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Origin of Everything
Season 2 Episode 13 | 10m 6s

What motivates someone to disguise their race, gender, religion, etc.? Today Danielle explores the complicated history of passing in the United States.

Aired: 02/27/19

Rating: NR

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What is Racial Passing? | Season 2 Episode 13 | Origin of Everything

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Origin of Everything Season 2 Episode 13 | 10m 6s What motivates someone to disguise their race, gender, religion, etc.? Today Danielle explores the complicated history of passing in the United States. Aired: 02/27/19 Rating: NR

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The characters in Passing pass as white for a variety of reasons. Clare passes as white in order to get married and stay married to an economically valuable partner. Irene shows a more superfluous use of passing when she passes as white to gain admittance to the Drayton. All three women in front of John Bellew to maintain both their own safety and the future safety of Clare. As we can see, Larsen suggests a variety of reasons one might choose to pass as white and the different benefits that go along with doing so.

In my History 109 class, “Who Is An American?,” unsurprisingly citizenship is a central topic of the course. Therefore, we have spent a fair amount of time focusing on who was and was not eligible for legal citizenship. The First US Congress passed the Naturalization Act of 1790 which, among other criteria, asserted one must be “a free white person” to be eligible to become a naturalized citizen; it asserted a racial prerequisite to US citizenship. Though the language of this act was revised several times, this racial criterion was not removed until 1952. Of course this meant that many people of mixed or ambiguous racial or ethnic ancestry tried to pass as white to garner the legal right to become a naturalized citizen. This resulted in a series of prerequisite cases, as they were called, in which courts had to rule on whether the defendant was eligible for naturalization. Essentially the courts were deciding if defendants had the racial background to pass as white. This is an interesting way to look at passing in a legal context. Passing can be found in social arenas like we saw in Larsen’s Passing or in legal contexts as demonstrated in the prerequisite cases. Both circumstances present real, tangible rewards and protections for passing, and though the characters might use it sometimes in a superfluous manner, racial passing is a serious matter for those who partake in it.

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Native American map pre-colonialization (edited)

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Personally, I am a very big fan of commonplacing. To me, the main purpose of commonplacing is to draw connections between different areas of my life. It is easy to learn things in one class and compartmentalize them to that subject only, or to listen to a song and think about it in terms of one context or another, but the material becomes richer and multi-dimensional if you are able to connect it to other aspects of your life. Commonplacing helps me see patterns I wouldn’t have otherwise noticed if not for slowing down to critically think about how I can draw connections for my commonplace book. Once I do the work of making the first few connections, even more seem to come to me out of nowhere. All of these connections about the same topic present me the ability to compare and contrast related ideas. This allows me to add nuance to my perspective that I wouldn’t have otherwise considered. I have also commonplaced in a previous English class I took last year. However, in that class what constituted commonplacing was slightly different; we compiled (only) quotes from the texts we discussed as well as quotes from other types of media (books, lectures, songs, art, social media, overheard conversations, etc). This approach to commonplacing was less creative in the sense that I didn’t get to analyze images or art or music videos in the same way because I was focused on getting direct quotations to compile. However, it also served as a way to store many, many ideas in one place. This storage function of the commonplace was helpfu to me, and I still to this day go back to that book for ideas and inspiration when I am looking to make artwork. So in summary, commonplacing is a way to compile and store seemingly disparate ideas in a common location in order to draw connections and inspire future work.

Some of the entry topics were relatively easy for me to come up with. For example, in class while discussing The Sun Also Rises we listened to Mary Oliver’s poem Summer Day. I am already a big fan of Mary Oliver from reading her in high school, so this connection between her and Hemingway’s work intrigued me. After class I wrote a free write further exploring how the two authors (and others, like Cather) related. I then took this free write and expanded it to be a commonplace book entry. I started Googling the poems I knew by her that I thought would be relevant to annotate and include in my commonplace book, and in doing so, quotes from her other poems that I was not previously familiar with popped up. I annotated and included some of them in my commonplace book, and I saved other ones to go back to and read later for my own pleasure. I ended up with too many poems and too many connections to cover in depth in my entry, but I included the annotated poems on the side because there were interesting ideas and connections that I didn’t want to just omit.

The idea for my second entry came to me randomly while working on my first. While scrolling through Google’s image search results for a Hemingway quote to connect to Oliver, Google images search produced an image from a music video I recognized. I began to think about how the quote I had Googled could relate to the song and quickly realized the lyrics related fairly closely. Then, upon further reflection I remembered the music video narrative added and an extra layer of connection, so included that in my analysis as well. The randomness and coincidental nature of discovering this topics entry felt like a very genuine way to commonplace. It is also interesting to consider Google’s algorithms as a sort of commonplacing platform themselves. They bring together often seemingly unrelated images or search results. However these results are in some way filed together or otherwise tagged to pop up when certain keywords are searched for. It would be interesting to study search engines as a commonplacing tool and learn in what contexts they work best.

For my third entry, which took a less direct path, I started with the painting The Creation of Adam. I liked the idea of God and Adam’s fingers almost, but not quite, touching because it reminded me of the idea of disconnected characters we briefly mentioned in lecture. Thinking about disconnection led me to think about a song which in turn led me to remember a piece of artwork (3 Men Walking) from my Shakespeare lecture last year and how the professor had connected the sculpture to the play’s character’s movements on stage. This better represented the core idea I was trying to get at, so I dropped The Creation of Adam piece and centered my entry around this piece of artwork instead. After further thought two more songs came to mind, and I ended up connecting all three songs, The Sun Also Rises, and O Pioneers to the sculpture. I knew while I was doing this that I was sacrificing depth of analysis for quantity of connections, but I couldn’t resist displaying all the connections I had made. To mitigate the consequences of this decision, I used my analysis to highlight the breadth and versatility of the topic, so part of my point was that there was a wide range of connections able to be drawn.

The last two entries were more straightforward. I took what I am learning in my history class (whose topics of race and American history often overlap with this course) and connected them to O Pioneers! And Passing. I tried to make a clear connection between the content from each class and provide a significance for why these ideas are important. It was exciting to see these two classes overlap so directly.

(Interesting discovery: A Chosen Exile - A History of Racial Passing in American Life by Allyson Hobbs uses the same cover photo as some editions of “Passing” by Larsen)

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Astronaut - Simple Plan (space background)

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Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss-born Surrealist and Cubist artist who in 1949 produced a sculpture entitled “3 Men Walking.” This sculpture depicts a scene of three men walking in close proximity to one another, but critically they are not touching one another. In fact, the men are all walking in and looking in different directions. Art critics comment that the men appear “isolated from one another” and that the empty space they are surrounded by “acts as an obstacle to communication.” This same feeling of being so close to others, yet not being able to reach them appears in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. All the characters, Jake especially, seem to be moving around in close proximity to one another, but never fully able to communicate, never able to connect with each other. The characters are all on their own slightly different paths and therefore can’t make a lasting connection. Even as the reader we feel a certain level of distance between ourselves and Jake as a result of Hemingway’s writing style which tends to reveal very little about the characters’ emotional states.

Giacometti’s work is described as a depiction of the essential human condition. The emotions his art evokes are universal and relatable. Not only are feelings of disconnectedness relevant when Giacometti sculpted this piece in 1949, but also as we have already seen they are relevant to authors like Hemingway in the early 1900's. We can even see traces of this same idea in Cather’s work through Carl who returns from the big cities disillusioned and lonely. Looking beyond the modernist era, there is an abundance of contemporary work commenting on the same phenomenon and emotions Giacometti was getting at in his sculpture. Three songs come to mind in particular, all of which were produced within the last eight years. The song “Missed Connection” by The Head and the Heart is, as the title suggests, about feeling disconnected. The songwriters use language such as “criss-crossed in the wrong direction” which is reminiscent of Giacometti’s sculpture in which the men’s paths cross, but they are headed away from each other. The second song, “Astronaut” by Simple Plan, uses the metaphor of an astronaut stranded out in space and lines like “lonely like a satellite” to create visuals that convey feelings of disconnection, loneliness, and longing. It even acknowledges that the singer “can’t be the only one who’s so disconnected” and “that there are millions” who also feel as he does, hinting that this is perhaps a persistent cultural epidemic. Finally the song “Waving Through a Window” from the critically acclaimed musical Dear Evan Hansen. The musical as a whole deals with feelings of isolation, but this song in particular presents the audience with the image of a boy looking in through a window, “tap, tap, tapping on the glass” trying to get someone to notice him, trying to find someone to connect to. Clearly these feelings of disconnection are timeless, spanning across decades, media type, and audience. Giacometti’s work is one contribution towards the larger project of describing this particular part of the human condition.

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Throughout O Pioneers, a driving motivation for Alexandra is to keep her land which implies she believes, as do most other Americans, that she can and does own it. Alexandra and the other characters in the novel very much subscribe to the American ideal of westward expansion. In my History 109 class entitled “Who is An American?”, we discussed how the idea of expanding the western frontier was critical to early settlers’ identities. It shaped how they thought of themselves and their interactions with others and with the land. This is reflected in characters speaking of land in terms of “owning”, “keeping”, and “taming” it, showing evidence of a culture of commerce and exploitation. In that class, we analyzed John Gast’s painting, “American Progress” as an allegory for Manifest Destiny. In the painting Progress, an angelic woman, floats above the land leading white settlers westward across the nation and leaving markers of civilization in their path. This ties to disorientation the characters feel in the “absence of human landmarks” and their subsequent desire to establish a homestead and civilization as seen in O Pioneers.

As we discussed in my history class, settlers arriving on the western frontier they brought with them an instinct to “civilize” the “wilderness” before them as well as the assumption that the land had no previous history before their arrival. This way of thinking negates the thousands of years of rich and complex Native American history. This history can begin to be understood by looking at a map of Native Nations before the commencement of colonization. Maps like these which we analyzed in History 109 offer a counter perspective to the dominant narrative of settlers such as Alexandra and the other characters in O Pioneers. As Alexandra so astutely points out, human history is really just a handful of stories told and retold in different settings. The irony here is that she believes she is in one story, that of settling and discovering the new world, when in reality she is part of the enduring story of conquest. Critically,, she is missing counter-narratives that would allow her to recognize the power struggles and conquest taking place. Thus Alexandra (and to some extent Cather herself) is omitting both Natives’ histories, as well their displacement as a result of colonization in which she is partaking.

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Kodaline - our love was made for movie screenss

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Kodaline - I lay in tears in bed all night

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Hemingway - All I wanted to know was how to live in it

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The song “All I Want” by Kodaline in many ways mirrors the storyline of Brett and Jake’s relationship in The Sun Also Rises. There are a multitude of parallels between the song’s lyrics and Jake and Brett’s relationship. For example, the lines “I lay in tears in bed all night/ Alone without you by my side” brings to mind the scenes of Jake lying awake at night crying over Brett. The quote “All I want is nothing more/ To hear you knocking at my door/… I could die a happy man I’m sure” reveals that both Jake as well as narrator of the song see getting the girl as the ultimate key to their happiness. Both of them believe a romantic relationship will fix their loneliness and discontent with the world. This view perpetuates an arguably unhealthy view of romantic relationships by setting unrealistic standards as well as fails to address the root problems of their unhappiness. One final and critical connection between the two works is both men suffer from physical deformities inhibiting them from having romantic relationships. As we already know Jake’s injury prevents him from having a full sexual relationship. In the music video for “All I Want”, the main male character has a skin condition which leaves his face disfigured. Both men view their physical abnormality as (potentially insurmountable) obstacles to them ever having romantic relationships, and both suffer extreme loneliness.

Despite the many parallels between these two narratives, ultimately they are not the same story. The music video ends with the man walking the woman home and getting her number; in the end the guy gets the girl. On the other hand, in The Sun Also Rises, the complicated nature of Brett and Jake’s relationship remains, and thus they cannot end up together. These different narrative endings reflect the time and culture in which they were written. The music video and lyrics are influenced by today’s optimistic romanticism that is so prevalent in varying forms of media despite not representing reality. The Sun Also Rises was written in a bleaker time of post-war disillusionment and intense dissatisfaction. The cultural influences show themselves in the differing narrative conclusions.

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Meaning of Life - Modernist Authors and Mary Oliver

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Meaning of Life - Modernist Authors and Mary Oliver

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We ended our reading of The Sun Also Rises by concluding that Hemingway’s work is so enduring and universal because he writes about attempting to learn to live in a world that causes us so much pain. As Jake puts it “I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it.”  How to live a good life in a broken and pain filled world has been a topic of interest across all the novels we have read from a variety of modernist authors. Hemingway’s characters seem never to find a fully satisfying solution to this dilemma. Toomer also doesn’t seem to provide a concrete answer, though he does imply some solace can come from singing, dancing, and brotherhood. Cather edges closer to a solution with Alexandra’s character finding peace in her love for the land. This deep, almost spiritual love for nature, as a salve for the soul is echoed by today’s authors, particularly Mary Oliver.

Much of Oliver’s work is concerned with finding a way to live contently in a difficult world. We can see a connection between Hemingway’s characters’ emotions (and resulting behaviors) and Oliver’s quote from the moth in which she explains “I was always running around, looking at this and that. If I stopped the pain was unbearable.” Oliver’s writing often suggests that a solution to this unbearable pain is slowing down to examine the world and better understand one’s place in it. In her writing she occasionally gives direct advice towards this endeavor: “do not walk by without pausing.” Even more explicitly, in her poem Sometimes she gives “Instructions for living a life” which are to “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” Oliver’s overall message is to be aware, to pay attention, especially to the natural environment. This is a similar strategy employed by Cather’s character, Alexandra, who finds fulfillment in admiring the land, and it’s all that different from some of Hemingway’s characters who find peace being out in nature fishing.