Neo-Passing: Performing Identity after Jim Crow ed. by Mollie Godfrey and Vershawn Ashanti Young (review)

In the introduction to Neo-Passing: Performing Identity after Jim Crow, the editors argue that rather than becoming passé in post-Jim Crow decades, the strategy of passing has expanded, proliferated, and adjusted both to technological advances and "post-racial" discourse. As a whole, the ten essays in this collection offer insightful observations about various passing texts produced since the 1950s. The volume will appeal to those interested in contemporary race or identity politics and in the trope of passing; however, readers looking for a wholly new approach to or understanding of passing—as promised by the collection's title—may be a bit disappointed.

Godfrey and Young coin the term neo-passing to describe passing texts that complicate or diverge from what they refer to as the "classic-passing experience," which they define as black-to-white passing narratives set before the end of Jim Crow segregation (2). "Neo-passing narratives," they argue, ask readers to read these more recent texts in relation to "classic" passing texts but with an awareness of the ways that "contemporary iterations of passing … speak to and against present social circumstances" (3). While this definition is not particularly revelatory (all passing texts "speak to and against present social circumstances"), the editors give their neologism a bit more intellectual weight when they recognize that neo-passing narratives highlight the play with identity and identity categories made possible by new technologies and media. They also rightly note that bi- or multiracial people have more identity options available to them in recent decades due to the waning of the "one-drop" rule. However, as they also recognize, vehement reactions to individuals such as Rachel Dolezal indicate that, despite the belief in racial progressiveness and "post-racialism," a biologically based (primarily) black-white color line remains. Thus, they highlight the continuing centrality of the concept of "authenticity" to identity while also acknowledging that understandings of racial and ethnic authenticity have changed since the civil rights era.

The editors also argue that, because these neo-texts are more likely to "reveal the tensions that exist at [the] intersections" of race, gender, and sexuality, they require "intersectional analysis" (14). While scholars certainly must (continue to) approach passing texts through a lens of intersectionality, many would argue that authors of passing texts have always revealed an understanding of intersectionality; we might think of Nella Larsen's Passing (1929) and Charles Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars (1900), to name just two prominent examples. Indeed, passing's insistence of the complexity and interdependency of race, gender, class, sexuality, nationality, and so forth is nothing new. Furthermore, throughout the collection, various types of performance are collapsed in ways that can obscure arguments and weaken the utility of the neologism. For instance, at moments there is significant elision between the acts of "pretending," "acting," "performing," and "passing." However, those elisions perhaps stem as much from the recognition that all (performative) identities are "passing" as they do from the limitations of our dichotomous and categorical language itself.

Part 1, "New Histories," comprises a brief "think piece" by Allyson Hobbs and five essays that address the relevance of post-racial discourse to neo-passing. Martha J. Cutter surveys black-white passing texts, highlighting the "persistence of passing" (62) as well as the continuities between earlier passing texts and "neo-passing" texts, ranging from advertisements for runaway slaves to Spike Lee's film Bamboozled (2000). Moving in a rather undefined way from Colson Whitehead's Zone One (2012) to Edward P. Jones's The Known World (2004), Christopher M. Brown's essay argues that the discourses of "post-racialism" and "color-blindness," particularly within the law, prevent "extraordinary insights" into our national and individual identities and histories by obscuring "the incommensurability of law and black life under the law" (80). The link to passing in this essay seems tangential; its strength is in...