Following hot on the heels of Allyson Hobbs's A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (2014), Julie Cary Nerad's edited collection Passing Interest: Racial Passing in U.S. Novels, Memoirs, Television, and Film, 1990–2010 (2014) and N. Megan Kelley's Projections of Passing: Postwar Anxieties and Hollywood Films, 1947–1960 (2016) comes this latest collective scholarly reflection on the history of the practice of passing and/or cultural representations thereof. The editors, Mollie Godfrey and Vershawn Ashanti Young, propose the term “neo-passing narratives” to denote “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, italics in original). In the introduction, they sketch out some recent iterations of passing that are sufficiently different from Jim Crow-era passing that fresh theorization and innovative thinking on the subject are warranted. For example, Rachel Dolezal's proclamation of a “transracial” identity – that she “felt” black just as a transgender subject “feels” themselves not to be the gender assigned at birth – was a provocative challenge to some on the left who refuted the claim with equally problematic assertions that the analogy was flawed because Dolezal “lied” whereas a transgender subject is telling the “truth” about their identity (12). Equally, the vilification of Dolezal, and other recently “outed” passers, on social media draws attention to “the ways in which social media offers individuals as many opportunities to craft and shape online communities and identities as it offers the risk that the boundaries between one's social personas will break down” (15).

The term “neo-passing,” then, certainly proves to be a useful one: it allows the contributors to the volume to explore and theorize a range of passing scenarios that do not easily fit “the classic black-to-white trope” (8). For Christopher M. Brown, in an analysis of Edward P. Jones's The Known World (2003), the “formal passing conceit” relies on “a black character's faith that he won't be read as black” (73). For Eden Osucha, US popular culture's “discourse of black presidentialism” – pre-Obama cultural narratives that incipiently imagined an African American President of the United States – “variously trades upon the idea of racial passing” (97). If the traditional passing narrative emphasizes a disjuncture between the passer's legal categorization (black) and physical features (white), the “black-president trope” recodes this dualism as “the tension between the abstracted whiteness of the office of the presidency and black racial particularity” (97). Jennifer Glaser positions Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece's graphic novel Incognegro (2008) as a neo-passing narrative because it is “a self-reflexive text distinctly aware of its own participation in and capacity to play with the genre of the passing narrative” (119). Meanwhile, Loran Marsan argues that John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me (1961) inaugurated an entire subgenre of journalistic exposés – “identity-immersion journalism” (142) – in which the investigation relied on the journalist's passing. Alisha Gaines explores how claiming a “tan” identity – a performance of race and racialization “beyond the black/white binary” (160) – enables Italian Americans in the reality television show Jersey Shore to participate in “a strategic distancing” from a monolithic whiteness associated with “damning histories of racism, racial terror, oppression, and discrimination” (169, 168). Derek Adams's purchase on neo-passing is his conceptualization of “black passing”: “the acting out of any specific set of predetermined racialized norms by an individual that undermines the desirability of heteronormative whiteness” (180, emphasis in original).

Taken collectively, there is an abundance of rich material and analysis in Neo-passing. Osucha's and Gaines's essays, in particular, navigate with originality and flair the provocative questions raised by contemporary forms of passing and racial masquerade. However, the essays sometimes evince an anxiety about the “newness” of neo-passing narratives, an anxiety that manifests as treading a fine line between acknowledging and eliding the extent to which Jim Crow-era narratives covered much of the ground delineated “new” here. For example, Marsan's “identity-immersion journalism” has a literary precedent in Vera Manning in Jessie Fauset's There Is Confusion (1924). Having passed unhappily for many years in New York, Vera eventually finds personal and professional fulfilment taking precarious trips south, passing for white, and reporting atrocities committed against black southerners to her newspaper employer in New York. While not a newspaper reporter, Walter White also went “undercover” as chief investigator of lynching for the NAACP in the 1920s. Adams argues that Z. Z. Packer's “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” (2000) is a neo-passing narrative because “it resists reinforcing heteronormative whiteness” (178). Yet he also concedes that Nella Larsen's Passing (1929) performs a similar kind of work (178–80).

Ultimately, the editors themselves insist perhaps a bit too emphatically on the distinctive features of neo-passing narratives. According to Godfrey and Young, such works “are increasingly and explicitly intersectional – simultaneously involving class, gender, race, and sexuality” (4). While this claim underestimates the intersectionality of several Jim Crow-era passing narratives – one does not need to read Patricia Jones's Passing (1999), as the editors suggest, to discern in Larsen's Passing the knottiness of the gendered, raced, classed and sexualized identities it explores – it also does a disservice to some of the scholarship that has preceded this volume. As early as 1994, Valerie Smith located passing “within the discourse of intersectionality” because

Moreover, as the prominence of “Jim Crow” in the title of the book and the definition of “neo-passing” indicates, the work remains invested in US-centric treatments of passing, even when the “neo” prefix might seem to invite a more capacious, transnational consideration of the phenomenon. Still, “neo-passing” provides a constructive framework for analysing contemporary narratives of racial masquerade. Moreover, the Appendix to the introduction, which provides an excellent list of teaching and scholarly materials, is an invaluable resource to those who teach this topic.