5.5 ELH Richard Gabri on race, liminality and passing in The Great Gatsby

Hopkins Press Podcasts · May 8, 2026 · 34m

Today on the podcast, we talk with Richard Gabri about his new article for ELH, “All White in the End: From the Passage of James Wait to the Passing of James Gatz; Intertextuality and the Riddle of Race in The Great Gatsby.” Building on the work of Carlyle Van Thompson, whose 2004 book The Tragic Black Buck: Racial Masquerading in the American Literary Imagination explored the ways that Jay Gatsby can be read as a white-passing Black man, Gabri and his high school students began a literary exploration of the classic novel, and discovered fascinating intertextual links between Fitzgerald's…