The Meditation On Racial Identity And The Expression Of Its Complicated Psychology

The Harlem Renaissance was an ideological and cultural movement launched by American black intellectuals in the early 1920s, and a positive exploration of the way to liberate blacks in terms of arts, exerting a significant influence on African American culture. The most outstanding manifestation of the Harlem Renaissance was its literary creation. For the black writers, it is an era of breaking fetters and widening the field of vision. Their works made a great development in theme, background and value, broke through the bonds of subject matter and the mode of character, began the self-analysis and self-criticism of the race, and made an active exploration of the racial consciousness and the problem of identity. It is one of the climaxes in the development of African American literature. One of the themes the New Negro writers paid close attention to in the Harlem Renaissance was the problem of mulatto and the phenomenon of"passing for white". They explored the social situation and the psychological bewilderment of the mulattoes, analyzed the various social and ideological roots of passing for white, and exposed the adsurdity of the racial and color discrimination, making the passing novels become the true record of the black racial consciousness and the identity inquiry.This dissertation is to take the representative passing novelists in the Harlem Renaissance James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, George Schuyler and their classics as the object of study, makes an attempt to bring to light the theme of the passing novels in the Harlem Renaissance, and tries to make a comprehensive evaluation of the passing novels from the positive point of view. The dissertation consists of four chapters with an introduction at the beginning, and the main points of each part go as follows:The Introduction begins with a summarization of the study of the Harlem Renaissance and the main contents of the project are briefly introduced.Chapter One A Survey of the Harlem Renaissance and the Passing Novels. This chapter makes a general introduction to the Harlem Renaissance from the point of view of its rise, its literary creation and its influence on the further development of African American literature. This part also explores the relationship among race,identity and passing, traces the development of the problem of mulatto and the phenomenon of passing in African American literature, tries to define the passing novels, and makes a summarization of the features of the passing novels produced during the Harlem Renaissance.Chapter Two The Typical Model of the Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance. James Weldon Johnson was the principal figure in the Harlem Renaissance and a leader of the early Civil Rights Movement. His most representative work is The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man which was first published in 1912 and reprinted in 1927. In this novel, Johnson rejects any categories, questions and protests against the racial system through the displaying of the absence of the characters'names and the protagonist's perplexity towards whether he was a white or a"nigger", and makes an explanation and revision of Dubois'double consciousness through the experiences of the protagonist's turning white from black and eventually choosing the white identity. And the bivocality and parody present in the novel highlight its subversion. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man inaugurates a model for depicting the mulatto condition, establishes the basic theme of the passing novels---protest and anti-passing, and thus becomes the typical model of the passing novels in the Harlem Renaissance and a milestone in the history ofAfrican American literature.Chapter Three The Female Passing. This chapter focuses on Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset and their works Quicksand, Passing and Plum Bun. In the three novels, all of the protagonists have to leave their black community to search for self-development and material success, which demonstrates the unjustness of American society and the absurdity of racial discrimination, and shows its striking nature of protest. Meanwhile, Larsen and Fauset, through the use of the mode of passing novel and the depiction of the female passing and the life experiences of the mulatta in particular, refuse the conventional image of black woman identified by the mainstream society, reject the sexism, bravely express the pursuit of the black woman, and discuss in detail the sexuality, family and motherhood which have puzzled the black woman, making their novels have a female perspective lack in any other passing novels and the rich spirit of the times, and provide people with a new angle for the consideration of black woman.Chapter Four The Community Passing. This chapter takes Black No More written by George Schuyler as the object of study. The novel has a stronger sense of satire and protest, for the protagonist is not a mulatto/a who abandons his/her black identity, but the who black community who chooses to pass for white to avoid becoming the victim of the absurd racial system. It criticizes the overwhelming racial prejudices and the lack of racial belongingness in the black community, satirizes bitterly the ignorance of the white, and subverts harshly the so-called white superiority. In the novel, not only are the blacks no longer black, but the whites no longer white, too, which highlights the absurdity of the racial prejudice. The novel shows clearly that racial prejudice is merely a social construction, independent of any actual distinguishing features between races.Based on the above exposition and the analysis of the five representative passing novels and their themes from different aspects in particular, I come to the conclusion that the passing novels produced during the Harlem Renaissance are the mirror of the American black racial experiences and consciousness, the record of a particular historical era, with a strong sense of protest and anti-passing, and any assimilationist interpretation of them is a kind of misreading.