The Problem of Passing - Softcover

Harvey, Sandra

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1478038969 ISBN 13: 9781478038962

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2026

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1478038969
• ISBN 13: 9781478038962
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 260