In June 2015, the parents of Rachel Dolezal, president of the Spokane, Washington chapter of the NAACP, claimed that their daughter was passing as black. While she professed to be of mixed (white, African American) racial heritage, her parents asserted that she was of white European descent, with some remote Native American ancestry. The revelations precipitated Dolezal's resignation from her role at the NAACP and a flurry of articles about the story that were disseminated around the world on Twitter under the “Rachel Dolezal” hashtag. Much of the media coverage attempted to account for the fact that this story should elicit such impassioned reactions given that race has long been acknowledged as a performance. As Jelani Cobb wrote in the New Yorker, Dolezal had dressed herself in “a fictive garb of race whose determinations are as arbitrary as they are damaging.” This does not mean that Dolezal “wasn't lying about who she is.” It means that “she was lying about a lie.”Footnote ¹ Meanwhile, in the New York Times, Daniel J. Sharfstein pointed out that the kind of passing we saw in Dolezal's case – passing from white to black; so-called “reverse passing” – was not as historically uncommon as other writers had claimed. What is unusual is that Dolezal should feel the need to pass as black when there were no legal (and comparatively few social) obstacles to her forming “meaningful relationships with African-Americans, study[ing], teach[ing] and celebrat[ing] black history and culture and fight[ing] discrimination.” For Sharfstein, the explanation lies in the fact that “when blackness means something very specific – asserting that black lives matter – it follows for many people that categorical clarity has to matter, too.”Footnote ² The pervasive media and public interest in the Dolezal story confirms the ongoing fascination with racial passing within and beyond the United States, a popular interest that has its counterpart in the proliferation of academic studies of the subject that have been published in the past twenty years. The scholarly attention paid to racial passing inaugurated, arguably, by Elaine K. Ginsberg in her edited volume Passing and the Fictions of Identity (1996) continues unabated in two recent works on the subject. Julie Cary Nerad's edited volume Passing Interest is concerned with cultural representations of passing, while Allyson Hobbs's A Chosen Exile grapples with its history.

Indeed, as Nerad notes in her introduction, the title of her anthology of essays evokes both “the unwavering interest in passing and the notion or suggestion that passing is no longer relevant/necessary or no longer speaks to writers – that it is a ‘relic of the past’” (13, original emphasis). Specifically, Passing Interest examines the explosion of passing narratives in the contemporary moment (1990–2010). While, as Nerad acknowledges, the time frame is “to some extent arbitrary” (5), the parameters of the project allow her and her fellow contributors to consider the importance of the multiracial movement and the momentum that gathered around the campaign to have the category “multiracial” added to the US Census in the year 2000, as well as contemporary debates around “postrace.” Not surprisingly, certain salutary examples surface with some frequency in several of the essays: Time magazine's 1993 cover story devoted to “The New Face of America” (“Introduction”); Tiger Woods's self-identification as “Cablinasian” (“Introduction”; Schoenfeld) and the election of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth President of the United States (“Introduction”; Osucha). While those particular cases have been examined extensively elsewhere, there is much that is new, original and refreshing in this anthology.

The essays are broadly organized according to the authors' purchase on the term “passing,” with the relation to conventional black-to-white passing becoming increasingly remote as the collection progresses. The first two chapters focus on what Paul Spickard calls “the boom in biracial biography” in the 1990s and beyond: memoirs written by subjects whose family members passed as white.Footnote ³ This is certainly a phenomenon worthy of sustained analysis: if passing did “return” in the 1990s, the proliferation of mixed-race memoirs (by Judy Scales-Trent, Shirlee Taylor Haizlip, Gregory Howard Williams and Bliss Broyard, among others) is where this return became most evident. However, the conclusions reached here are not very startling. Both authors situate the memoirs in the context of the multiracial movement of the 1990s (Negrea 61; Washington and Nerad 70–71). Both essays find, moreover, that the contemporary memoirs emphasize the lived experience of race: that “although race is a fiction, it is still a fundamental element of American identity with real consequences” (Washington and Nerad 87). For Irina Negrea, the memoirs “suggest that the traditional racial system in America is ultimately untenable and is, if slowly, crumbling” (60). For Lynn Washington and Nerad, meanwhile, Broyard's One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life (2007) evidences a “shift in perception” in attitudes towards race (70). One of most compelling aspects of these texts – largely overlooked here – is the ways in which they foreground the ambivalent enterprise of genealogy. In many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century passing narratives, genealogy involves white subjects relentlessly researching another individual's ancestry in order to expose his/her “one drop” of “black blood.” One iteration of this is, as Jené Schoenfeld observes in a subsequent essay in Passing Interest, the “black-baby” scenario (106): the birth of a dark child throwing one or both of his/her parents' white ancestry into doubt, as depicted most memorably, perhaps, in Kate Chopin's “Desirée's Baby” (1893). By contrast, these contemporary memoirists ask readers to consider whether genealogy can, in fact, be a radical rather than a conservative activity.

The most interesting essays are those that appear in the second half of the book, with one set focussing on “the ‘ethnic’ passer in texts that complicate the black–white binary” and another exploring “the slippage between traditional racial passing and related forms of racial performance (such as blackface minstrelsy, racial masquerade, or the more contemporary concept of cultural borrowing)” (“Introduction” 15). Many of these essays are interested in teasing out the relationship between racial passing and blackface minstrelsy and in whether, in fact, latter-day forms of passing put the two in productive conversation with one another. As Eden Osucha notes helpfully, “the passing narrative can be said to materialize the codes of racial identity in order to denaturalize racial difference,” while blackface reproduces “a set of transparently unnatural codes in order to naturalize that difference” (131). In other words, the success of passing relies on “blackness” remaining undetected (thereby calling into question the validity of race as a category) while the effectiveness of blackface minstrelsy lies in its excessive and exaggerated performance of “blackness” (thereby calling into question the validity of race as a category).

For Ana Cristina Mendes, the “intricate matrix of meanings” produced by Ali G, who performs a kind of ghetto blackness without literally blacking up, involves a productive crossover between racial passing and blackface minstrelsy (Mendes 221). Unlike the typical racial passer, Ali G “can ‘pass’ in full view.” Unlike the conventional blackface minstrel, “he can be a minstrel without blacking up” (223). For Mendes, Ali G is thus a “postmodern passer” who “blur[s]” rather than crosses “the color line” (223). Meanwhile, Meredith McCarroll is also interested in “postmodern passing”: in Bamboozled (dir. Spike Lee, 2000) and Percival Everett's Erasure (2001), she argues, the cultural “whiteness” of the protagonists “presses the fault line between looking and acting ‘black’ or ‘white’” (285, original emphasis). The sheer length of the book (348 pages), and variety of texts, films and television shows discussed, bears out Nerad's claim that

While the anthology brings discussions of racial passing – and its contemporary iterations – bang up to date, there was one aspect that felt a little outmoded. In her foreword to Nerad's collection, Gayle Wald – whose Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (2000) was a major intervention in the scholarship of racial passing – repeats an exceptionalist claim that remains too often unchallenged by scholars of passing (including myself): that the United States is “a country uniquely defined by its historical obsession with a binaristic (black/white) racial discourse” (vii). In a transnational marketplace, is it appropriate or useful to continue to think in exceptionalist terms when it comes to racial passing? Indeed, one of the strongest essays in Passing Interest is that which treats of Ali G, a British youth of an unspecified nonwhite ethnicity (played by white, Jewish Sacha Baron Cohen), whose performance of blackness is inevitably refracted through a transatlantic lens. In that essay, Mendes opens with a discussion of Kate Moss's appearance in blackface on the front page of The [London] Independent in 2006. She might easily have discussed the “I am African” campaign run by AIDS nonprofit Keep a Child Alive in the same year, in which several celebrities – including Gwyneth Paltrow, Sarah Jessica Parker, Lucy Liu, David Bowie and supermodel Iman – were photographed sporting “tribal” war paint and beads on posters bearing the slogan “I am African.” In both of these examples, the very elasticity of the term “passing” seems to offer all sorts of opportunities for extending the analysis beyond the United States and thinking in more global terms about the contemporary implications of the practice.

Despite Werner Sollors's assertion that the term “passing” is “an Americanism not cited in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary” (quoted in the “Introduction” at 9), Allyson Hobbs is much closer to the mark when she writes, “By no means is the practice of passing exclusively an American phenomenon” (21).Footnote ⁴ Identifying Brazil and South Africa as countries in which “cultural practices that value lighter or white skin remain prevalent” (21), Hobbs points out that people passed whenever and wherever it was advantageous to do so (21–23). Hobbs's book is an immensely readable and compelling history of racial passing in American life. Historians of US racial definition and racial passing – including F. James Davis in his groundbreaking Who Is Black? One Nation's Definition (1991) – have faced one enormous methodological obstacle: how to identify, gather and interpret sources on a phenomenon that, by its nature, had to remain a secret enterprise. Thus historians have tended either to use literary texts as sources or to produce biographies of particular, proven racial passers. In the latter category, for instance, are James M. O'Toole's Passing for White: Race, Religion, and the Healy Family, 1820–1920 (2003), Martha A. Sandweiss's Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception across the Color Line (2009), Daniel J. Sharfstein's The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White (2011) and the numerous books about the Rhinelander case (1925) that have appeared in the past fifteen years. Hobbs's approach combines aspects of both methodologies: using a range of sources both literary and nonliterary (slave narratives, runaway-slave advertisements, court and newspaper reports, census data), she assembles a dizzying array of examples of individuals who passed as white from the eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth.

The book is organized around key moments in the history of racial passing: pre-1863, in which an enslaved African American who could pass as white could also become free; the period of Reconstruction, in which the promise of a more equal America meant that many African Americans, who otherwise might have passed, chose not to; post-Reconstruction to the 1920s; Harlem in the 1920s; and from the post-World War II moment to the civil rights era. Although Hobbs claims that “the primary evidentiary base of this book is historical rather than literary” (7), like many historians of passing before her she inevitably finds herself turning to the literary sources to assist with the interpretive challenges of passing. For example, to “reconstitute the fainter and less perceptible meanings that passing held, meanings that often elude the historical record” (64), Hobbs turns to Frank J. Webb's novel The Garies and Their Friends (1857). When grappling with the complexities of Jean Toomer's modes of self-identification, she finds that Elizabeth Alexander's poem “Toomer” (2010) “comes closest to deft articulation of the fragmented identity that Toomer tried to explain” (195). What is striking, though, is how many of the “real-life” passing scenarios that Hobbs uncovers seem to echo uncannily some of the literary representations. For instance, around 1906, Ernest Torregano – married, with a daughter (Gladys), to a black woman – moved from New Orleans to San Francisco, passed as white, became a successful lawyer and joined the prestigious Lafayette Club. He maintained some contact with his family until 1915, when his mother told each spouse that the other was dead. After he died in 1957, Torregano's sister, with whom he had stayed in touch, informed Gladys that, as his daughter, she had a claim upon his $275,000 estate. Despite overwhelming evidence in Gladys's favour, the court ruled against her and the estate was granted to Torregano's brother, Alfred (165–67). While this story only came to light in the late 1950s, the contours of it are remarkably similar to those of Charles Chesnutt's short story “The Wife of His Youth” (1898).

Hobbs's survey ends in the mid-twentieth century, with an extended discussion of the passing of the Johnston family of Keene, New Hampshire (the inspiration for the film Lost Boundaries (1949)) and what Wald calls “postpassing” stories that began to appear in African American periodicals in the 1940s and 1950s.Footnote ⁵ While Hobbs claims that passing “as traditionally understood has ‘passed out’ in the twenty-first century,” the “core issues of race and identity remain” (278): “Hybrid identities are still racialized identities. Racially ambiguous people are racially marked and still must negotiate the terrain of a racist society” (278). As long as this remains the case, it seems that passing – whether defined “traditionally” as “passing as white,” or deployed in a more capacious and flexible manner, as is the case in Passing Interest – will retain its power as a barometer, and ambivalent form of critique, of ongoing racial inequalities in the US and beyond.