Race in Context: Ordinary Language and Nella Larsen’s Passing

Abstract: In Nella Larsen’s Passing , light-skinned biracial characters use racial ambiguity to “pass” as white in 1920s America. When race concepts are ambiguous, do they lose their meaning? Some literary critics say yes, taking a postracialist position influenced by poststructuralist theories of language. I argue instead that Passing shows how race is constructed by contexts and interpreted as rules are interpreted—replete with mistakes, uncertainty, and borderline cases. This racial contextualism resonates with the ordinary language philosophy (OLP) of J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, suggesting the value of OLP for antiracism and the importance of debates about race in OLP.