A Bitter Journey: The "Passing" Mulatta as "Expatriate": in Jessie Redmon Fauset's 'Plum Bun'

Abstract

This paper looks at the phenomenon of “passing”, the movement from one race to another, as it is seen in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s novel "Plum Bun". Documenting this journey by employing some of the headings black feminist critic bell hooks suggests in her essay “Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination”, the author wants to show how Fauset, an African American woman writer of the Harlem Renaissance, used the conventional theme of “passing” in order to problematize issues of national identity and expatriation. According to the author of this article the protagonist’s journey from the black community to the white world and back again can, then, be seen in the terms that bell hooks suggests for the creation of an alternative theory of travel. Thus, what the reader of the novel learns from Angela Murray’s experience is, most of all, the importance of perspective in judging both people and events.