Review by Choice Review
After the off-putting foreword in which Gayle Wald erroneously identifies Barack Obama's father as hailing from Nigeria, the reader can expect a real treat. The introduction, which is exceedingly well written, lays bare the notion of passing and situates it within the neo-resistance narrative and the neo-segregation narrative. If passing is essentially a matter of performing identity, then "what passing connotes is precisely that which performance hopes to obliterate or obscure: the individual or social perception of distance between the performance and the perceived reality." The discussion of Rachel Dolezal, Shaun King, and Andrea Smith is important and situates well the binary of race and appropriation. The ten essays that follow interrogate neo-passing in literature, popular culture, film, and politics. Two of the more powerful essays are Martha Cutter's "Why Passing Is (Still) Not Passé after More than 250 Years" and Jennifer Glaser's "Seeing Race in Comics." Neo-passing, as defined in this work, includes class, gender, sexuality, and racial group. The editors write in the introduction that such narratives "frequently go beyond a simple black/white binary that typified class-passing narratives in order to explore not only how identities are differently performed in relation to contemporary social norms but also how they are increasingly and explicitly intersectional." Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.--Adele Sheron Newson-Horst, Morgan State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
