To hurt is to shimmer: violence in literary representations of passing

This thesis will examine the role of violence in literary representations of passing. Considering the ways in which Derrida calls language itself a violence, a "cutting" of the world, the scripting of passing as a transgression is predicated on "figures of division" (James Snead, Figures of Division, 1986) being arbitrarily "cut" and propped up as discrete poles of identity that must remain impossibly pure despite extreme proximity to one another. This thesis will examine six works of American literature ranging from Nella Larsens Passing (1929) to Hilton Alss White Girls (2013) concerned with passing, written at different times in history and embodying different notions of what it means to pass, for the ways in which they use violence as plot occurrences or prevailing motifs to illustrate the trauma associated with realizing the volatility and liminality of identity in a society that actively perpetuates and polices division.