Here are the key terms from the document: - Passing: The act of presenting oneself as another race, often for social or economic gain. Both "Recitatif" and "Who's Passing for Who?" explore themes of racial passing. - Performance: Presenting oneself in a particular way depending on the social context or audience, often related to questions of racial or sexual identity. Both stories involve elements of performance and questioning the stability of identity. - Insider/outsider: Distinguishing between those who are part of a particular social or racial group ("insiders") and those who are not ("outsiders"). Both stories involve characters navigating different social contexts and groups. - Dramatic irony

2.  Discussion:
 Hughes: "Who's Passing for Who?"
 Juda Bennett’s Reading of Hughes
 Morrison: “Recitatif”
 Comparing works that we have read.

3. Take ten minutes to discuss
Hughes’s "Who's Passing for Who?”
and Morrison’s “Recitatif.”

4.  Caleb Johnson (social worker)
 The “Three dark bohemians” (artists)
 The “red-haired man from Iowa” Mr.
Stubblefield
 The Iowan Couple (school teachers)
 The “brownskin man” and blonde
woman

5. 1. Q: Why is Caleb Johnson so intent on defending Mr.
Stubblefield’s actions by explaining that, “Mr. Stubblefield is
new to Harlem”
2. Why did Caleb feel the urge to apologize to Mr. Stubblefield
[for the confusion caused by the interaction between
Stubblefield, the ostensibly white woman, and her black
husband]?
3. Q. Why did the black artists choose to ignore the color line?
Were they really blind when it came to race?
4. Q: Why does Caleb hang out with white people instead of with
his own race?

6.  Q: Why did the red haired man from Iowa and Caleb begin to
act differently after the couple in the restaurant that were
fighting revealed that they were both dark-skinned and not
white?
 Q: Why did the white man stop helping the blonde lady?
 Q: Is the red-headed man passing as a gentlemen?
 Q: If the situation looked the other way around, a white man
beating a black woman, would the red haired man still
interfere?
 Q: Why did the others questioned Mr. Stubblefield’s motives,
when they themselves took no action to help the woman?
The red-haired man (Mr. Stubblefield) and chivalry

7.  Question: Why was race so big to the group once
they found out that the couple actually was white?
 Does being around your own race really change the
way you behave in public?
 Q: Is it helpful to entertain these white guests if only going
to ridicule them? Do these interactions undermine their
community’s strength or are they only creating a sideshow
for outsiders to gawk?
The Party

8. • Q: Did the white couple pretend to pass to exact
revenge for their red-haired friend?
• Question- What is the purpose of the couple by
trying to fool Caleb and his poet friends saying that
they were passing?
• Q: Were the [Iowan] couple really white passing for
[black]? Or [black] passing for white?
• Q: What is the purpose of the woman telling them in
the end that they were really white passing as African
American? Was she mocking them?
But why?

10. If so, where do you see hints of it?

11. Bennett’s Thesis:
“With a sense of the interplay between voyeur
and object, homophobe and homosexual, inside
and outside, “Who's Passing For Who?"
Interweaves the explicit theme of racial
passing” with the buried theme of the closet.

12.  Bennett writes,
[Assertion] The voice of the narrator is the key to discovering
this buried, or closety, theme. Although critics have been
surprisingly silent about the narrator's various and potential passings,
there are several reasons for reading his character as false or at least
layered. [Evidence] He admits, for example, to at least one
performance when he states that "we dropped our professionally self-
conscious 'Negro' manners... and kidded freely like colored folks do
when there are no white folks around" (173). [Explanation]
Although Langston Hughes is working within an African American
tradition that has often explored the nature of performance as it
relates to racial difference and insider/outsider communities,
[Analysis] this story further layers that dynamic with other marks of
difference.

13. [Evidence] Before the action begins, the prolix and witty
narrator introduces his friends and himself as "too broad-
minded to be bothered with questions of color." [Explanation]
This statement sets up the dramatic irony that positions the
narrator for his ultimate blunder: being fooled by the white
Iowans. [Analysis] Although the narrator's bohemian world is
meant to stand in contrast to the boring white folks from Iowa,
Hughes eventually reverses the roles. The Iowans prove to be
the tricksters, and the narrator must confront his own naiveté.
That the narrator could not see through the Iowans'
dissimulation is funny, ironic, interesting-but in the end,
not entirely believable.

14. What happens, though, if we read the narrator's bohemian
world as a homosocial world? [Assertion posed as a question]
When we divide the entire cast of characters into single
men and heterosexual couples, we discover that racial
passing only occurs within the heterosexual realm. Not only
does the Iowan couple pass, but so too does the only other
woman, half of the only other heterosexual couple in the story.
[Analysis] We might then see these racial passings as deflecting
attention from the narrator and his friends, who become boring
and unremarkable despite the initial flair with which they are
introduced. [Logical Conclusion] Racial passing becomes a
decoy, distracting our attention from the performances of the
bohemian bachelors.

15. [Assertion] Before Hughes initiates the drama of racial passing, he
comes dangerously close to revealing the "perverse" nature of
the narrator and his bachelor friends:
[Evidence] “You see, Caleb and his white friends, too, were all
bores. Or so we, who lived in Harlem's literary bohemia during the
"Negro Renaissance," thought. We literary ones considered
ourselves too broad-minded to be bothered with questions of color.
We liked people of any race who smoked incessantly, drank liberally,
wore complexion and morality as loose garments, and made fun of
anyone who didn't do likewise. We snubbed and high-hatted any
Negro or white luckless enough not to understand Gertrude Stein
....” (Hughes 170)

16. [Concession]Although the narrator assumes this affected tone,
his dandified attitude and the passing reference to Gertrude
Stein hardly mark him fully and definitively as a homosexual.
[Assertion] Nevertheless, the title, with its bad grammar calling
attention to itself, encourages speculation. Who is passing for
whom? [Explanation/Analysis] Surely the author would have
planted more and trickier trickster figures than the Iowans to fully
justify his title. Furthermore, the narrative has already schooled us
in the surprising fluidity of identity, and so readers are encouraged
to suspect more revelations and exposures.

17. [Concession] To those who would argue that the subject of passing lends
itself to this kind of wild and speculative reading-after all, everything is
performance, and everybody passes-I heartily agree. [Final Assertion] I
am finally arguing that in his autobiographies, poetry, fiction, and
drama, Hughes returned to the subject of passing throughout his
career because he was fascinated with identity as something unstable
and "queer." With their emphasis on compensation rather than loss,
questions rather than answers, the unknown rather than the known,
and curiosity rather than punishment, Hughes's writings on sexual
identity invite comparison to his exploration of racial passing.

18. 
Where do you think the author came up with the idea to name this story “Recitatif”?

19.  Roberta Fisk
 Twyla
 Big Bozo: Orphanage Worker
 Roberta’s mother:
 Twyla’s mother: Mary
 Maggie: Kitchen worker
 James Benson (Twyla’s
Husband)
 Kenneth Norton (Roberta’s
Husband)
 Chinese Limo Driver
• St. Bonny’s
• Howard Johnsons
• Food Emporium
• School Picket Line
• Diner at Christmas

20. 1. Q: How is reading a story from Twyla’s point of view
still show the struggle of Roberta’s experience?
2. Q: Why would Twyla say “my mother won’t like you
putting me in here” when Roberta was assigned as
her roommate?
3. Why didn’t Roberta’s mother want to shake hands
with Twyla’s mother?
4. Q: Why is Twyla so obsessed with expressing her
annoyance towards her mother by “killing” her?

21. 1. Q: Why doesn’t Toni Morrison establish who is black
and who is white between Roberto and Twyla?
2. Q. Did the racial differences between the two girls
affect their friendship at all?
3. Q: Is Roberta racist towards blacks?
4. Q: When do we learn to “see” race?
5. What was the bigger conflict, class difference or
racism?

22. 1. Q: Why did Roberta act like she did not know Twyla
at Howard Johnsons?
2. Q: Would Roberta have acted the same way to Twyla
if she wasn’t with the two other guys?
3. Q: Twyla meets Roberta another time while
shopping for groceries. Why is Roberta suddenly
more open and close to Twyla than she was before?
4. Why doesn’t Roberta help Twyla when the crowd
rocks her car?
5. Q: Why do Twyla and Roberta have a
complicated relationship?

23.  Q: When Twyla encounters Roberta on Hudson street they begin
to argue about their different feelings towards the district’s
choice on transferring their kids to different schools. During this
argument Roberta expresses her anger by reminding Twyla
about Maggie “Maybe I am different now, Twyla. But you’re not.
You’re the same little state kid who kicked a poor old black lady
when she was down on the ground”. This confrontation resulted
into Twyla being confused about whether Maggie was black or
not. Subsequently, Twyla figured out she never had kicked
Maggie but she always wanted to. At the end of the story Twyla
and Roberta run into each other once again. Roberta admits to
Twyla that they both never kicked Maggie, but she always
wanted to. Why did both Roberta and Twyla want to kick
Maggie? Was it their difficult situation of not being with their
families or did they want to be like the other girls?

24. 1. Q: Why does Roberta think that Maggie is black?
2. Q: How did the Maggie situation effect Roberta and Twyla
through their adulthood:
3. Q>Why do Roberta and Twyla remember some events of
their childhood differently?
4. Q: Why is Maggie such a big deal in this story?
5. Q: What does Roberta lie to Twyla about having kicked
Maggie? Also, why are the girls so concerned with
Maggie’s race?
.Q

25.  What does” Morrison’s “Recitatif” have in common
with Hughes’s “Who’s Passing for Who?
 What do they share with other works? How are they
different?
 “Passing,” the poem
 “Passing,” the short story
 “Leaves from the Portfolio of an Eurasian”
 Passing, the novel
 Do you have any other insights into “passing” that you
have realized through our readings or discussions.

26.  Read: Kennedy "Racial Passing."
Posted under "Secondary Sources."
 Post #8: Discuss one story from
Kennedy's article that particularly
speaks to you. How did it influence
you in your thinking about passing?
Include cited textual evidence.
 Read: “Racial Segregation” William
Pickens and the essay #2 prompt.
 Study: Terms