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Reading African American Women's Literature: Passing and “Recitatif”

Toni Morrison’s only short story “Recitatif” is a curious revision of Nella Larsen’s Passing, one of the masterpieces of the Harlem Renaissance. While both texts are embedded with numerous cultural and historical signs of modern America, what operates as the center of the narrative is racial ambiguity that simultaneously claims and disclaims race. The two female protagonists in Larsen’s Passing are equipped with racially ambiguous bodies that allow them to pass for white; in“Recitatif,” the racial codes of two racialized female characters are intentionally erased. As such, Morrison intriguingly replaces the bodily passing in Passing with literary passing, in which the provocative experiments on racial readability probelmatize the issue of race as well as the genre of African American women’s literature. Not conforming to the readers’ expectations of African American women’s literary texts, Passing and “Recitatif” avoid the search for the rural origins or an African American past. Each text instead chooses to delineate a pair of women’slives in terms of class, family, gender roles, and consumer culture; the memory excavated is that of personal, not racial or even collective. Though written by two of the most representative African American women writers of the Harlem Renaissance and the late twentieth century respectively, both works urge us to reconsider African American women’s literature as they only obliquely mention race. By problematizing the notion of race as conventionally literarized in African American women’s literature, these works invite readers to re-examine and re-question the meaning and weight of race and the ways we believe and perceive it in literature and in life as well.