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M. Giulia Fabi. Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001. 187 pp. $32.50.
Reviewed by Rita B. Dandridge Norfolk State University
M. Giulia Fabi's Passing builds on a number of well-known studies that have reexamfined, reclassified, and reinterpreted nineteenth-century African American novels, including Barbara Christian's Black Women's Novelists (1980), Claudia Tate's Domestic Allegories of Political Desire (1992), and Ann duCille's The Coupling Convention (1993). What distinguishes Passing from these critical works are its insistence that nineteenth-century African American novels are still a maligned fiction, and its objective to correct this problem.
Situating nineteenth-century African American fiction in a predominantly literary rather than a sociohistorical context, Fabi appropriates the tropes of passing and miscegenation to lay the foundation for an African American novelistic tradition. She argues that nineteenth-century African American novelists used the subversive passing trope within familiar literary forms to articulate their social views. Chapter one demonstrates how William Wells Brown's sentimental romance Clotel (1853) and Frank Webb's domestic novel The Garies and Their Friends (1857) use crossover characters to magnify the superficial and even virulent forms of slavery and...