Type of Document Master's Thesis Author Apgar, Jennifer L. URN etd-11202008-211634 Title Performing Passing: Theatricality in Zoë Wicomb's Playing in the Light and Nella Larsen's Passing Degree Master of Arts Department English Advisory Committee
Advisor Name Title Dr. Pearl McHaney Committee Co-Chair Dr. Renee Schatteman Committee Co-Chair Dr. Audrey Goodman Committee Member Keywords
- theatrical
- settings
- theater
- racial passing
- social passing
- thresholds
Date of Defense 2008-11-21 Availability unrestricted Abstract Acts of “passing” inform the plots of Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light and Nella Larsen’s Passing. Examples of contemporary South African fiction and Harlem Renaissance fiction respectively, these texts explore racial passing and its correlative, social passing. Social passing includes enactment of social relationships, responds to class anxieties, and requires repression of emotions as participating characters attempt to fix their performed roles into permanent identities. At issue are the texts’ multiple enactments of passing with special interest paid to these acts’ constitutive theatricality. Characters perform within narrative settings, locations subsequently deconstructed exposing both implicit and explicit theatrical functions. Threshold spaces of doors and windows form frames within settings, focusing the audience’s gaze and simultaneously creating and dismantling private and public places to reconstitute them as theater. This study culminates in reflections on the tension between the relative freedom and containment of characters that pass.Files
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