Losing “Touch”: The Sense of Belonging in Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half

ABSTRACT

Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half is an unconventional passing narrative in that it not only deals with both racial passing and gender transition but also escapes the tragic passing narrative structure. If traditional passing narratives often portray passing as a deception and a betrayal of racial belonging, neo-passing narratives tend to embrace fluidity in identity and belonging. This article, with its distinct focus on touch, argues that The Vanishing Half helps navigate the tension between traditional views and contemporary perceptions of identity and belonging. By weaving a thread of “touch” throughout the narrative, Bennett’s novel challenges a predominantly visible understanding of identity and emphasizes the ethical import of belonging to a shared past while moving beyond assuming a rigid, traditionally familial/familiar mode of belonging. Drawing on theories about touch, especially in Black feminist and queer theory, this article reveals the ways in which The Vanishing Half formulates the tactile as an essential way of knowing the self and the other – in place of the dominant modes of understanding identity and belonging – and demonstrates how touch crosses boundaries across time and space to connect and shape past, present, and future.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Critics like Kathleen Pfeiffer, too, rightly problematize an old but persistent moral judgment that passing is always “an instance of racial self-hatred or disloyalty” (2).

2. Alluding to Larsen’s choice to have Clare pushed out of a window at the end of Passing, Bennett said she wanted to have her novel stay away from the usual repercussions of passing in traditional passing narratives: “Usually, the person who passes is punished at the end. I knew that I didn’t want to punish Stella per se. I certainly didn’t want to kill her or have her fall or jump or get pushed out of a window” (“Brit Bennett on Publishing”).

3. Inventing the fictional town Mallard, Bennett’s novel indirectly alludes to the history of selective marriages throughout the nation, notably in the South, based on the ideology of pigmentocracy traced back to slave owners’ differential treatment of enslaved people depending on their skin tone: During the racial uplift era, “[c]ities such as Washington, D.C., Richmond, Virginia, Durham, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia were among those where blacks of lighter hue ensured that they married similar persons and became ‘lighter and lighter every generation’” (Harris). For recent publications that examine the complex relationship between the racial uplift ideology and understandings of the senses, including touch, see Kyla Schuller’s The Biopolitics of Feeling and Erica Fretwell’s Sensory Experiments (2020).

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Hyoung Min Lee

Hyoung Min Lee received her Ph.D. in English from Texas A&M University. Her research interests include 20^th-and 21^st-century African American literature and theories of race and phenomenology. She recently published her work in Journal of American Studies.