That Middle World

by Julia S. Charles

ISBN: 9781469659572

Published: 2020

"During the decades leading up to the Civil War, the idea of white superiority was bolstered by rigid race laws that governed interactions between the races, targeting Black people and relegating them to the lower rungs of the racial caste system. Consequently, American literature-especially that by black writers-began to reflect the cultural phenomenon of racial passing from the antebellum period through the collapse of Reconstruction. In this book, Julia Charles investigates the construction and performance of racial identity in select works of passing literature by Black writers. Charles looks at how Black writers in the nineteenth century have used the trope of racial passing in order to propose new racial categories and, relatedly, new boundaries of identity-essentially, creating a middle world between whiteness and blackness. For mixed-race characters in the Black passing novel Charles argues, race is about resisting and rejecting legally and socially imposed boundaries of...