Introduction: passing, imitations, crossings

Abstract

When it was revealed that Anglo-Australian writer Helen Darville had passed as Ukrainian to publish a novel about the Holocaust, there was much public and scholarly debate about the nature of identity and the meaning of multiculturalism.1 Such 'passing' controversies have the capacity to unsettle everyday perceptions about personhood and about social classifications and identifications. The essays collected in this special issue of Humanities Research, 'Passing, Imitations, Crossings', explore the theme and act of 'passing' in a range of social, historical and cultural contexts. Put simply, passing is a type of border crossing, one that normally involves a movement from social disadvantage to advantage or from a socially stigmatised position to one that grants some privilege, or at least allows avoidance or evasion of group classification. Passing is distinct from other identity performances in that it generally refers to a surreptitious transgression of widely accepted social practices. That is, the passer normally masks the fact of his or her 'true' identity - he or she might rely on subterfuge or might remove him or herself from a telling context or simply suppress information that might lead to disclosure of his or her identity - in order to cross social boundaries. In the case of African-Americans, passing for historically entailed crossing the social divide that separated black and according to changing cultural, scientific and legal measurements of what constituted racial identity. As St Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton observed in their study of African-American social life in Chicago's South Side in the 1930s, 'there are thousands of Negroes whom neither colored nor people can distinguish from full-blooded whites, it is understandable that in the anonymity of the city many Negroes for white daily, both intentionally and unintentionally'.2 The prospect of passing multiplies in societies in which the often anonymous flow of people sets the scene for opportunism, masquerade and other forms of role-playing. There are women who have cross-dressed as male to publish books or participate in war and gays and lesbians who have passed as straight to avoid homophobia. There are those who pass out of necessity, to escape war or life-threatening discrimination, and those who pass for greater gain or simply for the thrill of experiencing life on the 'other side', as passing provides the opportunity to temporarily or permanently depart from a designated identity. The transport and communications revolution that took place in the United States at the end of the nineteenth and in the early decades of the twentieth centuries - a time also of great movement and mixing of diverse social groups in American cities, as well as a period of new strictures and the terrors of lynching - created a fertile context for passing. The many fictional and sociological recordings of African-Americans who 'passed as white' to cross the colour line, from the middle of the nineteenth century through to the 1950s and 1960s - when African-Americans began to win civil rights - suggests how prevalent the act was in a US context. In his encyclopedic study of 'inter-racial' themes in US history, Werner Sollors differentiates the passer from the parvenu (the social cumber or upstart). While the act of passing potentially encompasses 'the crossing of any line that divides social groups'3 - and Everett V. Stonequist argues that 'passing is found in every race situation where the subordinate race is held in disesteem'4 - Sollors' study locates the phenomenon firmly in US social history. In particular, Sollors connects passing with the burden of racial ancestry for the descendents of slaves. While the general expectation is that newly arrived immigrants will gradually assimilate, the descendents of slaves -in what Sollors calls America's 'hypodescent' system - have been treated as members of a caste. African-Americans have been subject to a form of 'ancestorcounting' that reduces personhood to a racial part. …