Entre atos de (des)obediência: o Passing racial e a construção interseccional, performativa e dialógica de feminilidades negras em Identidade, de Nella Larsen

Abstract

This research investigates the construction of Black femininities in Passing ([1929] 2020), by Nella Larsen. The study aims to identify and analyze the impacts of racial passing on how Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry construct their subjectivities while negotiating their identities as Black women in the United States in the early twentieth century. Through a qualitative analysis of selected passages from the novel, I employ an intersectional, performative, and dialogic approach to examine how the discourses of Larsen’s characters, the narrator, and the author herself perpetuate and/or challenge dominant and essentialist norms of race, gender, and class. Additionally, I investigate how the social meanings attributed to passing by the haracters reveal the intersecting forms of oppression, subordination, and privilege that shape their lives. The findings indicate that Clare destabilizes racial boundaries by understanding passing as an individual strategy for social mobility while simultaneously reinforcing the logic of whiteness through the erasure of her Black identity. Irene, in turn, interprets passing as a betrayal of lack collective values, yet reproduces white and bourgeois ideals that reiterate the colonial order. Thus, the study concludes that Larsen’s characters co-construct their identities through ongoing negotiation with hegemonic discourses of race, gender, and class, at times corroborating them and at others subverting them in the pursuit of ways of being that affirm their humanity.