Fewer Passing Novels, Younger Subjects

By Elizabeth Cali 

The subject of racial passing and addressing mixed-race identity arises in many – if not most – classes in African American literary studies. I wondered how many 21st-century novels from the Literary Navigator Device dataset fall into the category of mixed-race/passing novels.

From 2000-2024: just four. The dataset does not include any novels on the subject published in the first decade of the century, one novel in the 2010s, and three novels in the 2020s (to date). With such a small dataset it, was easy to start investigating cross-references with these four novels and other tags organizing the dataset. I immediately moved to see what other genres and categories might connect these four novels.

Three of the four mixed-race/passing novels published in the 21st century and included in the Navigator dataset take youth as some aspect of their focus. Two of the three are coming-of-age novels: Daven McQueen’s The Invincible Summer of Juniper Jones and Britt Bennet’s The Vanishing Half. Two of the same set of three are categorized as YA, or Young Adult fiction: Elyse Bryant’s Happily Ever After and Daven McQueen’s The Invincible Summer of Juniper Jones.

It’s interesting to consider that perhaps the most well-known and most frequently taught novel on passing, Nella Larson’s Passing (1929), focuses on adult Black women navigating their identities as mixed-race, light skinned women who could pass, and addresses adult audiences. Yet, three of the four novels we have tracked as mixed-race/passing novels in contemporary African American literature focus on a young adult audience and/or the experiences of identity formation in the movement from childhood into adulthood.

Related: 

• Navigator Discoveries