Context

• Marcus Garvey


  African American leader durin the 1920s who founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and advocated mass migration of African Americans back to Africa. Was deported to Jamaica in 1927.
• Harlem Renaissance


  A period in the 1920s when African-American achievements in art and music and literature flourished
• The Great Migration


  1916-1970

  over 6 million Black Americans migrated from the rural South to the North and to the Midwest

  Chicago, Detroit, New York
• passing


  Racial passing of a light-skinned or mixed-race
• Jim Crow and segregation


  Racial caste system operating in the US 1877-1960s

  Segregation between white and Black people

  Plessy v Ferguson court case, the doctrine of 'seperate but equal
• one-drop-rule'


  Classed anyone with any degree of Black ancestry as legally Black, regardless of skin colour

  Functioned to limit the legal rights and status of anyone considered to be Black on ancestral terms
• Colourism


  Mentioned in Alice Walker's 1983 'In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens'

  Describes how certain treatment of lighter-skinned people of colour were generated owing to their visual proximity to whiteness
• Miscegenation


  biological reproduction by partners of different racial categories

  Had predominantly been enacted through sexual violence by white men
• American Civil War (1861-65)


  Slavery formed the central cause of the American Civil War (1861-65)

  Most Northern states had abolished slavery by 1804 and as the Union expanded, controversy over slavery grew
• Emancipation Proclamation


  President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing all slaves held in Confederate states (1863)
• Ku Klux Klan


  explicitly racist white nationalist organisation

  Officially revived in 1915 after its 'dissolution' in 1871

  By 1925 had around 4 million members
• Reconstruction Era


  Reconstruction Era (1865-77)

  - Passing of 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the American constitution which had major implications for the legal rights of African Americans

  1924 Immigration Act
• Paris is Burning (1991)


  - "ball culture" of gay, black and Hispanic men in New York.

  - including the performance of gender and race, the commodification of racial difference, and challenging "authentic" identity categories.
• De-essentializing gender


  According to Butler, we do gender, rather than being a gender.

  
  

  - the focus is on social acting—the way we present ourselves to others, how we interact with others, what we say, what we do, etc.

  - NO REAL GENDER
• Gender theorist Judith Butler shook up thinking about gender in the early 1990s by making two provocative claims:


  1. our knowledge of sex actually follows from our reading of gender not biology

  2. gender is performed by individuals who embody and act out the "scripts" of gender.

  .
• Gender and race can be something


  performed
• Ralph

  at the dance, Ethiopian, object of fascination
• Race is more similar to

  "fashion" that can be assumed, faked, and/or changed.
• Clothing is also a means of


  advertising/ constructing the self and even marketing the self, as female, as middle class, as white.
• Passing is a form of____ that has connections to ___

  - "marketing" the self

  - advertisement.
• Effect of consumerism

  race and class are commodities that can be bought and owned like goods.
• Self-fashioning


  20th century interest in the idea of constructing and reconstructing a self.

  - puts you in a race, class, subculture,

  EX: irene acts white, dresses a certain way, goes to tea, gains entry into consumer space
• pecuniary emulation


  - Envy and the desire to possess the belongings and status of others is the reason for these collective practices

  - Mindset that if you could have all thus, you would compete with others
• Clothes in the story

  1. Clare's Chaffan dress is so nice and makes Irene feel not as good. Clare upstages Irene at the Negro Welfare League dance that Irene put on. Declaration of war?

  2. Irene feels superior to Gertrude because of her clothes. Looks like she is married to a butcher, she is failing to meet the expectations of her class.
• Fashion/ consumer culture


  shows how women use fashion to "reinvent" the self and to assert difference from others.

  - dress up for other women not men
• Consumer culture becomes a kind of ____

  empowerment, allowing women the opportunity to construct a persona and to participate in broader social arenas.
• Passing and consumer culture


  - novel represents the rise of the female consumer

  - Shopping and fashion become ways for women (of all races and classes) to participate in the public sphere.
• What did Homer plessy do


  who could pass as white, challenged the one drop rule by sitting in a segregated white train car and declaring himself "black."
• What is race

  asks us to think about racial difference, and even race, as social constructs, rather than natural or physical facts.
• Larsen sets things up..

  so we always compare irene and clare

  - EX: Whenever Irene notes that Clare is not "sacrificial" and has "no allegiance beyond her own immediate desire," we are meant to understand Irene's own sacrifices and her own sense of her allegiances to others (and to the race)
• Larsen's language and use of imagery focuses on

  1. colors

  2. Beauty: Clare's beauty and fashion is described in intimate, specific language

  3. Sensuality: Clare gives of a sensual and sexual charge to everyone she interacts with
• Book divided into three sections

  highlights questions of theatricality that are central to the novel's concerns.
• Historical events occurring at this time

  - Plessy v. Ferguson: reinforced the "one drop" rule and "separate but equal" doctrine

  - Middle-class African America embracing fashion and other aspects of consumer culture as mode of upward mobility

  - Increasing knowledge and interest in, sexuality

  - The Rhinelander case: wealthy white man sued his mixed race wife for "fraud"
• Nella Larsen's life that makes this book almost a reflection of herself


  - Mother was Danish, father West Indian

  - After father died, mother married a white man