The Theme of “Passing” in the Novels of James Weldon Johnson and Nella Larsen.

ABSTRACT

The depiction of the experience of a very fair-skinned person of some ―coloured‖ background who successfully passes into white society was a recurrent theme in early African American writings. In this paper an attempt is made to look at, and compare and contrast, two African American novels, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (l912) and Passing (1929) which deal with the theme of passing, written by James Weldon Johnson and Nella Larsen, a Black man and a Black woman writer. This paper analyses how the two novels reject the rules of colour division, rules which demand that one accepts a position within a predetermined hierarchy.