Abstract
In her article, Minyoung Park examines how fashion in Quicksand by Nella Larsen and Pachinko by Min Jin Lee functions not simply as a visual strategy for passing but as a site where the wearers’ conflicting feelings—shame, desire, and defiance—emerge and persist. Rather than evaluating the success or failure of passing, the article shifts focus to the process of dressing—selecting, maintaining, and reflecting on clothing—through which identity is negotiated and feelings are embodied. The protagonists, Helga and Sunja, often dismissed as failures, are reconsidered as figures whose attention to their inappropriate or excessive fashion reveals their emotional labor and strenuous efforts both to pass and not to pass. Drawing on affect theory and fashion studies, Park foregrounds shame as a key affect in passing narratives—an emotion that is at once protective and exposing. In this context, fashion is framed not as a mask but as an intimate and affective mode of expression. By placing Pachinko alongside Quicksand, the article expands the genealogy of American passing narratives beyond racial binaries to incorporate questions of nationality. Park argues that this comparative framework and a double-take at the protagonists’ fashion choices enable a broader, transnational understanding of passing and self-fashioning, and calls for a reconsideration of American literature not from within fixed national boundaries but through the layered textures of global, embodied experience.
Recommended Citation
Park, Minyoung.
"Inappropriate Attire: Fashion, Nationality, and Shame in Quicksand and Pachinko."
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
26.2
(2024):
<https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.4544>
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