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Afterword: Passing and the Arts of Subjectification “Ever passed for something you’re not?” With this simple advertisement in a Miami newspaper, artists Hillary Leone and Jennifer Macdonald collected hundreds of stories from individuals who considered passing to be a central part of their identity. They selected thirty representative narratives to create a video project entitled,quite simply,Passing (1996).In the piece,a group of people face the camera simultaneously on a divided video screen, as if in a police lineup or flip-book, to relate how they pass across multiple categories: race, nationality, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. As they speak, they each perform the same sequence of movements, suggesting a commonality that coexists, however uneasily, with their differences.While the subjects matter-of-factly narrate their passing—acts of impersonation that involve varying degrees of active dissimulation or misrecognition—the artists further complicate matters by uncoupling the video and audio tracks,so that the viewer must effectively construct a coherent subject out of disparate elements.The video thereby introduces a second level of ambiguity, as viewers haplessly attempt to confirm the subjects of the narratives to which they are listening.The very attempt forces the audience to recognize the ways in which we instinctively rely on stereotypes to distinguish one kind of person from another. As the piece reminds us, while stereotypes color our experience of identity, passing troubles any certainties that classification might afford. Leone and Macdonald’s video neatly encapsulates some of the key aspects of passing as a cultural and political strategy. The stories all come from Miami , one of the most diverse cities in the United States and part of this country ’s ever evolving and highly porous border with Latin America. Passing in this context often presents a challenge to both the internal and external boundaries of the nation-state. Moreover, the individual stories that make up the Afterword 112 video suggest the instability of the categories through which we apprehend identity and the way in which narrative can itself alter them. There are multiple possible intersections among these categories, whether controlled by the subjects who pass or imposed upon them by the viewers.While some of these people relish passing for a certain race, for example, they do not always appreciate other qualities ascribed to them as a result.The piece also emphasizes how passing may counter and even appropriate stereotyping, transforming it from a tool of discrimination into an art of subjectification. The passing subjects actively intervene in the creation of their own identities, even if their agency is limited by the roles and categories that the culture makes available to them. It is a common fallacy to suppose that such sophisticated maneuvers of subjectification, such performative identities, could only occur in our own postmodern time. While it is true that contemporary critical theorists—and artists—have made us newly aware of the complexity and performativity of identity, the phenomena they identify are not exclusively modern. As I suggest throughout this book,the pressures of nation-formation,imperial expansion , and religious upheavals in the early modern period led to elaborate negotiations of identity and belonging.The classifying manias that accompanied these large-scale transformations themselves engendered the necessity of subverting or transcending categories. From renegades in the Mediterranean, to religious dissidents throughout Europe, to racial drifters in the New World, early modern subjects turned to passing as a central strategy of subjectification and, indeed, survival. Cervantes’s complex literary representation of these strategies evinces the challenge that they mount to essentialized categories of belonging, most crucially to the Spanish nation. The public mesa de trucos that the author promises in the prologue to the Novelas ejemplares hosts a delicate game of action and reaction, disguise and discovery, repression and reprieve. My analysis focuses on Cervantes because of the irresistible doubleness of his own passing— the generic legerdemain as well as the cross-cultural transvestism that it frequently dissimulates. Given the critical tradition that has so often written Cervantes, and especially his “idealizing” texts, out of history, it seems crucial to establish how, through an astute and highly strategic use of literary conventionality , the author intervenes in pressing historical debates on identity and belonging. Beyond my own focus on Cervantes, however, I want to offer the concept of passing as a powerful tool for much broader investigations in the early modern period. Even as it emphasizes how identity is socially constructed, passing serves to...

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