Presenter: Carly Bushman
Faculty Mentor: Mai-Lin Cheng
Presentation Type: Oral
Primary Research Area: Humanities
Major: Architecture
African American authors of the Harlem Renaissance used the term “New Negro” to represent racial progress and to unite the African American community around a mutual identity. Nella Larsen’s book, Passing, was affected by the rhetoric of the New Negro Movement in Harlem during the 1920s, as it manifests her perception of racial consciousness. Using Larsen’s text, scholarly journals and primary sources (specifically poems, short stories and essays from The New Negro: An Interpretation), I establish that the New Negro movement relates to the conflicts and character development of Passing as it reveals the contradictions surrounding the racial consciousness of the African American community during the time period. Specifically, African American individuals “passed” as Caucasian to survive in an environment of discrimination, but the act of “passing” negated the ideologies of the New Negro movement by conforming to Caucasian norms and shying away from African American heritage. This initial research on Larsen’s Passing could inform a study of her first novel, Quicksand, which has the potential to introduce additional ideas of racial consciousness in relation to the movement’s propaganda.