The Problem of Passing

Sandra Harvey

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781478038962
  9781478033417
• eBook ISBN:
  9781478062554
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Critical Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Of Passing and the Pass
• 2. Passing and the Archival Ruse
• 3. The Science of Passing
• 4. Passing and the Ethics of Knowing
• Coda
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index