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The first volume to focus on the trope of racial passing in novels, memoirs, television, and films published or produced between 1990 and 2010, Passing Interest takes the scholarly conversation on passing into the twenty-first century. With contributors working in the fields of African American studies, American studies, cultural studies, film studies, literature, and media studies, this book offers a rich, interdisciplinary survey of critical approaches to a broad range of contemporary passing texts. Contributors frame recent passing texts with a wide array of cultural discourses, including immigration law, the Post-Soul Aesthetic, contemporary political satire, affirmative action, the paradoxes of "colorblindness," and the rhetoric of "post-racialism." Many explore whether "one drop" of blood still governs our sense of racial identity, or to what extent contemporary American culture allows for the racially indeterminate individual. Some essays open the scholarly conversation to focus on "ethnic" passers—individuals who complicate the traditional black-white binary—while others explore the slippage between traditional racial passing and related forms of racial performance, including blackface minstrelsy and racial masquerade.
Preface: The “Posts” of Passing
Gayle Wald

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: The (Not So) New Face of America
Julie Cary Nerad

2. On the Margins of Movement: Passing in Three Contemporary Memoirs
Irina Negrea

3. “A Cousin to Blackness”: Race and Identity in Bliss Broyard’s One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life
Lynn Washington and Julie Cary Nerad

4. Can One Really Choose? Passing and Self-Identification at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century
Jené Schoenfeld

5. Passing in Blackface: The Intimate Drama of Post-Racialism on Black. White.
Eden Osucha

6. Broke Right in Half: Passing of/in Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone
Julie Cary Nerad

7. Passing for Chicano, Passing for White: Negotiating Filipino American Identity in Brian Ascalon Roley’s American Son
Amanda Page

8. Race in the Marketplace: Postmodern Passing and Ali G
Ana Cristina Mendes

9. Passing for Black, White, and Jewish: Mixed-Race Identity in Rebecca Walker and Danzy Senna
Lori Harrison-Kahan

10. Smiling Faces: Chameleon Street, Racial Passing/Performativity, and Film Blackness
Michael B. Gillespie

11. Consuming Performances: Race, Media, and the Failure of the Cultural Mulatto in Bamboozled and Erasure
Meredith McCarroll

Bibliography
Contributor Biographies
Index

Sujets

USA

United States of America

Película fotográfica

Visual culture

Ethnic studies

États-Unis

Film

Informations

Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	16 juin 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438452296
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1748€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Passing Interest
SUNY series in Multiethnic Literature Mary Jo Bona, editor
Passing Interest
Racial Passing in US Novels, Memoirs, Television, and Film, 1990–2010
Edited by
Julie Cary Nerad
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2014 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Ryan Morris
Marketing by Kate Seburyamo
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Passing interest : racial passing in US novels, memoirs, television, and film,
1990–2010 / edited by Julie Cary Nerad.
pages cm. — (SUNY series in multiethnic literature)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5227-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. American literature—21st century—History and criticism. 3. Passing (Identity)—United States—History—20th century. 4. Passing (Identity)—United States—History—21st century. 5. Passing (Identity) in literature. 6. Passing (Identity) in motion pictures 7. Race in literature. 8. Race in motion pictures. I. Nerad, Julie, 1969–
PS228.P35P37 2014 813'.5093520396073—dc23
2013029955
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface: The “Posts” of Passing
Gayle Wald
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: The (Not So) New Face of America
Julie Cary Nerad
2. On the Margins of a Movement: Passing in Three Contemporary Memoirs
Irina Negrea
3. “A Cousin to Blackness”: Race and Identity in Bliss Broyard’s One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life
Lynn Washington and Julie Cary Nerad
4. Can One Really Choose? Passing and Self-Identification at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century
Jené Schoenfeld
5. Passing in Blackface: The Intimate Drama of Post-Racialism on Black.White .
Eden Osucha
6. Broke Right in Half: Passing of/in Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone
Julie Cary Nerad
7. Passing for Chicano, Passing for White: Negotiating Filipino American Identity in Brian Ascalon Roley’s American Son
Amanda Page
8. Race in the Marketplace: Postmodern Passing and Ali G
Ana Cristina Mendes
9. Passing for Black, White, and Jewish: Mixed-Race Identity in Rebecca Walker and Danzy Senna
Lori Harrison-Kahan
10. Smiling Faces: Chameleon Street , Racial Passing/Performativity, and Film Blackness
Michael B. Gillespie
11. Consuming Performances: Race, Media, and the Failure of the Cultural Mulatto in Bamboozled and Erasure
Meredith McCarroll
Bibliography
Contributor Biographies
Index
Preface
The “Posts” of Passing
P assing Interest: Racial Passing in U.S. Novels, Memoirs, Television, & Film, 1990–2010 is a most welcome addition to the scholarship on racial passing in the United States, a country uniquely defined by its historical obsession with a binaristic (black/white) racial discourse. In particular, this book expands upon a rich body of scholarship on passing by exploring recent literary and visual texts produced in an era often referred to as “post-racial,” and by bringing a host of new voices to the scholarly conversation. As these essays collectively attest, the post of post-racial, insofar as it is meant to signify the obsolescence or superseding of our national obsession, fails to capture both the ongoing, if changing, significance of race and the ongoing relevance of passing as a narrative theme or a strategy of racial critique. As the assembled essays show, the fluidity of racial-ethnic categorization and of visualized markers of race (such as skin color, hair texture, and the like) make passing a still-potent site of exploration into issues of identity, national belonging, post–civil rights political discourse, gender and sexuality, and ideologies of the visible. Passing also serves to illuminate complex questions of performance (how we “do” who we “are”) knowledge (how we “know” who we “are”), and authenticity (how we validate ourselves or receive validation for who we “are”).
The historical framing of this volume, from 1990 to 2010, is additionally interesting since it brackets a two-decades-long period that saw heightened interest in passing as a subject of research among humanities scholars, myself included. In this preface, then, I want to briefly historicize the scholarly discourse of passing, using my own experience as a point of entrance, before returning to the theme of the “post-racial,” which these essays eloquently engage.
It is beyond me to produce empirical data to back up this assertion, but from my perspective as someone who began graduate studies in English in 1988 at Princeton University, then and now a hub of African Americanist scholarship, it was late-1980s theorizing about race, ideology, and textuality/performance that created the conditions for “passing” to be seen, by many of us, as a productive site of theoretical and historical exploration. This is not to dismiss important scholarship on passing that predated the 1990s, but rather to locate the proliferation of “passing studies” in that decade as one legacy of the enabling and groundbreaking work done by such scholars-artists as Houston Baker, Kimberly Bentson, Barbara Christian, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Cheryl I. Harris, Adrian Piper, Werner Sollors, Valerie Smith, and others too numerous to mention here. That is to say, it was pioneering work by a generation of African Americanists—many of whom emerged from the flowering of Black Studies in the 1960s and ’70s, and who had taken up positions of visibility and increasing authority in formerly white institutions—who provided the tools with which someone like me could begin to entertain certain questions, and even to think of those questions as the basis of future scholarly projects.
To cite one concrete example: It is difficult to overstate the importance, especially to my cohort of future African Americanists, of the publication of “Race,” Writing and Difference , edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in 1986 (republished in 1992). In my memory, we all had the paperback edition with its stark black and red cover artwork, and we all read it with pens in hand. My “we” here is obviously a construct produced through the haze of memory and nostalgia, but that book, which originally appeared in two issues of the journal Critical Inquiry (Autumn 1995, vol. 12, no. 1 and Autumn 1986, vol. 13, no. 1) was the equivalent of a scholarly blockbuster in its day. To be sure, we all had our critiques of various positions staked out in that volume, which was itself far from univocal, but many of us used it as a starting point for discussion and debate. The phrase “social construct” or variations thereof (e.g., “Race is a social construct, but it is also real”) were enormously enabling. Those quotation marks around “race” in the title of the book meant that we could begin to imagine a strategy of negotiating an important conundrum, which was how to write critically about race and its histories and legacies without reifying race in language, if not in practice. “Race,” Writing, and Difference had the imprint of Derrida and other poststructuralist philosophers in its very title—“Difference” registering as both racial-ethnic difference and an Anglicization of Derridean différence —so the notion of a “way out” of such problems of language, which were also problems of the social, was always already an object of scrutiny and careful appraisal. And yet, antiessentialist critiques of race that emerged from U.S. scholars’ engagement with the poststructuralist turn of the late 1960s and 1970s (including critical engagements with the philosophical foundations of poststructuralism), and the intensified intellectual atmosphere of post-1968 Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Feminist Studies, constitute the groundwork upon which my and others’ engagements with racial passing were based.
In retrospect, and as this volume bears out, some of the intellectual giddiness associated with that moment was unwarranted. Indeed, by early 1995, when I defended my dissertation on twentieth-century cultural representations of racial passing, I had already begun to contemplate the political limitations of the quotation marks that many people habitually placed around race . That is, I had begun to wonder whether those quotation marks might be merely gestural. This was borne out by my teaching, in the mid-1990s and now. Today, the by and large economically privileged students I teach enter the classroom having internalized what scholars might call a language of social constructionism. They “know” that race is a social product, or at least they have absorbed that lesson even if they haven’t learned it through their lived experiences. When I assign them Danzy Senna’s Caucasia , in a class about “post-soul” aesthetics, politics, and culture, they talk easily