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Neo-Passing

Neo-Passing

Performing Identity after Jim Crow

Edited by Mollie Godfrey and Vershawn Young

Contributions by Derek Adams, Christopher M Brown, Martha J Cutter, Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Alisha Gaines, Jennifer Glaser, Allyson Hobbs, Brandon J. Manning, Loran Marsan, Lara Narcisi, Eden Osucha and Deborah Elizabeth Whaley

Published by: University of Illinois Press

Imprint: University of Illinois Press

11 black & white photographs

Digital download
9780252050244
Published: February 2018

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Contents
Authors
Praise

African Americans once passed as whites to escape the pains of racism. Today's neo-passing has pushed the old idea of passing in extraordinary new directions. A white author uses an Asian pen name; heterosexuals live "out" as gay; and, irony of ironies, whites try to pass as black. Mollie Godfrey and Vershawn Ashanti Young present essays that explore practices, performances, and texts of neo-passing in our supposedly postracial moment. The authors move from the postracial imagery of Angry Black White Boy and the issues of sexual orientation and race in ZZ Packer's short fiction to the politics of Dave Chappelle's skits as a black President George W. Bush. Together, the works reveal that the questions raised by neo-passing—questions about performing and contesting identity in relation to social norms—remain as relevant today as in the past. Contributors: Derek Adams, Christopher M. Brown, Martha J. Cutter, Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Michele Elam, Alisha Gaines, Jennifer Glaser, Allyson Hobbs, Brandon J. Manning, Loran Marsan, Lara Narcisi, Eden Osucha, Gayle Wald, and Deborah Elizabeth Whaley

COVER

Title

Contents

Foreword: Passing and “Post-Race” / Gayle Wald

Acknowledgments / Mollie Godfrey and Vershawn Ashanti Young

Introduction: The Neo-Passing Narrative / Mollie Godfrey and Vershawn Ashanti Young

Appendix to the Introduction: Neo-Passing Narratives: Teaching and Scholarly Resources

PART I: NEW HISTORIES

Introduction: Passing at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

1. Why Passing Is (Still) Not Passé after More Than 250 Years Sources from the Past and Present

2. Passing for Postracial Colorblind Reading Practices of Zombies, Sheriffs, and Slaveholders

3. Adam Mansbach’s Postracial Imaginary in Angry Black White Boy

4. Black President Bush The Racial and Gender Politics behind Dave Chappelle’s Presidential Drag

5. Seeing Race in Comics Passing, Witness, and the Spectacle of Racial Violence in Johnson and Pleece's Incognegro

PART II: NEW IDENTITIES

Introduction: Passing at the Intersections

6. Passing Truths: Identity-Immersion Journalism and the Experience of Authenticity

7. Passing for Tan: Snooki and the Grotesque Reality of Ethnicity

8. The Pass of Least Resistance Sexual Orientation and Race in ZZ Packer’s “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere"

9. Neo-Passing and Dissociative Identities as Affective Strategies in Frankie and Alice

10. “A New Type of Human Being” Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity as Perpetual Passing in Jeffrey Eugenide's Middlesex

Afterword: Why Neo Now?

Contributors

Index

Mollie Godfrey is an assistant professor of English at James Madison University. Vershawn Ashanti Young is an associate professor of drama and speech communication at the University of Waterloo and the author of Your Average Nigga: Performing Race, Literacy, and Masculinity.

"The essays offer insight into how the end of de jure segregation shifted the significance of 'cultural authenticity' in a way that values nonwhite racial and ethnic identities as forms of property, and they demonstrate that the black-white boundary has been destabilized (although not destroyed) through continued multi-racial and multi-ethnic identification." --MELUS

“Excellently introduced by Mollie Godfrey and Vershawn Ashanti Young, the ten essays collected in this volume offer a wealth of information, from a working bibliography of neo-passing narratives to interpretive overviews of passing, old and new. The essays suggest that despite all historical, legal, and attitudinal changes in the course of the twentieth century, race remains a central obsession in the United States.”--Werner Sollors, author of The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s

"Highly recommended." --Choice