![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() By tracing the African American experience back to its roots, she has created a canon-worthy work that exposes the complexity of color and the deep wounds passing superficially attempts to address. Du Bois, out tomorrow, is a novel about passing, however, would be akin to calling John Steinbeck’s East of Eden a book about farming in California Jeffers engages with a richness of Black life and history far beyond her characters’ proximity to whiteness alone. To say that Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s sweeping epic The Love Songs of W.E.B. New novels including Brit Bennet’s The Vanishing Half (2020) and Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray’s The Personal Librarian (2021) examine passing on its own terms, from within its impact on Black families, and the myriad reasons why someone (in all of these cases women) may choose to pass. What started with Nella Larsen’s Passing in 1929 has culminated in a recent string of efforts by Black women authors to subvert the simplistic moral expectations associated with “race novels”-namely the readers’ discovery that racism is bad, thanks to the burden placed upon Black characters to prove their white peers wrong. ![]()
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