2.  Discussion:
 Hughes: "Who's Passing for Who?"
 Juda Bennett’s Reading of Hughes
 Morrison: “Recitatif”
 Comparing works that we have read.

3. Take ten minutes to discuss
Hughes’s "Who's Passing for Who?”
and Morrison’s “Recitatif.”

4.  Caleb Johnson (social worker)
 The “Three dark bohemians” (artists)
 The “red-haired man from Iowa” Mr.
Stubblefield
 The Iowan Couple (school teachers)
 The “brownskin man” and blonde
woman

5. 1. Q: Why is Caleb Johnson so intent on defending Mr.
Stubblefield’s actions by explaining that, “Mr. Stubblefield is
new to Harlem”
2. Q. Why did the black artists choose to ignore the color line?
Were they really blind when it came to race?
3. Q: Why does Caleb hang out with white people instead of with
his own race?
4. Q: Why does Caleb feel the need to impress his “friends”?
5. What was the couple’s and red-headed man’s real purpose of
visiting Harlem?

6.  Q: Why did the white man stop helping the blonde lady?
 Q: Why didn’t Mr. Stubblefield feel the need to defend her just
because she was a woman being mistreated by her husband?
Did the color of her skin make her unworthy of defense?
 Q: Why did the African American woman, who was beaten up
by her husband, became so defensive for her husband?
 Q: Is the red-headed man passing as a gentlemen?
 Q: If the situation looked the other way around, a white man
beating a black woman, would the red haired man still
interfere?
 Q: Why did the others questioned Mr. Stubblefield’s motives,
when they themselves took no action to help the woman?
The red-haired man (Mr. Stubblefield) and chivalry

7.  Q: Why did Caleb and his friends start to act
differently with the couple when they found out that
they were [black] and passing?
 Does being around your own race really change the
way you behave in public?
 Q: Is it helpful to entertain these white guests if only going
to ridicule them? Do these interactions undermine their
community’s strength or are they only creating a sideshow
for outsiders to gawk?
The Party

8. • Q: Why did the couple decide to fool Caleb and his
[black] friends after the incident Mr. Stubblefield
had?
• Q: Were the [Iowan] couple really white passing for
[black]? Or [black] passing for white?
• Q: What is the purpose of the woman telling them in
the end that they were really white passing as African
American? Was she mocking them?
• Q: What’s the real point of this short story?
But why?

10. If so, where do you see hints of it?

11. Bennett’s Thesis:
“With a sense of the interplay between voyeur
and object, homophobe and homosexual, inside
and outside, “Who's Passing For Who?"
Interweaves the explicit theme of racial
passing” with the buried theme of the closet.

12.  Bennett writes,
[Assertion] The voice of the narrator is the key to discovering
this buried, or closety, theme. Although critics have been
surprisingly silent about the narrator's various and potential passings,
there are several reasons for reading his character as false or at least
layered. [Evidence] He admits, for example, to at least one
performance when he states that "we dropped our professionally self-
conscious 'Negro' manners... and kidded freely like colored folks do
when there are no white folks around" (173). [Explanation]
Although Langston Hughes is working within an African American
tradition that has often explored the nature of performance as it
relates to racial difference and insider/outsider communities,
[Analysis] this story further layers that dynamic with other marks of
difference.

13. [Evidence] Before the action begins, the prolix and witty
narrator introduces his friends and himself as "too broad-
minded to be bothered with questions of color." [Explanation]
This statement sets up the dramatic irony that positions the
narrator for his ultimate blunder: being fooled by the white
Iowans. [Analysis] Although the narrator's bohemian world is
meant to stand in contrast to the boring white folks from Iowa,
Hughes eventually reverses the roles. The Iowans prove to be
the tricksters, and the narrator must confront his own naiveté.
That the narrator could not see through the Iowans'
dissimulation is funny, ironic, interesting-but in the end,
not entirely believable.

14. What happens, though, if we read the narrator's bohemian
world as a homosocial world? [Assertion posed as a question]
When we divide the entire cast of characters into single
men and heterosexual couples, we discover that racial
passing only occurs within the heterosexual realm. Not only
does the Iowan couple pass, but so too does the only other
woman, half of the only other heterosexual couple in the story.
[Analysis] We might then see these racial passings as deflecting
attention from the narrator and his friends, who become boring
and unremarkable despite the initial flair with which they are
introduced. [Logical Conclusion] Racial passing becomes a
decoy, distracting our attention from the performances of the
bohemian bachelors.

15. [Assertion] Before Hughes initiates the drama of racial passing, he
comes dangerously close to revealing the "perverse" nature of
the narrator and his bachelor friends:
[Evidence] “You see, Caleb and his white friends, too, were all
bores. Or so we, who lived in Harlem's literary bohemia during the
"Negro Renaissance," thought. We literary ones considered
ourselves too broad-minded to be bothered with questions of color.
We liked people of any race who smoked incessantly, drank liberally,
wore complexion and morality as loose garments, and made fun of
anyone who didn't do likewise. We snubbed and high-hatted any
Negro or white luckless enough not to understand Gertrude Stein
....” (Hughes 170)

16. [Concession]Although the narrator assumes this affected tone,
his dandified attitude and the passing reference to Gertrude
Stein hardly mark him fully and definitively as a homosexual.
[Assertion] Nevertheless, the title, with its bad grammar calling
attention to itself, encourages speculation. Who is passing for
whom? [Explanation/Analysis] Surely the author would have
planted more and trickier trickster figures than the Iowans to fully
justify his title. Furthermore, the narrative has already schooled us
in the surprising fluidity of identity, and so readers are encouraged
to suspect more revelations and exposures.

17. [Concession] To those who would argue that the subject of passing lends
itself to this kind of wild and speculative reading-after all, everything is
performance, and everybody passes-I heartily agree. [Final Assertion] I
am finally arguing that in his autobiographies, poetry, fiction, and
drama, Hughes returned to the subject of passing throughout his
career because he was fascinated with identity as something unstable
and "queer." With their emphasis on compensation rather than loss,
questions rather than answers, the unknown rather than the known,
and curiosity rather than punishment, Hughes's writings on sexual
identity invite comparison to his exploration of racial passing.

18. 
Where do you think the author came up with the idea to name this story “Recitatif”?

19.  Roberta Fisk
 Twyla
 Big Bozo: Orphanage Worker
 Roberta’s mother:
 Twyla’s mother: Mary
 Maggie: Kitchen worker
 James Benson (Twyla’s
Husband)
 Kenneth Norton (Roberta’s
Husband)
 Chinese Limo Driver
• St. Bonny’s
• Howard Johnsons
• Food Emporium
• School Picket Line
• Diner at Christmas

20. 1. Q: Why would Twyla say “my mother won’t like
you putting me in here” when Roberta was
assigned as her roommate?
2. Q: What does Twyla mean when she says that
her mother “danced all night”?
3. Q: Why did Twyla kept on referring to the other
children at the shelter as the “real Orphans”?
Why wasn’t she a real Orphan?
4. Why didn’t Roberta’s mother want to shake
hands with Twyla’s mother?

21. 1. Q: Why didn’t Morrison tell us their race?
Would it have a different approach to us
readers?
2. Q. Did the racial differences between the two
girls affect their friendship at all?
3. Q: Is Roberta racist towards blacks?
4. Q: When do we learn to “see” race?
5. What was the bigger conflict, class difference
or racism?

22. 1. Q: Why did Roberta act like she did not know Twyla
at Howard Johnsons?
2. Q: Would Roberta have acted the same way to Twyla
if she wasn’t with the two other guys?
3. Q: Twyla meets Roberta another time while
shopping for groceries. Why is Roberta suddenly
more open and close to Twyla than she was before?
4. Why doesn’t Roberta help Twyla when the crowd
rocks her car?
5. Q: Why do Twyla and Roberta have a
complicated relationship?

23. 1. Q: What is Maggie’s role in the story?
2. Q: What purpose does the incident with Maggie serve in
the story?
3. Q: Why did Roberta make up the lie that both her and
Twyla kicked Maggie?
4. Q: Twyla didn’t seem willing to accept Maggie as black
when Roberta had told her she was, was Twyla also
wanting to kick Maggie when the other girls did? Or was
Roberta the only one of the two who wanted to join in?
5. Q: What race was Maggie?
6. Q. Was Maggie a metaphor for something?

24.  What does” Morrison’s “Recitatif” have in common
with Hughes’s “Who’s Passing for Who?
 What do they share with other works? How are they
different?
 “Passing,” the poem
 “Passing,” the short story
 “Leaves from the Portfolio of an Eurasian”
 Passing, the novel
 Do you have any other insights into “passing” that you
have realized through our readings or discussions.

25.  Read: Kennedy "Racial Passing."
Posted under "Secondary Sources."
 Post #8: Discuss one story from
Kennedy's article that particularly
speaks to you. How did it influence
you in your thinking about passing?
Include cited textual evidence.
 Read: “Racial Segregation” William
Pickens and the essay #2 prompt.
 Study: Terms