The Problem of Passing

The Problem of Passing traces the continued relevance of Black racial passing for contemporary Black life, Black studies, philosophy, and narratives of passing more generally. In this critical and interdisciplinary journey through historical archives, literature, law, and conceptual art, Sandra Harvey argues that narratives of passing are at the core of past and present-day violence toward all Black subjects. She reframes passing as a set of reader relations at once cultural, discursive, aesthetic, and metaphysical. From antebellum slavery to modern genomics, each chapter traces how seemingly disparate institutional complexes, including law, science, and philosophy, are animated by logics of Black racegender passing that support the national project and the modern knowing subject. The Problem of Passing untangles the messy, unstable sites of encounter between subject and object, self and other, to bring to light the ways Black racial passing and its mythology are bound up in logics of settler colonialism, the nation-state, white sovereignty, and policing.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations vii
Introduction 1
1. Of Passing and the Pass 33
2. Passing and the Archival Ruse 71
3. The Science of Passing 107
4. Passing and the Ethics of Knowing 137
Coda 169
Acknowledgments 181
Notes 185
Bibliography 227
Index 229

About the Author :
Sandra Harvey is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

Review :
“A masterful contribution in its indictment of our static and mono-directional understanding of ‘passing’ as an implied choice. Harvey’s analysis is sharp, well written, and brings light to new ways of thinking about subjects as diverse as Black Lives Matter Movements to colonial studies and philosophy as ‘passing zones’ that seek to further eradicate the rights of Black, Indigenous and ‘othered’ subjects.”—Andrew Jolivétte, author of Indian Blood: HIV and Colonial Trauma in San Francisco's Two-Spirit Community

“Harvey’s bountiful book zeros in on scenes of ‘the hunt’ and ‘the stakeout’ to argue that passing is of utmost concern for black life. In The Problem of Passing, the shadow of the modern knowing subject chases the fugitive and at times its own tail. The chords that Harvey strums in this formidable book about racial passing are both familiar and unusual. Harvey’s book is essential reading for anyone concerned with surveillance and passing in the wake of chattel slavery.”—Tiffany Lethabo King, author of The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies