Research Article
The Symbolic Role of the Elevator and Identity Crisis of Colorism in The Vanishing Half and Passing
Francois Kodjo Adaha
,
Senakpon Adelphe Fortune Azon*
Issue:
Volume 13, Issue 5, October 2025
Pages:
104-113
Received:
26 August 2025
Accepted:
20 September 2025
Published:
18 October 2025
Abstract: This paper examines the symbolic role of the elevator in Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half (2020) and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), with particular attention to its connection to colorism and identity crisis. Set almost a century apart, these novels illuminate the enduring complexities of racial passing in the United States, where skin tone stratification shapes access to privilege and belonging. The elevator, far from being a mere mechanical device, emerges as a metaphorical stage for the negotiation of race, class, and selfhood. Through the dual application of Postcolonial Theory and Critical Race Theory (CRT), the study demonstrates how elevator scenes dramatize both aspiration and entrapment. Frantz Fanon’s reflections on the “mask” and W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness help illuminate the fractured selfhood of characters like Stella Vignes and Irene Redfield, who experience upward social movement only at the cost of authenticity and psychic security. CRT further situates these struggles within systemic racial hierarchies, exposing how legal and cultural constructs of race sustain barriers that passing can only temporarily circumvent. By comparing the earlier twentieth-century Harlem Renaissance text with a contemporary African American novel, this article highlights the transhistorical persistence of passing as both a strategy of survival and a source of alienation. Ultimately, elevators embody a paradox: they lift characters into spaces of prestige and temporary acceptance while simultaneously reminding them of the fragility of such an elevation. In both works, mobility is revealed to be precarious, conditional, and psychologically burdensome. The analysis thus contributes to scholarship on African American literature by proposing the elevator as a powerful symbol that encapsulates the paradoxes of racialized existence. Elevators become not simply vehicles of transport but metaphors for the precarious balance between aspiration and authenticity, privilege and exposure, belonging and estrangement in a racially divided society.
Abstract: This paper examines the symbolic role of the elevator in Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half (2020) and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), with particular attention to its connection to colorism and identity crisis. Set almost a century apart, these novels illuminate the enduring complexities of racial passing in the United States, where skin tone strati...
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Research Article
Ferrara, Time and Guilt in Giorgio Bassani’s the Heron
Renzo Rabboni*
Issue:
Volume 13, Issue 5, October 2025
Pages:
114-123
Received:
16 September 2025
Accepted:
29 September 2025
Published:
28 October 2025
DOI:
10.11648/j.ijla.20251305.12
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Abstract: The article analyzes, in its first part, the image of Ferrara and the role of time in Bassani’s novels, with particular attention to the urban chronotope he crafted, where the history of the deportation of Ferrarese Jews intertwines with the city’s topography, establishing a division between the Ferrara of the saved and that of the submerged. The article then focuses on the autobiographical element, strongly implicated in Bassani’s narration, where everything is filtered through memory, which, while faithfully rendering the city’s history and geography, simultaneously transforms it into a “fantastic,” mental place. This is as required by authentic art, by the great tradition of the historical novel, which Bassani defended in a famous controversy against the Italian Neo-avant-garde (the Gruppo 63) and in his quieter critique of the French Nouveau Roman. In this context, the second part of the study offers a reading of The Heron, the fifth chapter of The Novel of Ferrara, perhaps the most mature fruit of Bassani’s narrative. The novel aligns with the themes of Francis Bacon’s Neo-Expressionist painting and its variant, the Existential Realism of Alberto Sughi, discussed by Giuseppe Raimondi, one of Bassani’s mentors in art writing during his Bologna years. This is followed by a detailed account of the development of The Heron, with attention to the functioning of narrative time and, above all, to the theme of guilt and its redemption, linked to the story of the Ferrarese Jews and addressed repeatedly, in verse and prose, also by Primo Levi.
Abstract: The article analyzes, in its first part, the image of Ferrara and the role of time in Bassani’s novels, with particular attention to the urban chronotope he crafted, where the history of the deportation of Ferrarese Jews intertwines with the city’s topography, establishing a division between the Ferrara of the saved and that of the submerged. The a...
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