Nella Larsen

ourselves from them. If you’re talking to a homophobic person, you probably won’t tell them that you’re gay, and if you’re biracial and white passing, it’s likely that you wouldn’t tell a man who fetishizes “China dolls” that you’re part Vietnamese. In Nella Larsen’s book Passing, Clare Kendry passes as white and has an extremely racist and potentially violent white husband. When Clare’s husband finds out that Clare’s friend Irene is black, Irene considers telling him that his wife isn’t white…

poetry as a way to express his feeling of racial equality and, became one of the most influential writers of the harlem renaissance. Jean collaborated with great reformers such as Alaine Locke, W.E.B. duBois, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Nella Larsen, Harold Jackman, Rudolph Fisher, Dorothy West, Dorothy Peterson, and Aaron Douglass (Jean Toomer poets). Throughout his writing career Toomer instituted imagery in his poems to convey messages regarding racial equality. One of Toomer’s…

“The New Negro” is a self-expression that speaks for itself meaning “a new type of negro” or black person. In the north during the Harlem Renaissance, black people were becoming independent. They started branching off making their own art, music, and poetry, and opening their own businesses and forming their own new communities. Now there was a “New Negro” as opposed to the “Old Negro”; a black man with a slave mentality. The “Old Negro” was a black man who viewed himself as inferior, the black…

The Harlem Renaissance was created for the simple purpose of letting African Americans express themselves through music, art, and poetry. At the time, African Americans weren’t violent in any nature, as they were prone to use art and music as their weapon to stand their ground and show the world the beautiful things they can create to overcome the hatred. But how did music and art keep the Harlem Renaissance alive for so long? Was it the culture and foundation? Or was it leading the world into a…

Some believed that racial inferiority was not based on science, but rather based on racial dominance in society, and it is the white race that has been in control throughout history. These ideas are evident in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, but also Nella Larsen’s Passing. Both texts reflect the sociological,…

”Passing is a deception that enables a person to adopt certain roles or identities from which he would be barred by prevailing social standards in the absence of his misleading conduct.” (Kennedy, 2001). There were and still are individuals whose physical appearance allows him or her to present himself as “white” but whose “black” heritage makes him an African American according to dominant racial rules. (Kennedy, 2001). Even though “passing” was popular during the 1920s and 1930s, it…

How should a mother act towards her child? Women have the choice to become a mother. Becoming a mother is more than just giving birth to a child. As a mother, you have the ability to create a whole person that shares half you and your significant other’s dna. For nine months you carry a living human being inside of you. Being a mother is falling in love with someone before you even see them. It is a relationship that never ends and hopefully one where the love never dies. The theme of motherhood…

Ellison and it’s titled Invisible Man. The story is about a black man in the 1940s who lives in the South, but moves to the North and the circumstances in which he has to maneuver while there. A lesser known, but just as important text is Passing by Nella Larsen. Passing follows two black women in 1920s New York City and the idea of how ‘passing’ as a…

a “woman” too. “In the 1920s, Harlem Renaissance empowered the blacks’ art and literature and celebrated black culture, but it rarely did elevate the conditions of the black women. Black women poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Zora Neal Hurston, Nella Larsen, Angelina Weld Grimke, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Gwendolyn B Bennett, Ethel Caution-Davis, Carrie Williams Clifford, Anita Scott Coleman,…Sarah Lee Brown Fleming, Edythe Mae Gordon, Naomi Long Madgett, Mari Evans, Clara Ann Thompson, Lucy Mae…

respond through extreme means. However, responses to losing a sense of identity greatly differ. Nonetheless, every event that threatens a person’s sense of identity results in huge changes for the person, whether they lost their identity or not. In both Nella Larsen’s Passing and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, threats to character’s sense of identity result in huge changes to their personality. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the townspeople stripping Hester Prynne of…