by outing Clare she will be able to hold onto her own husband and
the status he endows upon her. She fails to warn Clare of her encounter with
Bellew. The penultimate scene of the novel takes place at a party on the top floor of
a Harlem walk-up apartment. In the middle of the party Clares husband bursts
into the room bellowing, So youre a nigger, a damned dirty nigger! (Larsen,
1997, p. 111). Irene rushes towards Clare and in the next instant Clare has either
fallen, jumped, or been pushed from a six-storey window.
Passing the novellike passing, the racial performanceis filled with
ambiguities which engender wide-ranging interpretations of the novel. Perhaps
more than any other literary theorist, Deborah McDowell is responsible for the
revival of Larsens work and for bringing it to the attention of an audience beyond
African American readers. In the introduction to the 1986 Rutgers University
Press republication of Larsens Quicksand and Passing as a single volume,
McDowell suggests in her interpretation that Passing is a narrative of homoerotic
desire, a lesbian novel passing as a race novel. Her interpretation helped to
generate a new readership among feminist and queer scholars (Wald, 2000, p. viii).
While Clare is, without question, a seductress who is described repeatedly in the
novel by the narrator, Irene, through an eroticized inventory of her body parts
Just as shed always had that pale gold hair, which, unsheared still, was drawn
loosely back from a broad brow, partly hidden by the small close hat. Her lips,
painted a brilliant geranium-red, were sweet and sensitive and a little obstinate.
A tempting mouthI question whether the attraction that Irene feels toward
Clare is sexual in nature (Larsen, 1997, p. 26).
236 P. L. Carter

Lauren Berlant, in the introduction to her paper, National Brands/National

Body: Imitation of Life, directly challenges McDowells interpretation (1991). She
states that Irenes attraction to Clare is class-based. Irene is a wife and a mother in a
middle-class Black family. She has status in her community but is circumscribed by
race. Clare is a wife and mother in an affluent White family. The novel gives the
sense that Clares life is nearly without limits. Berlants point is that instead of
desiring Clare, Irene wants to be Clare. Irenes non-focused antipathy towards
Clare is rooted in the subconscious knowledge that if she had made the same
choices as Clare, then she could be Clare. Irene resents having tied herself to
Blackness, and perhaps this is a reflection of Nellas resentment of being bound to
Blackness while her sister Anna was free of its constrictions (Davis, 1994, pp. 11 13).
Berlants analysis of passing fiction, both literary and cinematic, primarily
interrogates the intersections of race, gender and nationality. She examines not
just how being American has been embodied in the White male, but also how other
raced and sexed subjects seek to become one with the nation. The passing figure is
an exemplar of this intersectionality as well as the struggle over who actually is
American. Irene throughout the novel makes her claims to an American identity
and while there are points in the novel where she seems ambivalent about her
Black identity, at times describing it as a burden, she never wavers in her
identification with the nation: She was an American. She grew from this soil, and
she would not be uprooted (Larsen, 1986, p. 225). However, Grace Elizabeth Hale,
in her history of segregation in the American South from 1890 to 1940, puts forth a
counter view of race and the nation:
Central to the meaning of whiteness is a broad, collective American
silence. The denial of white as a racial identity, the denial that whiteness
has a history, allows the quiet, the blankness, to stand as the norm. This
erasure enables many to fuse their absence of racial being with the
nation, making whiteness their unspoken but deepest sense of what it
means to be an American. (1998, p. xi)
This conflation of Whiteness with America provides an alternative explanation
as to why Irene is attracted to Clare yet simultaneously feels contempt for her. She
envies Clare because Clare is White, and thus more fully American than herself.
Clare does not have to carry the burden of race because being White implies that
she is raceless. Unlike Irene, Clare is not, unless she chooses to be, tied to be burden of
being Black in a nation that defines itself and all things that are worth being as
White.

The Spatiality of Passing

After the failure of Reconstruction, social conventions dictated an
increasing and more absolute distance [emphasis added] between black
and white as institutionalized in the Jim Crow laws. In response, the
mulatto figure in literature became a more frequently used literary
convention for an exploration and expression of what was increasingly
socially proscribed. . . the mulatto figure allowed for movement [emphasis
added] between two worlds, white and black, and acted as a literary
displacement of the actual increasing separation of the races. (Carby, 1987,
p. 89)
 The Penumbral Spaces of Nella Larsens Passing 237

Passing is a novel that is just as much about space as it is about the intersections of
race, gender and class. It is about how these intersections define who can be
where. The movement of passing figures back and forth across the color line
exposes this line as an abstraction rather than a tangible racial barrier. Passing
reveals that the distance between racialized spaces is not insuperable. It
demonstrates that spaces can be easily spanned if one possesses the appropriate
passthe right skin color. The protagonists are Black in some spaces and White in
others, under-class in some neighborhoods and upper-class in others, demure
pampered housewives in domestic spaces and death-defying cultural tourist/-
predators in certain public spaces.
As the story begins, an adult Irene is back in Chicago visiting her family. While
passing as White in order to receive service at an up-scale Chicago restaurant,
Irene runs into Clare, who she has not seen in more than 10 years. Clare is also
passing in the restaurant. Even though both women are performing Whiteness,
there is a distinction between how these two undecidables negotiate the color line.
Irene is a race woman, a New Negro; she identifies herself as Black and only
passes to obtain things that she wants, such as service in Whites-only restaurants.
Irene is a conscious episodic passer (Mills, 1998, pp. 55 6). Clare, on the other hand,
is a conscious permanent passer (Mills, 1998, pp. 56 7). The depth of her racial
trespass is exemplified by her marriage to a wealthy White businessman who is
unaware, at least consciously, that his wife is a Black woman.
The connection between bodies, spaces and being in and out of place is made
explicit in the first few pages of the novel. Irene, sitting in the restaurant at the
Drayton hotel (the fictionalized Drake hotel in Chicago), comes to realize that she
is being surveiled by a White woman at the next table:
And gradually there rose in Irene a small inner disturbance, odious and
hatefully familiar. . .

Did that woman, could that woman, somehow know that here before her
very eyes on the Drayton sat a Negro?

Absurd! Impossible! White people were so stupid about such things for
all that they usually asserted they were able to tell; and by the most
ridiculous means finger-nails, palms of hands, shapes of ears, teeth, and
other equally silly rot. . . No, the woman sitting there staring at her
couldnt possibly know.

Nevertheless, Irene felt, in turn, anger, scorn, and fear slide over her. It
wasnt that she was ashamed of being a Negro, or even of having it
declared. It was the idea of being ejected from any place [my emphasis],
even in the polite and tactful way in which the Drayton would probably
do it, that disturbed her. (Larsen, 1997, p. 16)
Irene, as well as Clare, is in a space where she is not supposed to be. The only
reason she can slip into such spaces is that she has an undecidable body that
cannot be easily read; it is a body decoupled from a racial identity just as she has
decoupled herself from her designated racial space. The reason Irene is Black has
nothing to do with what her body does or does not appear to be. Irene is Black
because she defines herself as Black, because she chooses to be Black and
Whiteness is a performance, a device used to obtain what she desires (Butler, 1993,
238 P. L. Carter

pp. 167 85; Williams, 1998, p. 38). It is a performance in this instance that she fears
has not been convincing enough. Irene fears that she will be forced from this
space, that she will be humiliated and rejected for being a Black woman in a White
space. The White woman staring at Irene is Clare, who reintroduces herself to
Irene, allows her behind the stage of her performance, and the two passing figures
sit together and catch up with one anothers lives (Goffman, 1959, p. 238). Irene is
curious as to how Clare managed to completely cross over to the other side of the
color line:
There were things that she wanted to ask Clare Kendry. She wished to
find out about this hazardous business of pass, this breaking away from
all that was familiar and friendly to take ones chances in another
environment [my emphasis], not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly
not entirely friendly. . .
You mean that you didnt have to explain where you came from [my
emphasis]? It seems impossible.. . .. As a matter of fact, I didnt. . . I
might have had to provide some plausible tale to account for myself.
I have a good imagination so Im sure I could have done it quite
creditably and credibly. But it wasnt necessary. (Larsen, 1997, p. 25)
Clare, like Cheryl Harriss grandmother, did not have to provide an
explanation, a racial identity for her new White friends; they simply assumed
that anyone located in White space was White. Because she possessed a body that
could not be read by them as Black, Clare failed to disrupt their geographies of
racial expectations, demonstrating that Whiteness is as much about physical
location as it is about unmarked bodies (Cresswell, 1996, p. 27; Bonnett, 2000, p. 36;
Pred, 2000). Clare became White merely by moving from the Southside of Chicago
to the White Westside of the city, by moving from a Black place to White place. The
fact that she successfully crossed the color line in this way highlights how we are
in large part defined as well as constructed by the places we inhabit (Butler, 1993,
p. 171). Placesspaces embedded in systems of meaning, value, and power
reflect themselves upon the bodies of those inhabiting them (Creswell, 1996; Pred,
2000, pp. 57 185).
While those with undecidable bodies can seep across the color line, there is
always a fear, as seen in Irenes uneasiness in the Drayton, that passing figures
bodies will fail them, that they will be found out and ejected from White spaces,
perhaps even have violence inflicted upon them. One way in which passing
figures bodies can betray them is through African avatarism. The terror invoked
by this bodily betrayal is evident in the scene in the book where Clare, Irene and
their friend from the old neighborhood, Gertrudethree White Black
women/Black White womenare in Clares hotel room discussing their lives
and their families:
After taking up her own glass she [Clare] informed them: No, I have no
boys and I dont think Ill ever have any. Im afraid. I nearly died of terror
the whole nine months before Margery was born for fear that she might
be dark. Thank goodness, she turned out all right [emphasis added]. But
Ill never risk it again. Never! The stain is simply tootoo hellish. . .

[Gertrude] No, she went on, no more for me either. Not even a girl.
Its awful the way it skips generations and then pops out. Why, he [her
 The Penumbral Spaces of Nella Larsens Passing 239

White husband] actually said he didnt care what colour it turned out,
if I would only stop worrying about it. But, of course, nobody wants a
dark child [emphasis added]. Her voice was earnest and she took for
granted that her audience was in entire agreement with her. (Larsen,
1997, p. 36)
No one wants a marked body, for marked bodies are shackled to inferior social
and physical locations. Marked bodies are immobile, limited bodies. This was the
dominant discourse at the time and remains little changed today; a discourse that
is so hegemonic it not only functions as the infrastructure for Whites privilege, it
also insinuates itself into the minds of its victims. Though her body allows her
mobility, Gertrudes mind has been colonized (wa Thiongo, 1986; hooks, 1992,
pp. 9 20). For Gertrude and many others across the entire spectrum of skin tones,
Blackness is inferiority, something that no one in her right mind would want to be.
Gertrude, unlike Irene and Clare, has not so much passed into Whiteness as she
has run away from Blackness.
Sometimes the body will give you away; sometimes it pops out. Undecidable
bodies will become marked or will beget marked bodies. The color of the body
may become incongruent with the color of the space in which it is situated. When
this occurs, racial and spatial order must be restored, bodies must be placed in
their proper spaces (Bowker & Star, 200, pp. 195 210). Later, in this same scene, it
appears that Clares body has begun to betray her:
Hello Nig, was his [Bellews, Clares husbands] greeting to Clare...
When we were first married, she was as white asaswell as white as a
lily. But I declare shes gettin darker and darker. I tell her if she dont
look out, shell wake up one of these days and find shes turned into a
nigger. . . I know youre [Clare] no nigger, so its all right. You can get as
black as you please as far as Im concerned, since I know youre no
nigger. I draw the line at that [emphasis added]. No niggers in my family.
Never have been and never will be. (Larsen, 1997, pp. 39 40)
This passage illustrates how passing is an act of silencing as well as concealment.
In this scene, Larsen situates three miscegenated subjects performing Whiteness in
a hotel where if they were a few shades darker in skin tone, they could only enter
only through the rear servants entrance. They are subjects out of place (Cresswell,
1996). Located in a White space, they must remain silent as they, their mothers,
their fathers, their brothers and sisters and their children are insulted, devalued,
denigrated. This passage also represents a symbolic penetration. The master
subject, the White man, enters a feminized space, in order to pontificate about
race. At some subconscious level he seems to have made not only a connection
between race and penetrating feminine physical spacethe hotel room where the
women are sittingbut also between race and penetrating his wifes, Clares,
body space. He seems subconsciously aware that his dear Nig is in fact a Nigger.
The Nigger hater is sleeping with a Nigger, and has begotten a Nigger child, and
has himself been Blackened or Niggerized because he was careless about the
spaces he chose to penetrate. The color line that Bellew proudly maintains has
been infiltrated by an undecidable, and in a bizarre reversal this passage depicts a
White man being exploited by a Black woman. Clare is married to Bellew because
of the things he can provide her, not because she loves him. Bellew failed the
White nation by allowing Whiteness to be defiled.
240 P. L. Carter

After Irene returns to New York she thinks that she has seen the last of Clare, but
she wonders why Clare, a rich White woman, continually writes requesting to
visit her in Harlem. She discusses Clares desire to return to the Black community
with her husband Brian. He notes that:
Its always that way. Never known it to fail. Remember Albert
Hammond [another passing figure], how he use to be for ever haunting
Seventh Avenue, and Lenox Avenue, and the dancing-places, until some
shine [Negro] took a shot at him for casting an eye towards his sheba?
They always come back. Ive seen it happen time and time again.
But why? Irene wanted to know. Why?
If I knew that, Id know what race is. (Larsen, 1997, p. 55)
There are two significant points in this passage: one, the pull of the racial
community on the racial emigre. Passing figures can be thought of as racial
refugees abandoning their spaces of origin to escape racial circumscriptions and
racial violence. Yet they seem to lack something that they wish to recover by
returning home: You dont know, you cant realize how I [Clare] want to see
Negroes, to be with them again, to talk with them, to hear them laugh (Larsen,
1997, p. 71). Gayle Wald argues that Passing is a narrative of racial homecoming
(2000, pp. 46 50). This homecoming and the disturbance it causes in both Irenes
and Clares worlds is the underlining driving theme of the narrative. Essentially,
the novel asks the question, Can the passing figure ever return home? It answers
with a resounding noClares death.
The second point is found in Brians last statement in this passage: If I knew
that, Id know what race is. In this statement Larsen is explicitly conflating race
with space. Her point can be unpacked as follows: Clare, a Black subject, despite
her self-imposed exile, is bound to the Black nationthe Black communityand
because nations occupy spaces she is drawn, despite great risks, to Black places.
Simply, subjects are forever linked to the collectives from which they sprang. This,
of course, is an essentialist view of race and space, but the fact that Larsen
believed this or at the very least found it a plausible enough idea to make it a
central theme in her novel reveals something about how Americans as a society
view race and space (Lutz & Collins, 1993, pp. 155 66).
Belonging is another central theme of Passing. Passing renders an image of an
America where Blacks do not truly belong. This sense of national rejection is
depicted most prominently in the character of Brian, an embittered Black man,
who feels that he does not belong in a racist country that constantly rejects and
denigrates Black people. His feelings about the country have created a simmering
spatial conflict between him and Irene:
That strange, and to her fantastic, notion of Brians of going off to Brazil
[emphasis added], which, though unmentioned, yet lived within him;
how it frightened her, andyes, angered her!
. . .He had never spoken of his desire since that long-ago time of storm
and strain, of hateful and nearly disastrous quarrelling, when she had so
firmly opposed him, so sensibly pointed out its utter impossibility and it
probable consequences to her and the boys, and had even hinted at a
dissolution of their marriage in the event of his persistence in his idea.
No, there had been, in all the years that they had lived together since
 The Penumbral Spaces of Nella Larsens Passing 241

then, no other talk of it, no more than there had been any other
quarrelling or any other threats. But because, so she insisted the bond of
flesh and spirit between them was so strong, she knew, had always
known, that his dissatisfaction had continued, as had his dislike and
disgust for his profession and his country. (Larsen, 1997, pp. 57 8)
As noted above, Irene defines herself as a race woman yet sees herself as fully
American. These two identities, particularly at this time in US history, appear to be
contradictory because the American race was defined as the White race
(Horseman, 1981). But, as noted previously, Irene has conflicted feelings about
being Black. She wears her race as if it is a necessary burden.
The Jamaican Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey in 1916 founded an American
chapter of his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), headquartered
in Harlem. Along with promoting self-sufficiency and Black pride, UNIA was a
back-to-Africa movement. By 1923, 6 years before the publicati, p. 113). The rapid
growth of UNIA in the United States suggests that the feelings of alienation from
the nation that Larsen voiced through Brian were palpable for many African
Americans. To many it must have seemed that Black bodies had few places in
which to belong in America, the White nation.
Black bodies were not welcome in White spaces because they were viewed as
defilers of Whiteness (McClintock, 1995, pp. 207 31; Sibley, 1995, pp. 19 24; Dyer,
1997, pp. 75 6). Irene discovers that the proximity of Black and seemly White
body spaces can result in a chain of defilement in the White imagination:
She [Irene] had gone downtown with Felise Freeland to shop. The day
was an exceptionally cold one. . .
Clinging to each other, with heads bent against the wind, they turned out
of the Avenue [5th Avenue] into Fifty-seventh Street. A sudden bluster
flung them around the corner with unexpected quickness and they
collided with a man.
Pardon, Irene begged laughingly, and looked up into the face of Clare
Kendrys husband.
His hat came off. He held out his hand, smiling genially.
But the smile faded at once. Surprise, incredulity, andwas it
understanding?passed over his face.
He had, Irene knew, became conscious of Felise, golden, with curly black
Negro hair, whose arm was still linked in her own. She was sure, now, of
the understanding in his face, as he looked at her again and then back at
Felise. And displeasure. (Larsen, 1997, p. 99)
Bodies outed Clare: her not-quite-White one and Felises easily read Black
one; but it was more than just bodies, it was their proximity in space. When
Bellew first met Irene, she was sitting beside his wife in their hotel room. When
he meets her next, she is walking much too close to a Black woman. Race at its
basic level has to do with bodies and the spaces between them. Whiteness, or
any other racial identity, cannot exist without the concurrent existence of
exclusive racial spaces. These exclusionary spaces can range in scale from the
home to the nation-state. White privilege is largely the prerogative of not
having to share spaces with non-Whites. White privilege requires the power to
242 P. L. Carter

keep certain bodies within certain places. Bellew has been robbed of this
privilege by a miscegenated subject with an undecidable body, a body not
easily contained to its proper place, a fugitive body. This undecidable body
shared the spaces of his home, shared the spaces of his bed, shared the spaces
of his body, it begot his child. It Blackened him.
But why did it matter? Why does it matter still? Before Bellew made the
link between bodies, Clare was his White wife. How could that change
so suddenly? What is it about skin color, hair texture, facial features or the unseen
blood running through an individuals veins that makes them so radically
different that they can not share spaces with other individuals possessing
different skin, hair, features and blood? What is it about the color of skin that
would make a White family push their Black daughter out of their home and
into the world alone?

Conclusion: A mapping of the real from the fictional

Literature cannot be truly fictitious any more than it can achieve verisimilitude.
There is undoubtedly uniqueness of style and insight that successful authors
achieve, but nevertheless the representations that he or she might produce are not
independent of the authors location within a variety of social, cultural and
economic systems (processes of which the author may or may not be aware).
(Sharp, 2000, pp. 330 1).
Passing for white is a prominent theme in twentieth-century African Americn
literature. However, it was also a historical, experiential reality for thousands of
people. In either case, it may be of value in coming to understand imaginative
geographies. (Delaney, 2002, p. 9).
Maps and novels are representations of a world that exists beyond their pages.
Maps display human constructions, such as roads, cities, dams and national
boundaries. While roads, cities, dams are material structures, nations are
conceptual structures, reification of socio-spatial categories. Whereas these mental
mappings, which nations represent, bound our ideas about places, they are in
reality unbounded and traversable. Passing is a type of map, too. It is map of
America at a particular time and as a particular place. It exposes the racialized
national boundaries of early twentieth-century America, boundaries partially
intact today. Passing, the act, reveals the traversablity of these imagined racialized
national boundaries.
Spaces and bodies are sites of contest. Space has no edges, no beginnings and no
endings. Space is penumbral. The body at its conception is featureless. It is
undecidable. But once begot, the body is demarcated through the application of
power. We project onto penumbral space and the undecidable body an order. We
gender, sex and race them both. We fix them by willing them into place. Passing,
the novel and the map, illuminates the socially constructed nature of both bodies
and spaces. By refusing to conform to our orderings passing figures force us to
acknowledge that space is penumbral.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Camila Bassi for her generosity, Susan Mains for her close
reading of and comments on an earlier version of this paper and Katherine
McKittrick for her assistance at a critical juncture in this project. Also I would
 The Penumbral Spaces of Nella Larsens Passing 243

like to acknowledge the helpful suggestions of the three anonymous reviewers

of this paper. Special thanks go to the individual who inspired this project,
Toby Saad, and to Linda Peake for all her encouragements and all her hard
work.

Notes
1. Look, a Negro! comes from a chapter entitled The Fact of Blackness in Franz Fanons Black Skin,
White Masks. Fanon describes Black identity as in part a White objectified identity, which closely
links the physicality of the Black body to a White imagined Blackness. The state of racial cognizance
that arises from this White construction of Blackness mirrors Du Boiss theorization of double
consciousness (1903):

Dirty nigger! Or simply, Look, a Negro! I came into the world imbued with the will to
find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain the source of the world,
and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects. . . As long as the black man
is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience
his being through others. . .For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in
relation to the white man. . . And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white
mans eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my claims. In
the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily
schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person
consciousness. (1967, pp. 1079)

2. The term miscegenation came into being as part of a ruse. Miscegenation, a neologism
composed from the Latin miscere (to mix) and genus (race), first appeared in a pamphlet
produced in 1864 by two New York City Democrats entitled Miscegenation: The theory of the blending
of the races, applied to the American White man and Negro (Roediger, 1991, pp. 1556). Its authors hoped
to smear the Republican party and it presidential nominee, Abraham Lincoln, by writing
a pamphlet that advocated inter-racial sex and passing it off as a Republican party sanctioned
document (Lemire, 2002, p. 116; Tucker, 1994, p. 302 n. 92). Miscegenation presumes polygenism,
i.e. that human races actually represent different biological species (Gould, 1981, p. 3942;
Lemire, 2002, p. 128).
3. Hypo-descent is another term for the one-drop rule which is an asymmetric definition of race. It
falsely assumes that races are pure categories and that an individual no matter how White they may
look in bodily appearance is actually not if they are the issue any of non-White ancestors. For
example, hypo-descent defines as Black an individual whose father is White and whose mother is
Black. It also defines as Black an individual whose great-great-grandfather is White while the rest of
their lineage is composed of Black ancestors. Hypo-descent is asymmetric in the sense that a drop
of Black blood defines a person as Black, yet a drop of White blood never defines a person as
White.

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246 P. L. Carter

ABSTRACT TRANSLATION

Los Espacios Penumbrales de Passing por Nella Larsen:

Cuerpos indecisos, identidades moviles, y la deconstruc-
cion de fronteras raciales
Resumen La novela Passing, escrito por Nellie Larsen en 1929, es una drama
sicologica que se centra en dos mujeres con piel clara. Una de ellas, Clare Kendry,
se hace pasar por la esposa blanca de un exitoso racista rico. La otra, Irene
Redfield, es una mujer de raza que vive en el Alto Manhattan durante la epoca
del Renacimiento de Harlem. Clare e Irene son indecisibles, ni blancas ni negras,
sujetas fluidas atravesando las fronteras de la razapasandola. Pasando es un
acto de insinuarse en espacios prohibidos a traves de desechar otras identidades;
es un traspaso de fronteras espaciales tanto como fronteras raciales. En la novela,
Clare se hace pasar solo por cruzando de un espacio negro a un espacio blanco y
en el paso se muda una identidad negra por una blanca. Este papel examina la
movilidad de identidades a traves de geografas raciales y como este movimiento
se desestabilizan ideas de raza y espacios racializados.