An Exploration of the Double-Conscious African- Americans on their Journey for an Identity along the Colour Line in -Passing, Quicksand, The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man

Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: My old man died in a fine big house. My ma died in a shack. I wonder where I’m gonna die. Being neither white nor black? These are the first words with which Nella Larsen commences her novel Quicksand in 1928. The quatrain belongs to the poem ‘Cross’ (1925) by Larsen’s contemporary Langston Hughes and addresses the issue of duality, where mixed racial heritage leads to self-doubt and struggle in the definition of identity. Larsen and other African-American writers, including James Weldon Johnson, explored the intricacies and contradictions of the concept of race at the beginning of the 20th century, in particular by addressing the phenomenon of ‘passing’. Passing has many definitions, most often it is associated with the term ‘passing for white’, which implies the crossing of the colour line from black to white in order to transcend racial barriers. Ratna Roy refers to it as „assimilating into white society by concealing one’s antecedents” and according to Sollors, passing can be understood in a more general sense as the „crossing of any line that divides social groups.” Perhaps most importantly is to understand passing as the ability of a person to be completely accepted as a member of a sociological group other than their own. Until the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, writers hardly had addressed the passing figure in literature because racial passing only „thrived in modern social systems in which as a primary condition, social and geographic mobility prevailed.” Passing has always been a much camouflaged topic because the successful passer does not want their identity to be uncloaked. This constitutes probably also the main reason why only little, and rather pioneering, research has been conducted up to today and why it still remains difficult to investigate the issue. The sole witnesses of the concepts of passing in the time period are passing narratives. James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man (initially published anonymously in 1912 but reissued under Johnson’s authorship in 1927), Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and her novella Passing (1929) are perhaps the most exemplary and promising examples of an analysis of the passing figure and classic epitomes of the racial situations during the Harlem Renaissance. The novels challenge stereotypes of race and disclose concepts of doubleness and visibility. In order to disentangle the complexities of the theme, these novels, [...]