Book Reviews
Passing and the Fictions of Identity. Ed. by
Elaine K. Ginsberg. (Durham: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 1996. viii, 298 pp. Cloth, $45.95,
ISBN 0-8223-1755-9. Paper, $16.95, ISBN 0-
8223-1764-8.)
What is interesting about the phenomenon
of passing or "crossing" the lines of race, gen-
der, or sexuality for the contributors to this vol-
ume is its significance for the question of iden-
tity. What began as a call for papers for a session
at a Modern Language Association conference
burgeoned into this collection of nine articles
on literary characters (the narrator of James
Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an
Ex-ColouredMan, 1912; Nella Larsen's heroines;
George Harris in Uncle TOm's Cabin, 1851-
1852;Capitola Blackin E. D. E. N . Southworth's
The Hidden Hand, 1859; David in James
Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, 1956), historical
figures (the African trader and former slave
Olaudah Equiano; the African American run-
away slave Ellen Craft; John Howard Griffin,
author of Black like Me, 1961), and some com-
bination of the two (Loreta Velazquez, cross-
dressing Confederate officer during the Civil
War and purported author of a picaresque
autobiography, The WOman in Battle, 1876).
Elaine K. Ginsberg provides a thoughtful in-
troduction, and Adrian Piper, a conceptual
artist and professor of philosophy at Wellesley
College, concludes the book with a meditation
on her experiences as an African American
woman often mistaken for white. Not surpris-
ingly for a contribution to American studies
and cultural studies, RuPaul and a contempo-
rary cross-dressing female Civil War reenactor
also make appearances.
Not all of the subjects of these essays are
actually engaged in passing in any traditional
The Journal of American History December 1997
sense. Olaudah Equiano did not pass for white
or female, but rather his autobiography passes
for an "imperialist production." Some pass in
Downloaded from http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/ at Northern Arizona University on June 22, 2015
more than one way, as did Ellen Craft when
she disguised herself as the young wealthy white
male master of her slave husband. But since
the real concern is identity, what is crucial to
all of these essays is the ways people create,
assume, or have imposed upon them different
identities, aswell as the significance and mean-
ing of the disruption of such identities.
For historians, I think the relevance of these
mostly literary studies is the views they offer
of the historical process of constructing race,
gender, and, to a lesser extent, nationality and
sexuality. Ginsberg tells us that passing chal-
lenges the essentialism that often underlies
identity politics, since those who transgress the
traditional categories show us that identities
are multiple and contingent rather than unitary
and fixed. Yet chosen and embraced identities,
as distinguished from imposed categories, re-
main powerfullyimportant in these pages. Equi-
ano expresses "his imperturbable dissatisfaction
with European intrusions on African identities."
Black like Me is about "white identity." Adrian
Piper may look white, but she comes from "one
of the verylast middle-class, light-skinned black
families left in ... Harlem." The big historical
questions are what it means to be black or fe-
male at particular points of time and particular
places to those both inside and outside the
group and how all of that plays out politically.
Passing and the Fictions of Identity does not
answer all the questions, but it grapples with
many of them.
Leila J. Rupp
Ohio State University
Columbus, Ohio
1025