As W. E. B. DuBois famously prophesied in The Souls of Black Folk, the fiction of the color line has been of urgent concern in defining a certain twentieth-century U.S. racial order. Yet the very arbitrariness of this line also gives rise to opportunities for racial passing, a practice through which subjects appropriate the terms of racial discourse. To erode race s authority, Gayle Wald argues, we must understand how race defines and yet fails to represent identity. She thus uses cultural narratives of passing to illuminate both the contradictions of race and the deployment of such...

As W. E. B. DuBois famously prophesied in The Souls of Black Folk, the fiction of the color line has been of urgent concern in defining a certain twentieth-century U.S. racial order. Yet the very arbitrariness of this line also gives rise to opportunities for racial passing, a practice through which subjects appropriate the terms of racial discourse. To erode race s authority, Gayle Wald argues, we must understand how race defines and yet fails to represent identity. She thus uses cultural narratives of passing to illuminate both the contradictions of race and the deployment of such...