SINEAD MOYNIHAN. Passing into the Present: Contemporary American Fiction of Racial and Gender Passing.

Abstract

Passing into the Present argues for and historicizes the resurgence of passing in late twentieth and early twenty-first century U.S. literature. The book's strongest contributions connect specific tropes of passing—most remarkably, investigation, adolescence and the body's textuality—to popular interpretations determined by authors’ racial identities. In each chapter, Moynihan pair's novels published in the past twenty-five years, integrating readings according to specific tropes of passing. The chapters then end with a discussion of writing as passing, arguing that passing becomes a theme in texts because of a need for the texts themselves to pass. In doing so, Moynihan demonstrates passing's critical potential for studies of postmodernism, race and authorship in contemporary literature. Moynihan recognizes passing's ambivalence: it makes use of the identity terms of biographical reading practices in order to destabilize those terms, all the while risking their reinforcement. For example, in Middlesex Moynihan reads Calliope's narrative of primarily female gender identity, a fiction written for his doctor, as a form of passing that risks using binary gender identities in order to critique their limits. Calliope's narrative results in the threat of surgery, making writing and, more specifically, the novel of adolescence, ambivalent forms of passing. This ambivalence remakes discussions about the relationship between memoir and postmodern fiction with terms that do not feminize the former and elevate the latter. Rather, by using the concept of passing, Moynihan can critique the insistence on biographical reading while also showing how a wide array of contemporary authors engage with such readings.