'She'll wake up one of these days and find she's turned into a Nigger' - Passing through hybridity

In this article, I examine racial narratives of passing and their relations hip to discourses of hybridity. Rather than defining passing as inherently transgressive, or as one side of identity politics or the other, I suggest that passing must be understood in relationship to forms of social antagoni sm. I ask the following questions: holy are differences that threaten the s ystem recuperated? How do ambiguous or hybrid bodies get read in a way whic h further supports the enunciative power of those who are telling the diffe rence? In what ways is 'passing' implicated in the very discourse around te llable differences? Although to some extent all identities involve passing - insofar as the subject never 'is' what it 'images' itself to be - we stil l need to theorize the differences between passing as white and passing as black. I argue that passing as black as a white subject can function as a t echnique of knowledge which assumes 'blackness' to be imageable and hence b eable. However, for black subjects to refuse to pass as white - that is, fo r black subjects to pass as black - can make visible the violent histories concealed by the invisibility of the mark of passing. Such a process of pas sing as black subjects is tied to a politics of the collective - a coming t ogether through the recognition of the lack that engenders passing in the f irst place.