Mulatta Characters' (Un)Making Urban Spaces in Nella Larsen's Passing

Abstract

Scholars have examined Nella Larsen's Passing (1929) from different theoretical backgrounds, but there has not been much attention to the urban space, where Larsen's mulatta characters explore their racial subjectivity. I thus read the novella from a contextual approach to trace urban geography Irene and Clare are situated in. This approach starts from a historical context that more than one million African Americans migrated to northern American cities in the first twentieth century. In urban areas, such as Chicago or New York, African Americans experienced not only a sense of emancipation free from their racialized past but also the ideology of whiteness. Larsen represents this discursive urbanity to explain how her mulatta characters are able to pass for whites. Despite the dynamic urbanity by which some mulattas explore and challenge their racial identities, however, I argue that urban geography is still bounded, based on the ways in which Irene responds to Clare. Irene's reaction to Clare delineates the racial conflict that is caused by the collision of different social geographies.