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History and literature have been known to ascribe a blanket of sameness in the study of black communities and their issues. The chapter approaches the concept of dissimilarity within communities of colored folk, specifically among its women, which focus on differences pertaining to social status, color, race, and gender. The chapter presents the reader with three novels of Afro-American female authors and their exploration of colored female “otherness” in their works. The novels of Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing, are tackled first, with her treatment and reinvention of the mulatto with influences from 19th-century literature from both black and white authors. Toni Morrison's Sula also examines the concept of difference, but without the mulatto figure highlighted in the previous books discussed. The three literary works reveal that differences in these Afro-American sub-societies are rooted deeply in sexuality and community building.

The title of the second of Lu Xun's stories, Kong Yiji, written in March 1919, is given to an older man, whose speech is frequently said to be full of archaisms, and whose death is imminent. With the writing of Medicine it is possible to see the flexibility of Lu Xun's approach in the writing of short stories. Tomorrow seems to echo the meaning of the flight of the crow in Medicine. A Small Incident is written as a fragment of an autobiography, recording the six years he spent in Beijing, from 1912 onwards. The Story of Hair is profoundly autobiographical, while fictional. A Passing Storm discusses a village where every event of significance has been reduced to triviality and every trivial event has become a crisis. Hometown shows the loss of ability to remember the past, and the sense that there is nothing to say about it.

Like the finale of a vaudeville show, this chapter brings the themes and actors presented in preceding chapters “back on stage” through an examination of the Shubert Brother’s answer to the Ziegfeld Follies revue, The Passing Show of 1913. The show’s act 1 Finale, “The Capitol Steps,” gestures toward a number of the performances and intermedial performance strategies discussed throughout the book in order to both negotiate cultural issues and create meaning and humor. This number and the shorter version of it staged as Escalade at the London Hippodrome demonstrate the centrality of reference to American popular genres in the early years of the century, the fluidity of these genres and their performers, and just how definitive intermedial aesthetics were in American entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century.

This chapter first analyzes Nella Larsen's Passing, which takes up the question of how (and whether) a look of recognition deals with difference and takes account of what seems unfamiliar and unknown in another person. It then shows how James Baldwin's Another Country unpacks the complex and subtle dynamics of recognition and relationship in ways that emphasizes the necessity of vulnerability and therefore of trust. These two novels contribute to our public philosophy of democracy by underscoring the complex, perhaps inescapably tragic dynamics of such relationships, thereby pointing us toward a more successful practice of the art of democratic citizenship.

This essay presents a revised version of an illustrated lecture that Berube first presented in San Francisco in June 1979. Inspired by the section in Jonathan Ned Katz's Gay American History titled “Passing Women”—which revealed a long tradition of women who dressed, lived, and worked as men; Berube searched through San Francisco newspapers for local evidence of the phenomenon. He places his stories in the context of the newly emerging field of U.S. women's history and sets them as well in the local setting of San Francisco. Although very much constructed as a discovery of hidden lesbian lives, the showings of “Lesbian Masquerade” also inspired some of the first explorations of transgender history. The essay was originally published in Gay Community News, a Boston-based politically progressive newspaper with a national circulation. Like much of the community press in the post-Stonewall era, Gay Community News not only reported news but served as an outlet for early writing in gay and lesbian history.

This chapter examines Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun (1929) and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) within the framework of the debate over the meaning of race. It shows how the two novels’ mulatta characters pass selectively as white and black, instead of mediating between whiteness and blackness, in order to engage in a performative that challenges American notions of race as a natural closed category. It also discusses the interimplications of race, gender, class, and sexuality through the characters’ acts of passing and argues that Fauset and Larsen were engaged with debates over “authentic blackness” within the Harlem Renaissance.

This chapter analyzes Lu Xun's adaptation of another prevalent theme in classical poetry to his stories: yearning for home. Rather than an image of the idyllic native place (guxiang) commonly found in the classical poetic universe and modern narratives, the natal home in his fiction is depicted as a veritable dystopia. In so doing, Lu Xun highlights the plight of his intellectual wanderers: of being without a home in the world. Of his stories, the chapter discusses “New Year's Sacrifice” (1924), “In the Tavern” (1924), and “A Passing Storm” (1921), focusing in particular on “My Old Home” (1921).

An exploration of the racial and class dimensions of early American department stores is provided in this chapter. It reveals why these retail institutions became prime locations for protesting and claiming civil rights. Early American department stores operated under the principle of free entry and browsing—a principle that helped usher in a new conception of American democracy that was intricately tied to the practices of consumption that the department store fostered. Stores, however, also conformed to and endorsed aspects of Jim Crow (including notions of racial order and purity): many stores received African Americans under the principle of free entry and browsing but then constrained their movement and participation in this space; and stores hired blacks as maintenance and stockroom workers, elevator operators, porters, and maids—all invisible from the salesroom floor—but barred them from white-collar staff positions in sales, clerical, and management. The racialized democracy of the department store shaped the ways that race and class were imagined and employed to create both worker and consumer identities, making department stores an epitome of racial discrimination and thus an ideal site to challenge racial discrimination.

Reviewing the critical reception and scholarship on Nella Larsen’s Passing, the chapter documents the historical and contemporary appeal of the “passing plot” in US fiction, along with the social phenomenon of race passing. Like the slave narrative, the passing novel is structured by border crossings and functions as a form of social critique. And while, like many modernist texts, Passing focuses on the theme of identity, Larsen rewrites essentialist notions of identity with the postmodernist concept of performative identity. The chapter proposes that Larsen, in effect, narratively theorizes the postmodern debate around essentialism vs. constructionism, challenging the idea of innate racial difference while embracing an ideology of racial uniqueness. Juxtaposing central characters Clare, who embodies textual performance, and Irene, who embodies readerly performance, the chapter demonstrates how these miscegenous figures represent “a crisis of representation.” Larsen’s achievement, it concludes, lies in her reductio ad absurdum refutation of the essentialist position.

Chapter 12 discusses two computational topics. The first topic is one of the key inspirations for our approach, namely, Plotkin’s treatment of the call‐by‐name evaluation discipline versus the call‐by‐value evaluation discipline for a formal language (the untyped lambda calculus). Plotkin’s Continuation Passing Style technique allows explicit control over the evaluation order of an expression within a larger system that is order‐independent. We show the family resemblance between Plotkin’s CPS transforms and our combination schema. The second main topic of the chapter is of a more practical nature, and concerns the computational implementation of the tower system. We show how a refactoring of the type‐shifters into a slightly larger set of combinators guarantees that it is possible to build an efficient (decidable) implementation.