Humanities Research - Passing Imitations Crossings

Humanities Research - Passing Imitations Crossings
Author/editor: Dr Carolyn Strange
Publisher: Research School of Humanities and the Arts, ANU
Year published: 2010
School/Centre: School of History

Abstract

When it was revealed that Anglo-Australian writer Helen Darville had passed as Ukrainian to publish a novel about the Holocaust, there was much public and scholarly debate about the nature of identity and the meaning of multiculturalism.  Such 'passing' controversies have the capacity to unsettle everyday perceptions about personhood and about social classifications and identifications.  The essays collected in this special issue of Humanities Research, 'Passing, Imitations, Crossings', explore the theme and act of 'passing' in a range of social, historical and cultural contexts.  Put simply, passing is a type of border crossing, one that normally involves a movement from social disadvantage to advantage or form a socially stigmatised position to one that grants some privilege, or at least allows avoidance or evasion of group classification.  Passing is distinct from other identity performances in that it generally refers to a surreptitious transgression of widely accepted social practices.  That is, the passer normally masks the fact of his or her 'true' identity - he or she might rely on subterfuge or might remove him or herself from a telling context or simply suppress information that might lead to disclosure of his or her identity - in order to cross social boundaries.  In the case of African-Americans, passing for white historically entailed crossing the social divide that separated black and white according to changing cultural, scientific and legal measurements of what constituted racial identity.

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