Abstract
Bringing together fifteen essays by leading scholars, including a theoretical introduction by the editors and an insightful foreword and afterword by Gayle Wald and Michele Elam, respectively, this volume analyzes Godfrey and Young’s neologism neo-passing. Godfrey and Young define neo-passing as narratives and performative acts of passing that recall the complex racial politics that define classic tales of passing, such as Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) and James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man (1912). The difference, however, between the former concept of passing and what Godfrey and Young call neo-passing is that neo-passing is performed and/or produced in various media after the end of legal segregation (circa 1954). Beginning with the Jim Crow–era assumption that passing will come to pass as soon as desegregation begins, this volume investigates how and why passing not only persists in the post–Jim Crow moment but has also proliferated. As with both neo-slave and neo-segregation narratives, performances of neo-passing speak to contemporary racial injustices and ideologies, asking readers to hold these in mind alongside the racial injustices and ideologies of the past. Typically, neo-passing also goes beyond the black/white binary that defined classic passing narratives to explore how identities are increasingly defined as intersectional—simultaneously involving class, gender, race, ethnicity, disability, and sexuality. Through explorations of newspaper articles, advertisements, journalism, fiction, graphic novels, film, comedy sketches, reality television, music, and social media, the essays in this volume engage in a vigorous debate about the specific ways in which neo-passing alternatively shores up, deconstructs, or complicates our understanding of performance and identity production after Jim Crow
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