Reproduction of the original: Passing By by Maurice Baring

Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen (1891 –1964) published just two novels and three short stories in her lifetime, but achieved lasting literary acclaim. Her classic novel Passing first appeared in 1926.

"Examines the minute, seemingly inconsequential violations of public civility that often occur in encounters between strangers in contemporary American society. Drawing on a wealth of observations and interviews, Gardner insightfully and sensitively examines the structure and processes of public harassment which women and others regularly encounter. In so doing. she extends the social scientific concern with harassment from workplace to public place encounters, deepening it in the process."—Robert M. Emerson, University of California, Los Angeles "A compelling and important book. Every reader will recognize the humiliations, conflicts, and ambiguous encounters that constitute public harassment. Gardner provides fresh and telling insight into seemingly trivial but enormously consequential daily experiences. She is alert to complex relations between gender and race, sexual orientation, and disability in the construction of public encounters. Her articulation of double-binds and everyday dilemmas has practical payoff for efforts to create a safe and mutually respectful society."—Barrie Thorne, author of Gender Play "A unique study that will be a paradigm for others. . . . Its contributions to the sociology of everyday life and to the understanding of public encounters and harassment are unparalleled."—Douglas Maynard, University of Indiana, Bloomington

Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. It was, as Allyson Hobbs writes, a chosen exile, a separation from one racial identity and the leap into another. This revelatory history of passing explores the possibilities and challenges that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions. It also tells a tale of loss. As racial relations in America have evolved so has the significance of passing. To pass as white in the antebellum South was to escape the shackles of slavery. After emancipation, many African Americans came to regard passing as a form of betrayal, a selling of one’s birthright. When the initially hopeful period of Reconstruction proved short-lived, passing became an opportunity to defy Jim Crow and strike out on one’s own. Although black Americans who adopted white identities reaped benefits of expanded opportunity and mobility, Hobbs helps us to recognize and understand the grief, loneliness, and isolation that accompanied—and often outweighed—these rewards. By the dawning of the civil rights era, more and more racially mixed Americans felt the loss of kin and community was too much to bear, that it was time to “pass out” and embrace a black identity. Although recent decades have witnessed an increasingly multiracial society and a growing acceptance of hybridity, the problem of race and identity remains at the center of public debate and emotionally fraught personal decisions.

Like a glass of lemonade that is both sweet and tart, writer Patricia Jones mixes up a refreshing blend of deep emotion and raw truth, tempered by a grounded dose of wisdom. To Lila Giles, the term "passing" refers to those pale-hued folks who take advantage of their creamy shade by crossing into the white world. Descended from a long line of an elite Baltimore family awash with "high-colored" skin just right for "passing", family lore told Lila that not one of them would have thought to deny their true selves and rich history in such a way. It is this sense of pride that bonds the Giles family together -- a bond strongly enforced by Lila's controlling stepmother Eulelie. But the delicate balance of this branch of the family Eulelie has so carefully engineered is threatened when Lila's brother decides to marry a woman from an oh-so-very-wrong family. A proud though severe matriarch, Eulelie Giles has ruled her four grown stepchildren with a heavy self-righteousness that could break the spirit of the most sound opponent, let alone the nearly thirty-year-old Lila. Relentlessly loyal to her privileged world, Eulelie has ingrained upon Lila and her three other stepchildren the importance of distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable blacks. Despite her strident belief in an unyielding class line, Eulelie has kept a secret about her own past that manages to affect, in more ways than a few, anyone who enters her life. As the wedding day draws closer, Lila begins to look at her reality versus Eulelie's, and what Lila finds leads to a confrontation between stepmother and stepdaughter that could finally shatter Eulelie's reign over Lila and the family, but ultimately, one that will lead Eulelie back to the truth. Filled with multi-dimensional characters and rich with atmosphere, Passing is a story of tangled family relationships; the secrets, misunderstanding, and deceptions that hold them together.

Yael peeks out from her balcony and sees everyting that's happening in the street below, from the cat in the garden next door to a big red tractor chugging down the road. Finally, she see the best thing-her dad on his way home!

The first volume to focus on the trope of racial passing in novels, memoirs, television, and films published or produced between 1990 and 2010, Passing Interest takes the scholarly conversation on passing into the twenty-first century. With contributors working in the fields of African American studies, American studies, cultural studies, film studies, literature, and media studies, this book offers a rich, interdisciplinary survey of critical approaches to a broad range of contemporary passing texts. Contributors frame recent passing texts with a wide array of cultural discourses, including immigration law, the Post-Soul Aesthetic, contemporary political satire, affirmative action, the paradoxes of "colorblindness," and the rhetoric of "post-racialism." Many explore whether "one drop" of blood still governs our sense of racial identity, or to what extent contemporary American culture allows for the racially indeterminate individual. Some essays open the scholarly conversation to focus on "ethnic" passers—individuals who complicate the traditional black-white binary—while others explore the slippage between traditional racial passing and related forms of racial performance, including blackface minstrelsy and racial masquerade.