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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Neo-Passing: Performing Identity after Jim Crow ed. by Mollie Godfrey and Vershawn Ashanti Young Scott Selisker Mollie Godfrey and Vershawn Ashanti Young, eds. Neo-Passing: Performing Identity after Jim Crow. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2018. 296 pp. $28.00. This edited collection will likely be a valuable resource for scholars working on texts related to racial passing after 1968. Reluctant as we may be to embrace another neologism, the titular one in Mollie Godfrey and Vershawn Ashanti Young's Neo-Passing: Performing Identity after Jim Crow finds a useful way to name the variations on black-to-white passing we see relative to other races and ethnicities, and between genders today. Godfrey and Young thus define the volume's scope as exploring "neo-passing narratives: acts and stories of passing that recall the complex racial politics that defined classic passing narratives but that are performed or produced after segregation" (2). Even so, many of the essays, especially Godfrey and Young's Introduction, Martha J. Cutter's essay, Gayle Wald's Foreword, and Michele Elam's Afterword, linger on coordinates and points of comparison from the nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. Neo-Passing charts the expansion of the forms and circumstances of passing phenomena, noting from the outset that present discussions of identity often slip from "pretending to passing to identifying and back again" (5). The introduction, then, offers historical and terminological clarity on a phenomenon that is invoked from unusual racial passing (they discuss Rachel Dolezal's white-to-black passing at some length) to offensive Halloween costumes, disability, class, and gender passing, and more. To call such performances "neo-passing" is to distinguish them from earlier forms while still asserting that they can offer us a critical purchase on the roles and limits of identity in public discourse. Because such a broad topic will necessarily have implications in several directions, the topic is especially well suited to an edited collection. Godfrey and Young have added an appendix to their Introduction, "Neo-Passing Narratives: Teaching and Scholarly Resources," which matches a fine scholarly bibliography on black-to-white passing to a capacious listing of American texts that treat the topic across the media of graphic novels, nonfiction, fiction, poetry, drama, film, music, television, radio, and performance art. This alone makes the volume a strong resource for instructors interested in dedicating a course to passing, and for graduate students or other researchers looking for a jump-start on the critical conversation around passing. With so much to recommend it on this front, I can't help wishing the Introduction took the one additional step of explicitly outlining a brief critical history of passing, with some glosses on the major arguments of a few field-defining books and articles. The bibliography of that critical work is excellent, but readers will have to glean a sense of the most influential scholarship as it comes through the essays. Moreover, such a narrative might have helped the editors to describe even more pointedly the volume's intervention within the larger conversations in African American studies. The first half of the collection, briefly introduced by Gayle Wald, explores how the histories of black-white passing before and during segregation shape its contemporary forms. After outlining several passing and neo-passing cases and narratives, Martha J. Cutter concludes that "neo-passing texts sometimes explode the very idea that we can locate racial, sexual, or class identity within some definitive physical, mental, economic, or social vector," and that it is a "flawed mirror" that offers insight into our "most intimate fears, fantasies, obsessions, and desires" (63). The titular conceit of Christopher M. Brown's "Passing for Postracial" strains even the open framework of Neo-Passing, but Brown's readings of postracial ideology [End Page 409] through AMC's The Walking Dead (2010-), Colson Whitehead's Zone One (2011), and Edward P. Jones's The Known World (2004), which he reads as "some of the sharpest rebuttals . . . to contemporary colorblind reading practices" (71). The question of postracial and colorblind ideologies is a persistent concern throughout the volume, and a number of the essays mention the Obama presidency as a recent historical touchstone for...