{"id":24659,"date":"2012-08-05T02:54:52","date_gmt":"2012-08-05T02:54:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=24659"},"modified":"2012-08-05T02:54:52","modified_gmt":"2012-08-05T02:54:52","slug":"introduction-passing-imitations-crossings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=24659","title":{"rendered":"Introduction: Passing, Imitations, Crossings"},"content":{"rendered":"

Introduction: Passing, Imitations, Crossings<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Humanities Research<\/a>
\n Volume XVI. Number 1<\/a> (2010)<\/p>\n

Monique Rooney<\/a><\/strong>, Lecturer and Honours Convenor
\nCollege of Arts and Social Sciences
\n Austrailian National University<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When it was revealed that Anglo-Australian writer Helen Darville<\/a> had passed as Ukrainian to publish a novel about the Holocaust<\/a>, there was much public and scholarly debate about the nature of identity and the meaning of multiculturalism. Such \u2018passing<\/a>\u2019 controversies have the capacity to unsettle everyday perceptions about personhood and about social classifications and identifications. The essays collected in this special issue of Humanities Research<\/em>, \u2018Passing, Imitations, Crossings<\/a>\u2019, explore the theme and act of \u2018passing\u2019 in a range of social, historical and cultural contexts. Put simply, passing is a type of border crossing, one that normally involves a movement from social disadvantage to advantage or from a socially stigmatised position to one that grants some privilege, or at least allows avoidance or evasion of group classification. Passing is distinct from other identity performances in that it generally refers to a surreptitious transgression of widely accepted social practices. That is, the passer normally masks the fact of his or her \u2018true\u2019 identity\u2014he or she might rely on subterfuge or might remove him or herself from a telling context or simply suppress information that might lead to disclosure of his or her identity\u2014in order to cross social boundaries. In the case of African-Americans, passing for white historically entailed crossing the social divide that separated black and white according to changing cultural, scientific and legal measurements of what constituted racial identity. As St Clair Drake<\/a> and Horace R. Cayton<\/a> observed in their study of African-American social life in Chicago\u2019s South Side<\/a> in the 1930s, \u2018there are thousands of Negroes whom neither colored nor white people can distinguish from full-blooded whites, it is understandable that in the anonymity of the city many Negroes \u201cpass for white\u201d daily, both intentionally and unintentionally\u2019. The prospect of passing multiplies in societies in which the often anonymous flow of people sets the scene for opportunism, masquerade and other forms of role-playing. There are women who have cross-dressed as male to publish books or participate in war and gays and lesbians who have passed as straight to avoid homophobia. There are those who pass out of necessity, to escape war or life-threatening discrimination, and those who pass for greater gain or simply for the thrill of experiencing life on the \u2018other side\u2019, as passing provides the opportunity to temporarily or permanently depart from a designated identity.<\/p>\n

The transport and communications revolution that took place in the United States at the end of the nineteenth and in the early decades of the twentieth centuries\u2014a time also of great movement and mixing of diverse social groups in American cities, as well as a period of new strictures and the terrors of lynching\u2014created a fertile context for passing. The many fictional and sociological recordings of African-Americans who \u2018passed as white\u2019 to cross the colour line, from the middle of the nineteenth century through to the 1950s and 1960s\u2014when African-Americans began to win civil rights\u2014suggests how prevalent the act was in a US context. In his encyclopedic study of \u2018inter-racial\u2019 themes in US history, Werner Sollors<\/a> differentiates the passer from the parvenu (the social climber or upstart). While the act of passing potentially encompasses \u2018the crossing of any line that divides social groups\u2019\u2014and Everett V. Stonequist argues that \u2018passing is found in every race situation where the subordinate race is held in disesteem\u2019\u2014Sollors\u2019 study locates the phenomenon firmly in US social history. In particular, Sollors connects passing with the burden of racial ancestry for the descendents of slaves. While the general expectation is that newly arrived immigrants will gradually assimilate, the descendents of slaves\u2014in what Sollors calls America\u2019s \u2018hypodescent<\/a>\u2019 system\u2014have been treated as members of a caste. African-Americans have been subject to a form of \u2018ancestor-counting\u2019 that reduces personhood to a racial part<\/strong>…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Introduction: Passing, Imitations, Crossings Humanities Research Volume XVI. Number 1 (2010) Monique Rooney, Lecturer and Honours Convenor College of Arts and Social Sciences Austrailian National University When it was revealed that Anglo-Australian writer Helen Darville had passed as Ukrainian to publish a novel about the Holocaust, there was much public and scholarly debate about the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8,6462,394],"tags":[11486,6066],"class_list":["post-24659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-socialscience","tag-humanities-research","tag-monique-rooney"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24659"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24659\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}