IDENTITY, RACE, AND THE POLITICS OF PASSING: A CRITICAL RACE THEORY ANALYSIS OF BRIT BENNETT'S THE VANISHING HALF

Abstract

This literary criticism analyzes Brit Bennett's novel The Vanishing Half through the theoretical frameworks of Critical Race Theory and postcolonial identity studies. The novel focuses on two identical black twin sisters whose paths diverge dramatically between light and dark in mid-twentieth-century America as a vehicle for interrogating how racial identity is created, performed, and challenged within American social constructs. This dissertation will expand the contemporary literary discourse by employing, critically analyzing, and relating the tenets of key scholars within the field, namely Critical Race Theorists such as Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw, and those in postcolonial studies such as Stuart Hall and Frantz Fanon.  We will begin by examining the fluidities of racial categories and then extend into the implications of “passing.”  This work will explore the generational effects of racial trauma. This work will include extensive, intensive textual analysis of selected passages. It is here that we will analyze the manner in which Bennett utilizes: linear/non- linear chronology, alternating third-person dual point of view narration, and the dual representation of The American South as a place of symbolic landscape, in the construction of a narrative that both deconstructs the existing white supremacist structures and analyzes the concomitant psychosocial destruction those systems cause to black subjectivity. The result will provide evidence to support the theory that Bennett’s novel works as a societal comment on race relations in America, as well as an examination of psychic self-erasure, the notion of belonging and the futile attempts to elude one's racial inheritance, and as an intervention into and reconceptualization of the twenty-first-century racial passing narrative, within the contemporary African American literary canon.