Steven J. Belluscio. To Be Suddenly White: Literary Realism and Racial Passing

African American Review, Winter, 2007 by KaaVonia Hinton

Steven J. Belluscio. To Be Suddenly White:

Literary Realism and Racial Passing.

Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2006. 288 pp.

$44.95.

Although Belluscio's book takes up two heavily studied topics, literary realism and racial passing aspects of its analysis of selected 19th- and 20th-century texts lean towards recent discourse on critical race theory and whiteness studies. When posing such questions as What is whiteness? What is race? Is race merely a social construct? How/When did white ethnic groups become white? How does one write about race and racial identity? Belluscio adds immensely to scholarship about American literature.

Beginning with narratives known to most readers of African American literature-James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Nella Larsen's Passing, and George Schuyler's Black No More--Belluscio breaks new ground while reading works by members of white ethnic groups, Jewish American and Italian American, as passing narratives. He analyzes the aforementioned representative texts and others such as Guido d'Agostino's Olives on the Apple Tree, Mary Antin's The Promised Land, and Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers, "textually, contextually, and comparatively for their respective engagements with discourses of racial and/or ethnic difference, assimilation, passing, and identity" (3). Using realism as a lens, he focuses on the "free-will individual" in each work, as main characters exercise moral agency, especially when making, in some cases, a deliberate decision to "become white."

After an introduction that delineates terms such as passing, literary racial passing, and realism and an opening chapter about whiteness and its inherent value, Belluscio takes up text about race, ethnicity, and gender. For example, chapter two examines how African American women in two of the earliest passing narratives, William Dean Howell's An Imperative Duty and Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted, negotiate "passing acts" while chapter three focuses on male white ethnic passing narratives--Guido d'Agostino's memoir Olives on the Apple Tree and Ludwig Lewisohn's novel Up Stream--in which the focus is on shedding ethnic identity in exchange for whiteness. The main characters of both works are unsuccessful in their attempt to pass for white, and they eventually consider the value in their own culture. The author also looks closely at The Passing of the Great Race (1916) and Race or Nation: A Conflict of Divided Loyalties (1925), texts that "exemplify ... anti-immigrant racialism" and argue that certain races of people are inferior (namely blacks and Jews).

The chapter on African American male-centered texts--Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Schuyler's Black No More, and Charles Chesnutt's The House behind the Cedars and "The Wife of His Youth"--demonstrates the tension that arises when characters must exert free will and tackle an important moral decision: should they maintain cultural loyalty or pursue the benefits of passing for white? The chapter on female white ethnic narratives offers a careful analysis of Antin's The Promised Land, Yezierska's Bread Givers, Marie Hall Et's Rosa: The Life of an Immigrant, and Helen Barolini's Umbertina. Each text features a female character concerned with gender oppression, in the dominant and ethnic cultures, and ethnic status in general within the United States. Belluscio defines the Italian American novels as acculturation narratives, arguing that the first Italian American women's passing narrative did not appear until 1979 when Umbertina was published. The author does admit that this difference might be attributed to several factors, including that the Italian American literary tradition is more recent than the Jewish American literary tradition. Chapter 6 returns to narratives--Chesnutt's The House behind the Cedars, Larsen's Passing, Jessie Redmon Fauset's Plum Bun, and Walter White's Flight--that contain key African American female characters who elect to pass when it is convenient. According to Belluscio, the texts are arranged by gender because "female-centered texts are frequently structured around different sets of desires, motivations, and actions than male-centered texts" (25). Each chapter, regardless of its focus on race, ethnicity, and/or gender, examines the evolution of the national narrative.

Belluscio's findings, however, are not very insightful, as he concludes that African American writers were more likely to critique race and racial identity than do their white ethnic counterparts. Further, he argues yet another predictable point--African American writers had a tendency to create passing narratives while white ethnic writers often produced acculturation narratives, narratives that bring "discourses of ethnicity and Americanness into equilibrium ... even suppressing the conflict between the two" (13). Simply put, his comparative findings come as no surprise: white ethnics were not affected by race to the extent that African Americans were. As he asserts, "In the labor market, the social arena, the legal realm ... the experiences of African Americans compared with those of white ethnics tell the story of a group more adversely affected by ideologies of race, as witnessed by, among other things, the era's racial violence, legalized segregation, and miscegenation laws: none of which affected white ethnics as much as it did blacks" (7).