That Middle World - by Julia S Charles

About the Book

"During the decades leading up to the Civil War, the idea of white superiority was bolstered by rigid race laws that governed interactions between the races, targeting Black people and relegating them to the lower rungs of the racial caste system. Consequently, American literature-especially that by black writers-began to reflect the cultural phenomenon of racial passing from the antebellum period through the collapse of Reconstruction. In this book, Julia Charles investigates the construction and performance of racial identity in select works of passing literature by Black writers. Charles looks at how Black writers in the nineteenth century have used the trope of racial passing in order to propose new racial categories and, relatedly, new boundaries of identity-essentially, creating a middle world between whiteness and blackness. For mixed-race characters in the Black passing novel Charles argues, race is about resisting and rejecting legally and socially imposed boundaries of identity, and African American authors of racial passing literature developed mixed-race characters that vacillated between multiple worlds as they negotiate these fuzzy and changing margins of identity"--

Book Synopsis

In this study of racial passing literature, Julia S. Charles highlights how mixed-race subjects invent cultural spaces for themselves--a place she terms that middle world--and how they, through various performance strategies, make meaning in the interstices between the Black and white worlds. Focusing on the construction and performance of racial identity in works by writers from the antebellum period through Reconstruction, Charles creates a new discourse around racial passing to analyze mixed-race characters' social objectives when crossing into other racialized spaces. To illustrate how this middle world and its attendant performativity still resonates in the present day, Charles connects contemporary figures, television, and film--including Rachel Dolezal and her Black-passing controversy, the FX show Atlanta, and the musical Show Boat--to a range of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary texts. Charles's work offers a nuanced approach to African American passing literature and examines how mixed-race performers articulated their sense of selfhood and communal belonging.

Review Quotes

"Charles has presented a fascinating new take on the phenomenon of racial passing during a particular moment in U.S. history. This book is a must-read for anyone studying the politics of race in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."--Journal of Southern History