This panel explores the aesthetics and politics of racial transformation in American literature, comics, and film, focusing on the ways these texts challenge traditional notions of racial passing. The works considered on this panel foreground the “not passing” of racial transformations, disrupting the notion of fluidity to expose how systemic white supremacy constructs and constrains racial identity. Together, these papers argue that racial transformations, whether literal, aesthetic, or performative, underscore the pervasive influence of whiteness in American cultural production.

The panel encourages deeper engagement with the mechanisms that define race, urging audiences to reconsider the narratives that dictate who can pass and who remains visibly marked by history and power. By reimagining passing, these works challenge audiences to confront the enduring systems of power that commodify, distort, and racialize identity in literature and film.

Within the context of American literature, passing narratives have historically been pivotal in discussions about race, identity, and power, illustrating the tensions between self-determination and racial categorization. This panel extends that discourse by analyzing texts where passing is disrupted or rendered impossible, thereby revealing the enduring power structures that define racial identity. In addition to disputing the presumed fluidity of racial passing in the literature, the papers align with and extend scholarship on racial capital(ism), blackface minstrelsy, critical race theory, and psychoanalysis, thereby challenging audiences to reconsider how racial identity is constructed, commodified, and constrained. Ultimately, this panel contributes to scholarship by reframing passing as a cultural and political act shaped by enduring systems of white supremacy.

Each presenter listed below will speak for 12-15 minutes, followed by 15-27 minutes of unstructured discussion.

Starting with Martina Lombardo’s paper on Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, this panel explores how beauty standards and cultural markers like hair define the desire for and impossibility of racial passing. Jude and Pecola’s inability to pass highlights the enduring link between race and Western aesthetics, revealing racial passing as rooted in systemic racism and cultural conditioning rather than personal choice.

Similarly, Cole Lowman argues that Chuck Palahniuk’s Adjustment Day critiques the grotesque legacy of minstrelsy through a minstrelized blackface performance that distorts Black identity. In “Passing Without Passing: The Legacy of Minstrel Stereotypes and Racial Identity in Adjustment Day,” Lowman maintains that Josephine Peabody’s blackface performance becomes a critique of the oppressive systems that created the racial boundaries she attempts to cross.

Akash Belsare’s paper, “Racial Transformation: Interrogating Whiteness in American Born Chinese and Ms. Marvel,” examines how racial transformation exposes the allure and dominance of white identity. Jin Wang and Kamala Khan’s visually disruptive transformations critique whiteness’s totalizing logics. Belsare notes that their softened or omitted transformations in television adaptations sanitize the complex racial politics of racialization.

In “The Racialized Voice in Absurdist Film, or, a Labor Theory of Passing,” Paola Del Toro argues that Cassius Green’s use of a “white voice” in Boots Riley’s film Sorry to Bother You literalizes the labor and artifice of passing in a corporate setting. The disembodied and unnatural quality of the dubbed voice reflects the impossibility of fully merging into whiteness, highlighting its alienating effects.

Our speakers bring forth a range perspectives on racial passing in 20^th and 21^st century American literature and culture produced by white, Black and Asian Americans. In addition, the presentations consider a variety of media representations of racial passing from novels to comics to film. Beyond that, our speakers themselves represent a broad swath of institutional positions (tenure-track faculty, teaching faculty, and domestic and international graduate students) and encompass a variety of gender identities, races, and ethnicities.