Negotiating the “Negro Problem”: Stew’s Passing (Made) Strange

“Black folks passing for black folks. That’s a trip!” A trip is just what we get in Passing Strange, Stew’s Tony Award–winning piece of “genre-defying rock-pop-funk-punk-cabaret.” Stew and his band, The Negro Problem, serve as tour guides on a semi-autobiographical “pilgrimage” beyond the tightly patrolled borders of the North American continent, the traditions of black musical theatre performance, and the “chains” of a rooted, African American authenticity. Passing Strange renders a musical critique of any traditional or idealist rendering of “double consciousness” and explores the negative—and hybridized—nature of black identity formation. In turn, this essay employs a dialectical and diasporic vocabulary to situate Stew in problematic yet productive relation to critical interlocutors like W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Gilroy among others in order to articulate the complex relations between racial and national identity that Passing Strange performs. It maps the varied problems of problematization for which Passing Strange is arguing by charting the piece’s often contradictory trajectories. Finally, the essay works to understand Stew where he is most at home, “between the clicks of a metronome”: between black and white, between music and theatre, between the United States and Europe, between past and present, between fictional representation and lived experience.