Postwar 1950s

The Postwar 1950s are identified as a turning point in the literary history of racial passing: Black popular fiction began to develop what Gayle Wald terms the postpassing narrative. The label marks a change in the genre, not the disappearance of the historical structures that made passing possible. Larsen’s Passing, set in 1927, remains legible within that longer history because its plot and its reference to the Rhinelander case bring racial classification, marriage, and legal status into the same frame.

Historical Conditions Behind Passing

The passing narrative emerged from the history of slavery and its aftermath, when racial identity was bound to social and legal status. Whiteness carried material and civic privilege; defining someone as not Black could mean defining them as free rather than enslaved. The genre therefore addressed more than an individual’s choice of identity: it exposed how racial categories organized access to property, personhood, and social standing.

That inherited order was reinforced by law. Plessy v. Ferguson legitimized segregation under the doctrine of separate but equal, while the one-drop rule treated even a small amount of Black ancestry as determinative. Jim Crow laws made these distinctions part of daily life. Passing narratives challenged the apparent stability of the color line by showing that visible appearance and legally assigned race did not necessarily coincide; they also questioned a racial hierarchy that restricted Black people’s access to citizenship and its privileges.

The Postwar Literary Shift

The Postwar 1950s saw the emergence of the postpassing narrative in Black popular fiction, as documented by Wald. This development sits alongside arguments that passing for white had ceased to be the social issue it had been in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The critical account does not treat those claims as proof that passing had become unimportant. Rather, the continuing publication and reception of passing narratives suggests that the subject retained literary force, even as its historical circumstances changed.

The distinction between passing narratives and postpassing narratives also places Larsen’s novel in a continuing, rather than closed, tradition. Passing’s later readership and renewed critical attention belong to a broader interest in interracial literature, biracial identity, and the social construction of race. The Postwar 1950s thus appear here as a point in the genre’s development, not as a clean break from the history the earlier narratives had confronted.

Legal Memory and Larsen’s Novel

The Rhinelander case provides a concrete earlier example of the legal stakes that inform this literary history. Leonard Kip Rhinelander, a member of a wealthy New York family, married Alice B. Jones in 1924 and later sought an annulment, alleging that she had misrepresented her racial identity. Jones countered that he had known her ancestry before the marriage. On December 5, 1925, a jury rejected the fraud charge against her. The case made racial identity a public legal dispute and exposed the gap between visible appearance and the categories courts used to define race.

In Passing, Irene’s reference to the case links the threat surrounding Clare’s concealed ancestry to more than private exposure: it evokes a legal system in which marriage and racial classification could determine social belonging and material rights. That reference helps explain why the passing narrative could remain relevant beyond the period in which passing was most commonly treated as an immediate social practice. The postwar literary shift takes place against this durable history of law, racial hierarchy, and contested identity.