Passing

The essay focuses on the uses and significance of the trope of passing, as both theme and literary strategy, in African American fiction from the 19th to the 21st century. African American writers adopted the trope of passing in order to expose the socio-political construction of “race,” unsettle prevailing racial epistemologies of blackness, popularize a more complex racial imaginary, and teach self-consciously critical modes of reading literature, and by extension reality. Through a diachronic approach, the essay shows how the trope of passing was repurposed in different literary-historical periods and how, to this day, it retains its relevance as a malleable literary strategy of cultural and political intervention.