Cyraina Johnson-Roullier

Bio

Cyraina Johnson-Roullier is Associate Professor of Modern Literature and Literature of the Americas at the University of Notre Dame. A former Ford Foundation Minority Postdoctoral Fellow, she authored Reading on the Edge: Exiles, Modernities, and Cultural Transformation in Proust, Joyce and Baldwin (SUNY 2000). She has published on modernism, cultural, feminist and critical race theories, the Americas, American and African American literature, and placed opeds in Ms. Magazine and the Chicago Tribune, among other outlets.

Contributions

Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun, Whiteness, and the Color Line: A Novel of Morality Without a Moral

Peer Reviewed

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This is the shocked retort of Angela, the very light-skinned protagonist in Jessie Fauset’s 1929 novel, Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral, when Angela’s racial heritage is publicly revealed to her close friend, a new girl at their school. By denying responsibility for policing so-called racial boundaries, Angela challenges a system of morality structured by white supremacy and embedded in histories of Atlantic American modernity. According to this (im)moral system, Angela is required to divulge her racial heritage to protect her hitherto unsuspecting white friend. To pass, even unintentionally, is, in this context, to lie. Angela and the new girl, Mary Hastings, stand on opposing sides of a yawning chasm of cultural silence about the significance of whiteness as it exists between them in their time period, within which whiteness wields an all-encompassing power.

Tags:

race novel