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Reviewed by:
  • Passing and the Fictions of Identity
  • Yumna Siddiqi
Passing and the Fictions of Identity. Ed. Elaine Ginsberg. Durham: Duke UP, 1996.

To “pass” is to “be identified or identify oneself as something one isn’t.” The expression “passing” has most commonly referred to an assumption of white racial identity by people of color. Increasingly, the term is employed for other sorts of category crossings—of sexuality, class identity, ethnicity, and religious affiliation, for instance—generally (but not only) to circumvent discrimination. Paradoxically, the act of “passing” both puts into question and reinforces the boundaries of identity. It suggests that identity is not simply “given” but must be enacted and demonstrated in some (usually visible) way. Yet neither is it completely malleable, operating as it does under symbolic and social preconceptions of what an identity “properly” is. In Passing and the Fictions of Identity, Ginsberg brings together a group of stimulating essays that examine several cultural representations of “passing” and offer a variety of conceptual frameworks for understanding this politically charged manipulation of identity.

Exploring the construction of various ambiguous identities, all of these essays throw into relief the contradictions of the social field in which they are constituted. In “The Subaltern as Imperialist: Speaking of Olaudah Equiano,” for example, Marion Rust suggests that although a subaltern in some respects, Equiano “passes” as an English merchant to argue for the “civilizing” of Africans as a means of advancing commerce, and espouses a sexually instrumental view of women. Yet Equiano’s Life reveals in its silences and abrupt shifts of tone the paradoxes of writing as a former slave turned slave-trader, as an African transformed into an Englishman, and as human cargo metamorphosed into sailor. Another essay demonstrates that at a metaphorical level, signifiers of race can also unsettle conventional codings of gender. Katherine Nicholson Ings’s piece on Southwark’s The Hidden Hand, while not strictly about passing, notes the author’s use of “blackness” as a trope to create an anti-sentimental heroine.

Equiano was able to purchase his freedom by participating in colonial trade and his “passing” is rhetorical rather than literal. By contrast, Ellen Craft literally traversed the boundaries of sex, race, and class by assuming the guise of a wealthy white man traveling with her servant, in truth her husband, and was thus able to escape from slavery in the South. In her article on William Craft’s 1860 narrative of the Crafts’ escape, Ellen Weinauer points out that while Ellen’s crossing of boundaries had the potential to upset categories, William Craft in fact reinforces conservative gender roles in his representation of Ellen. A proprietary relationship underpinned the relations of both slavery and matrimony so as to render these systems [End Page 203] inimical to each other. Ellen Craft passes to win freedom, but in the process assumes the bonds of wifehood.

Whereas Equiano’s and Crafts’ narratives show a certain investment in fixing identity in hierarchical ways, James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man uses the figure of passing to underscore “the failure of blackness or whiteness to provide the grounds for a stable, coherent identity,” according to Samira Kawash. In what is the strongest article of the collection, Kawash writes, “Blackness and whiteness as they emerge in the passing narrative belie the possibility of identity or authenticity that would allow one to be unequivocally black or white. Passing insists on the fallacy of identity as a content of social, psychological, national, or cultural attributes, whether bestowed by nature or produced by society; it forces us to pay attention to the form of difference itself.” Drawing upon Lacan, Kawash argues that all racial identity is the product of a specular identification, that is, of “passing.” Like Kawash, Martha Cutter emphasizes the “non-being” at the core of racial identity in “Sliding Significations: Passing as a Narrative and Textual Strategy in Nella Larsen’s Fiction.” She suggests that whereas Helga, the protagonist of Quicksand, passes from identity to identity, feeling stifled in each, Clare of Passing assumes plural and ambiguous identities to act upon polymorphous desires. Valerie Rohy extends some of the insights about the contingency of race and...