Clare and Irene were two childhood friends. They lost touch when Clare's father died and she moved in with two white aunts. By hiding that Clare was part-black, they allowed her to 'pass' as a white woman and marry a white racist. Irene lives in Harlem, commits herself to racial uplift, and marries a black doctor. The novel centers on the meeting of the two childhood friends la...(展开全部)

Clare Kendry leads a dangerous life. Fair, elegant, and ambitious, she is married to a white man unaware of her African American heritage, and has severed all ties to her past. Clare's childhood friend, Irene Redfield, just as light-skinned, has chosen to remain within the African American community, but refuses to acknowledge the racism that continues to constrict her family's...(展开全部)

Larsen's status as a Harlem Renaissance woman writer was rivaled by only Zora Neale Hurston s. This Norton Critical Edition of her electrifying 1929 novel includes Carla Kaplan s detailed and thought-provoking introduction, thorough explanatory annotations, and a Note on the Text. An unusually rich Background and Contexts section connects the novel to the historical events of t...(展开全部)

Married to a successful physician and prominently ensconced in Harlem's vibrant society of the 1920s, Irene Redfield leads a charmed existence -- until a chance encounter with a childhood friend who has been "passing for white." "Passing" offers fascinating psychological insights into issues of race and gender.

What do we mean when we say time passes? How do contingency and anachronism and other philosophical concepts bearing on time affect the more (seemingly) concrete realities of our political and cultural lives? In ways small and great, personal and cultural, we all experience the mutability of time. We feel it expand and contract, speed up and slow down, as it bends to the impera...(展开全部)