Donavan Ramon, IRT ’07 shares commentary on his first book, Striking Features: Psychoanalysis and Racial Passing Narratives published by Mercer University Press. He is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
How does psychoanalysis animate racial passing and how does racial passing inspire psychoanalysis? Despite long-held beliefs that the two have nothing in common, I assert that psychoanalysis is relevant for understanding the reasons behind jumping the color line. Beginning with the premise that Sigmund Freud created psychoanalysis to contend with his own anxieties about race, I explore canonical and non-canonical passing narratives using psychoanalytic perspectives. By closely reading narratives by Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Jessie Fauset, Anita Reynolds, Danzy Senna, Vera Caspary, Anatole Broyard, and Philip Roth, I advance several provocative claims about the intersections of passing and psychoanalysis. Chief among them are the youthful trauma and psychological consequences of racial passing. For instance, while the death drive motivates fictional racial passers to hasten their own deaths, those who pass in real life often seek their own immortality through print despite hiding their Blackness. This interdisciplinary work threads psychoanalysis and other theoretical perspectives through persuasive close readings of twentieth and twenty-first-century racial passing narratives, concluding with a meditation on today’s ineffective language of race. Scholars of race, African American Literature, American Literature, and psychoanalysis will find my book compelling.
In my book, I uncover all the ways in which racial passing and psychoanalysis are tethered.
Donavan Ramon, IRT ‘ 07
Donavan L. Ramon is an Assistant Professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. A native New Yorker, he earned his B.A. in English from Hunter College and his Ph.D. in African American Literature from Rutgers University-New Brunswick. He was an IRT Intern in the summer of 2007. His first monograph Striking Features: Psychoanalysis and Racial Passing Narratives (2024) is currently available with Mercer University Press.
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