An Exploration of the Double-Conscious African- Americans on their Journey for an Identity along the Colour Line in -Passing, Quicksand, The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man

My old man died in a fine big house.

My ma died in a shack.

I wonder where I’m gonna die.

Being neither white nor black?

These are the first words with which Nella Larsen commences her novel Quicksand in 1928. The quatrain belongs to the poem ‘Cross’ (1925) by Larsen’s contemporary Langston Hughes and addresses the issue of duality, where mixed racial heritage leads to self-doubt and struggle in the definition of identity.

Larsen and other African-American writers, including James Weldon Johnson, explored the intricacies and contradictions of the concept of race at the beginning of the 20th century, in particular by addressing the phenomenon of ‘passing’. Passing has many definitions, most often it is associated with the term ‘passing for white’, which implies the crossing of the colour line from black to white in order to transcend racial barriers. Ratna Roy refers to it as „assimilating into white society by concealing one’s antecedents” and according to Sollors, passing can be understood in a more general sense as the „crossing of any line that divides social groups.” Perhaps most importantly is to understand passing as the ability of a person to be completely accepted as a member of a sociological group other than their own. ...