Pfeiffer studies the fiction of William Dean Howells, Frances E.W. Harper, Jean Toomer, James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen. She supports the ambiguous theory that the African-American characters found in these six authors' works are reinventing themselves by passing as white.

The election of America’s first black president has led many to believe that race is no longer a real obstacle to success and that remaining racial inequality stems largely from the failure of minority groups to take personal responsibility for seeking out opportunities. Often this argument is made in the name of the long tradition of self-reliance and American individualism. In Awakening to Race, Jack Turner upends this view, arguing that it expresses not a deep commitment to the values of individualism, but a narrow understanding of them. Drawing on the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, Turner offers an original reconstruction of democratic individualism in American thought. All these thinkers, he shows, held that personal responsibility entails a refusal to be complicit in injustice and a duty to combat the conditions and structures that support it. At a time when individualism is invoked as a reason for inaction, Turner makes the individualist tradition the basis of a bold and impassioned case for race consciousness—consciousness of the ways that race continues to constrain opportunity in America. Turner’s “new individualism” becomes the grounds for concerted public action against racial injustice.

Teaching the Harlem Renaissance: Course Design and Classroom Strategies addresses the practical and theoretical needs of college and high school instructors offering a unit or a full course on the Harlem Renaissance. In this collection many of the field's leading scholars address a wide range of issues and primary materials: the role of slave narrative in shaping individual and collective identity; the long-recognized centrality of women writers, editors, and critics within the «New Negro» movement; the role of the visual arts and «popular» forms in the dialogue about race and cultural expression; and tried-and-true methods for bringing students into contact with the movement's poetry, prose, and visual art. Teaching the Harlem Renaissance is meant to be an ongoing resource for scholars and teachers as they devise a syllabus, prepare a lecture or lesson plan, or simply learn more about a particular Harlem Renaissance writer or text.

Gordon provides an intellectual history of the concept of racial prejudice in postwar America. In particular, she asks, what accounts for the dominance of theories of racism that depicted oppression in terms of individual perpetrators and victims, more often than in terms of power relations and class conflict? Such theories came to define race relations research, civil rights activism, and social policy. Gordon s book is a study in the politics of knowledge production, as it charts debates about the race problem in a variety of institutions, including the Rockefeller Foundation, the University of Chicago s Committee on Education Training and Research in Race Relations, Fisk University s Race Relations Institutes, Howard University s "Journal of Negro Education," and the National Conference of Christians and Jews."

Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen (1891 –1964) published just two novels and three short stories in her lifetime, but achieved lasting literary acclaim. Her classic novel Passing first appeared in 1926.

Introduction: Chapter 1, Introduction: Negro Announces. Remarkable Discovery. Can Change Black To White in Three Days. (Schuyler: p.9). This quote from George S. Schuyler’s short story Black No More advertises the benefit of a remarkable discovery’ that empowers black people to free themselves from the resentments of racial separation and all the disadvantages that come with a life as a person of a dark skin color during the time of the separate-but-equal Jim Crow laws in the US. Although this remarkable discovery’ has yet only been invented in fictional literature, albeit rumors about Michael Jackson’s skin bleaching therapy will supposedly never stop, it can be speculated that it would have had a breakthrough commercial success among the black community as generations of African Americans have suffered and are still suffering from discrimination and racism in the US, even now that the President is of African descent. For that reason passing’ narratives are part of a genre that is continuously popular in American literature and popular culture. Starting from the early slave narratives with the likes of Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom in 1860, which even includes a cross-dressing, thus gender-passing’ story to Philip Roth’s The Human Stain in 2000, or TV series such as Gangster Rapper Ice Cube’s reality show Black.White. in 2006, passing’ stories have always caught the attention of a wide audience. This is, of course due to the fact that a passing’ novel usually includes a lot of the ingredients that make up for an exciting read as the passing’ protagonist is willing to give up everything, leave his family and friends behind to pursue his individual happiness and freedom, thus making the passing’ character a symbol of American individualism looking for what is the most popular myth about The Land of the Free’: the American Dream. The focus in this paper though is not on individualism or the pursuit of the American Dream but on the constructions of race in two selected novels, Passing by Nella Larsen and The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson. The essential assumption for this central question is, of course, that race as a category of human classification, evaluation and grading is constructed and is by no means a biological fact that literally only knows black or white with the vague mulatto as the in-between. [...]

This book engages cosmopolitanism—a critical mode which moves beyond cultural pluralism by simultaneously privileging difference and commonality—in order to examine its particular deployment in the work of several African American writers. Deeply influenced and inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois, the writers closely examined in this study—Jean Toomer, Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes and Albert Murray—have advanced cosmopolitanism to meet its own theoretical principals in the contested arena of racial discourse while remaining integral figures in a larger tradition of cosmopolitan thought. Rather than become mired in fixed categorical distinctions, their cosmopolitan perspective values the pluralist belief in the distinctiveness of different cultural groups while allowing for the possibility of inter-ethnic subjectivities, intercultural affiliations and change in any given mode of identification. This study advances cosmopolitanism as a useful model for like-minded critics and intellectuals today who struggle with contemporary debates regarding multiculturalism and universalism in a rapidly, yet unevenly, globalizing world.