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  • Subverted Passing: Racial and Transgender Identities in Linda Villarosa’s Passing for Black
  • Erika Renée Williams (bio)

Passing for Black, a novel by longtime journalist Linda Villarosa1, offers a contemporary look at the seemingly archaic phenomenon of passing, examining the complexities of racial and transgender identities. In a recent discussion of contemporary passing tales, Michele Elam, extrapolating from the work of Paul Taylor, remarks that “it is a fact about each of us that we occupy the location that we do, and there are facts about each of us that qualify us for our social locations and that signify to others what our locations are.” Elam further defines passing as a process by which one “conceal[s]” one’s social location and then “invite[s] society to misapply its criteria for racial identification.”2 Elam’s characterization of passing underscores the precarious collaboration between the self and society, whose powers of judgment shape the discursive field in which the subject is framed.

Nevertheless, in the introduction to Questions of Cultural Identity, Stuart Hall reminds us to observe “what the mechanisms are by which individuals as subjects identify (or do not identify) with the ‘positions’ to which they are summoned; as well as how they fashion, stylize, produce and ‘perform’ these positions.”3 Acknowledging that there exists “some interior landscape of the subject,” Hall affirms the power of individual articulation. Passing for Black exemplifies Hall’s insight by offering an account of identity analogous to that of the literary text—first, by offering narration as the vehicle by which one claims, positions, and articulates identity and then, by suggesting that the self, like the text, be respected as the product of a deliberate narrative act. Thus, Passing for Black subverts4 the tradition of the passing tale, recalibrating the parameters of passing and offering a novel way to conceive of locating the self as a reflex of authorship. [End Page 285]

The novel centers around a young black journalist, Angela Wright, as she journeys from a life of resigned heteronormativity to one of passionate same-sex romance, a move that heightens her fear that she is simply “passing” for some version of her actual self—“for black, [ . . . ] for straight, [ . . . ] [for] a lesbian.” 5 Angela’s crisis stems in part from her shifting of the psycho-social domains through which she filters her identity. Having understood herself as a woman appropriately framed within the confines of an impending heterosexual marriage, a tightly-knit black family, and the historically black enclave of Harlem, Angela initially interprets her own shifting of locales—to a burgeoning homoerotic union, an ‘alternative’ family and the unfamiliar borough of Brooklyn—as premised upon ambivalence and abjection. She frets that “I should turn around and take my confused self right out of Brooklyn and back home, to Harlem, to my fiancé, where I belonged.” 6

Yet when she encounters two transgender women who also experience the crisis that results from having moved from one site of being to another (in this case, by changing gender identification), Angela learns that shifting the site of one’s identity and concomitantly, insisting on being read as a new kind of text, is not to pass, but rather, to approach a truer form of identity, one inadequately framed within the given parameters of biology or history. Angela ultimately concludes that each person has the right to “be her own damn self”7—even if that self appears untenable to others. While the traditional passing tale proffers an account of identity that relegates a subject to her original location, irrespective of that subject’s desired orientation, Passing for Black suggests that a subject may shift her location according to her will, and moreover, that, as the author of the text that is her person, she govern the process by which her self-narrative is publicly interpreted.

Typically, preexisting rules about the parameters of cultural identities govern social recognition.8 But understanding that a subject may deliberately shift identity locations to simultaneously expand and crystallize the self requires others to view that self with more acuity. This more complex form of recognition, which operates against the grain, both of history and convention, requires...

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