Nella Larsen (1891-1964) was the author of several short
stories and two novels, Quicksand and Passing. She
received a Guggenheim Fellowship to write a third novel in 1930
but, unable to find a publisher for it, she disappeared from the
literary scene and worked as a nurse in New York City.
Ntozake Shange is an American playwright and poet. Shange is
a black feminist and a critic of the Black Arts Movement. She
majored in American Studies at Barnard and earned a master's degree
in the same field at UCLA. Her most famous work, for colored
girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf,
moved from Off-Broadway to Broadway and won the Obie Award, the
Outer Critics Circle Award, and the AUDELCO Award.
Mae Henderson is a professor of English at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of numerous
articles on pedagogy, diasporic writing and performance, cultural
studies and cultural criticism, as well as black feminist criticism
and theory. Her essay "Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics,
and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition" has been widely
anthologized. Henderson is also the editor of Black Queer
Studies: A Critical Anthology and Borders, Boundaries and
Frames, and coeditor (with John Blassingame) of the five-volume
Antislavery Newspapers and Periodicals: An Annotated Index of
Letters, 1817-1871.
Another trailblazer, Larsen wrote this novel in 1929. It follows Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield, two light-skinned black women who try to escape racism. Kendry chooses to sever all ties with her background and passes herself off as white, while Redfield simply denies that racism exists. Both, however, eventually are forced to face the awful truth. This edition contains a lengthy introduction and scholarly notes on the text. Essential for Black History Month.
Praise for Nella Larsen and Passing
"The genius of this book is that its protagonists . . . are complex
and fully realized. . . . The work of a highly talented and
thoughtful writer."-Richard Bernstein, The New York Times
"[Larsen's novels] open up a whole world of experience and struggle
that seemed to me, when I first read them years ago, absolutely
absorbing, fascinating, and indispensable."-Alice Walker
"[Larsen] offers characters so honest and desperate to be whole
that we cannot help but champion their humanity."-From the
introduction by Ntozake Shange
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