Passing By

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

This scholarly study explores the conflicting forces of assimilation and cultural heritage in literary portrayals of Jewish American identity. In Passing Fancies in Jewish American Literature and Culture Judith Ruderman takes on the fraught question of who passes for Jewish in American literature and culture. In today’s contemporary political climate, religious and racial identities are being reconceived as responses to culture and environment, rather than essential qualities. Many Jews continue to hold conflicting ideas about their identity?seeking deep engagement with Jewish history and the experiences of the Jewish people while holding steadfastly to the understanding that identity is fluid and multivalent. Looking at carefully chosen texts from American literature, Ruderman elaborates on the strategies Jews have used to “pass” from the late nineteenth century to the present?nose jobs, renaming, clothing changes, religious and racial reclassification, and even playing baseball. While traversing racial and religious identities has always been a feature of America’s nation of immigrants, Ruderman shows how the complexities of identity formation and deformation are critically relevant during this important cultural moment.

A down-in-the trenches, hilarious send-up of everyday events that most people rarely take the time to notice. A sidesplitting look at the raw side of everyday existance and a kind-yet stern-reminder to lighten up whenever possible.

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.

A twist of Fate will turn her life upside down . . . It started out as just another ordinary day. Jessica Lund is on her way home from work when she suddenly notices a man sitting in the passenger seat of her car! But this is no ordinary man. Christopher Dunlap is arrogant, opinionated, and absolutely gorgeous. Unfortunately for Jessica's state of mind, he's also claiming to be an English nobleman--from 1812. Neither understands how Christopher, a man who'd been living a happy life nearly two hundred years in the past, is now flesh and blood in Jessica's present. But he's definitely real. And so are the feelings he inspires in Jessica. They soon share a love for each other as deep as it is dangerous, for they know that whatever brought them together could just as easily tear them apart.