That Middle World: Race, Performance, and the Politics of Passing by Julia S. Charles

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Reviewed by: That Middle World: Race, Performance, and the Politics of Passing by Julia S. Charles Tyler Sperrazza That Middle World: Race, Performance, and the Politics of Passing. By Julia S. Charles. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. xviii, 224. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-5957-2; cloth, $95.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-5956-5.) The past decade has seen a tremendous growth in scholarly inquiry around the subject of racial passing. The context of the current historical moment coupled with viral discussions of cultural appropriation and "blackfishing" brings a sense of urgency to understanding the long history of passing and its function in the U.S. context. Julia S. Charles's That Middle World: Race, Performance, and the Politics of Passing offers a perspective on this phenomenon that places performance at the heart of the racial passing experience. Charles calls for a rejection of previous scholarly treatments of passing that foreground experiences of loss among those who pass and instead argues for a focus on the opportunities that performing race offered to certain mixed-race African American citizens. Charles presents a book of theory and philosophy on racial passing meant to inform the ways scholars of African American literature and media studies can make sense of mixed-race and passing characters throughout nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. The title of Charles's book also serves as its main theoretical construction. "That Middle World" is a location that Charles defines as an interstitial and metaphysical space occupied by mixed-race characters that becomes the "location of culture and identity for so-called mulattoes in African American fiction" (p. 22). This space both creates and destroys boundaries between Black and white and offers a means of interpreting passing African Americans' experiences as a constant process of both making and crossing borders in a liminal space free of the "inadequate Black-white racial binary" (p. 40). Throughout the central chapters of the book, Charles adroitly moves between the historical lives and contexts of African American authors and the worlds their characters inhabit. Many of her subjects—Charles W. Chesnutt being central—were themselves mixed-race and able to navigate the boundaries of That Middle World in their everyday lives. Charles's interweaving of the historical and the literary is a welcome addition to this growing field of passing studies. The subjects of Charles's chapters will be familiar to readers with interest in nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American literature. However, she effectively breathes new critical life into texts that are often central to analyses of racial passing, such as Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars (1900), Nella Larsen's Passing (1929), and James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912). Charles analyzes these texts with an eye on both the written words and their authors in a way that combines the best tools of historiography, literary criticism, and performance theory. She also seeks to [End Page 164] add to the growing movement of scholars to recalibrate our view of African American literary production between the 1860s and 1930s toward regions beyond Harlem. Charles offers the conveniently termed "New Negro Renaissance" as a way of highlighting this important temporal shift, and readers who study this particular era could be well served in adding that phrase to their lexicon (p. 16). Charles has presented a fascinating new take on the phenomenon of racial passing during a particular moment in U.S. history. She makes connections between the contexts of historical authors and their writings, and how the lessons gleaned from her theoretical construction of That Middle World can have real interpretive power in our present moment. The book's epilogue, "That Rachel Dolezal," does just that by placing the theory of That Middle World into our contemporary moment and offering new perspectives on the ways racial performance continues to function in our world. This book is a must-read for anyone studying the politics of race in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Tyler Sperrazza University of New Haven Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association