Nella Larsen by Passing Page B

in which the word ‘passing’ was used to signify ‘crossing the color line’ would seem to have appeared in notices concerning runaway slaves, and the term ‘passing’—first for ‘free,’ and then for (its larger part-synonym) ‘white’—may have entered American fiction through the citing of such bills,” 255.
    22. Caleb Johnson, “Crossing the Color Line,”
Outlook and Independent
158 (Aug. 26, 1931): 526; also cited in Sollors, 245.
    23. Walter White, “Why I Remain a Negro,”
The Saturday Reviewof Literature,
Oct. 22, 1947; quoted in Amritjit Singh,
The
Novels of the Harlem Renaissance: Twelve Black Writers, 1923–
1933
(University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press), 92.
    24. Gunnar Myrdal,
An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and
Modern Democracy
(New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1944), 683, 688.
    25. Sterling Brown,
The Negro in American Fiction
(1937; reprint, New York: Atheneum, 1969), 142.
    26. See José Esteban Muñoz,
Disidentification: Queers of Color and the
Performance of Politics
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
    27. Barbara Christian,
Black Women Novelists: The Development of a
Tradition, 1892–1976
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 44, 45.
    28. Bone, 98.
    29. Singh, 93.
    30. Donald Goellnicht, “Passing as Autobiography: James Weldon Johnson’s
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,
”
African-AmericanReview
30.1 (1996), 19.
    31. Examples of works by such southern writers include Thomas Dixon’s
The Clansmen
(1905) and
The Leopard’s Spots
(1902), and Thomas Nelson Page’s
Red Rock: A Chronicle of Reconstruction
(1898).
    32. David Roediger,
The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of
the American Working Class
(New York: Verso, 1991); also cited in Ruth Frankenberg,
Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and
Cultural Criticism
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 10.
    33. Sollors, 260.
    34. Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” in
Critical Race Theory:
The Key Writings That Formed the Movement,
Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, eds. (New York: The New Press, 1996), 278.
    35. Ibid.
    36. Eva Saks, “Representing Miscegenation Law,”
Raritan
8.2 (1988), 57.
    37. Joel Williamson,
New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the
United States
(New York: Free Press, 1980), 98.
    38. Sir Francis Galton, the inventor of fingerprinting techniques, began his project in an attempt to discover an indicator of “Race and Temperament” in the character and patterns of fingerprints. Josiah C. Nott, in his Two Lectures on the Natural His
toryof the Caucasian and Negro Races
(1844), moved from the scriptural evocation of the curse of Ham to a biological argument for racial difference that was based on a theory of polygenesis. Harvard professor Louis Agassiz, who developed his racial ideas in 1863, is widely acknowledged as one of the major formulators of “scientistic racism.” See Sollors, 157, 109, 131.
    39. Drawing out the implications of British philosopher J. L. Austin’s work on performative utterances, contemporary theorists such as Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler postulate the performativity of identities constructed through practices of citationality and iterability. “Performativity,” Judith Butler argues, “consists in a reiteration of norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer and in that sense cannot be taken as the fabrication of the performer’s ‘will’ or ‘choice.’ ” For Butler, then, “The reduction of performativity to performance would be a mistake.” ( Judith Butler,
Bodies That Matter
[New York: Routledge, 1993], 234).
    40. See Mary Helen Washington, “Lost Women: Nella Larsen: Mystery Woman of the Harlem Renaissance,”
Ms.
(Dec. 1980). Arguably, of course, the same indictment could be brought against what