Let It Pass: Changing the Subject, Once Again

Abstract

The recent controversial transformation of the humanities is due partly to the institutional acknowledgment of diversity and partly to critics' efforts to theorize difference and to destabilize the categories of identity on which programs devoted to the study of diversity are founded. This double agenda creates anxiety over the positions we find ourselves in as scholars and teachers in the newly configured university. My essay offers a means of working through this tension: a performative pedagogy based on a descriptive theory of the dynamics of passing. I exemplify this dynamic by reading debates on white feminists' appropriation of black women's writing, comparing student responses to the 1934 film Imitation of Life , and discussing Fannie Hurst's novel on which the film is based. I posit the pedagogical relation as the privileged site where passing, which is inevitable in any subject position, can be enacted and made explicit.