Log In

Home
    - Create Journal
    - Update
    - Download

Scribbld
    - News
    - Paid Accounts
    - Invite
    - To-Do list
    - Contributors

Customize
    - Customize
    - Create Style
    - Edit Style

Find Users
    - Random!
    - By Region
    - By Interest
    - Search

Edit ...
    - User Info
    - Settings
    - Your Friends
    - Old Entries
    - Userpics
    - Password

Need Help?
    - Password?
    - FAQs
    - Support Area


Books | The Guardian ([info]theguardianbook) wrote,
@ 2020-06-23 08:00:00

Previous Entry  Add to memories!  Tell a Friend!  Next Entry
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett review – two faces of the black experience

A light-skinned twin sister constructs a new identity as a white woman in a clever novel that confounds expectations

North American literature is rich with dramatic tales of light-skinned black protagonists who attempt to “pass” for white. At their peak in the 1920s – whether in Nella Larsen’s Passing or Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun – these mostly young women wrestled with the fear of being uncovered while being seduced by the rewards of freedom from the perceived stain of blackness.

Brit Bennett’s intriguing new novel, The Vanishing Half, amplifies the trope of the “tragic mulatto” (a self-loathing mixed-race American) by sharing the dilemma of “passing” with identical twin characters, Stella and Desiree. In 1950s America the teenagers disappear from Mallard, a fictional small, racially homogeneous and snobbish “coloured” town in Louisiana, and embark on lives marked by opposing trajectories.

Continue reading...


(Read comments)

Post a comment in response:

From:
( )Anonymous- this community only allows commenting by members. You may comment here if you are a member of theguardianbook.
Identity URL: 
Username:
Password:
Don't have an account? Create one now.
Subject:
No HTML allowed in subject
  
Message:
 



scribbld is part of the horse.13 network
Design by Jimmy B.
Logo created by hitsuzen.
Scribbld System Status