Category: Passing

  • As a recent Twitter storm brought attention to social media blackface, Emma Dabiri looks at the cultural history of this racist practice and its links to black women being perceived as sexually available.

  • Passing is a new play that exposes the controversial practice of “racial passing” – the use of skin colour as a form of social currency.

  • Award-winning author Gail Lukasik will speak about her book “White Like Her: My Family’s Story of Race and Racial Passing” at Kenyon College on Wednesday, Nov. 14, at 7 p.m.

  • A cute cartoon dog sits in front of a computer, gazing at the monitor and typing away busily. The cartoon’s caption jubilantly proclaims, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog!” This image resonates with particular intensity for those members of a rapidly expanding subculture which congregates within the consensual hallucination defined as cyberspace.

  • This talk explores the phenomenon of ‘passing-for-white’ as represented in the work of transatlantic literary women ranging from Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen to contemporary British writer Helen Oyeyemi and asks why passing continues to inspire women writers across the West.

  • Philosophers Naomi Zack of the University of Oregon, Rebecca Tuvel of Rhodes College, and Diarmuid Costello of the University of Warwick discuss the ways in which Adrian Piper’s art interrogates racial identity, focusing on specific works as well as Piper’s own writings about race, “Passing for White, Passing for Black” and Escape to Berlin: A…

  • It was Shirley Kitching’s fascinating stories shared during holiday and summer visits to Chicago – particularly one about an ancestor who was sent to the West Coast to live her life as a White woman by “passing” – that influenced Hobbs’ decision to become a historian and author.

  • Narratives of Passing Vassar College Poughkeepsie, New York 2015-? Amitava Kumar, Professor of English (Same as AFRS 253) Topic for 2019b: Narratives of Passing. The phrase “passing for white,” peculiar to American English, first appears in advertisements for the return of runaway slaves. Abolitionist fiction later adopts the phenomenon of racial passing (together with the…

  • The approach in this article is to use techniques of semiotics to assess the subtle cues in the linguist protagonist’s language as his statements move in and out of clarity, ambivalence, and doubleness. I argue that these forms of semiotic doubleness represent the dualities and ironies with which mixed-race people struggle in a society still…

  • This ethnically ambiguous comedian shares the faux pas and mishaps in her lifelong journey of mistaken identity. Do not miss this hilarious show with Maija DiGiorgio.