A01=Sandra Harvey
Adrian Piper
anti-Black violence
Author_Sandra Harvey
Black Studies
blood quantum
Category=JBSF3
Category=JBSL
Category=QDTS1
Choctaw citizenship
colonial Virginia
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
forthcoming
Fugitivity
Gender
HeLa cell contamination crisis
Kant
Mastery
passing narratives
Race
runaway slave advertisements
Surveillance
surveillance technologies
Product details
- ISBN 9781478033417
- Weight: 572g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 25 Aug 2026
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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The Problem of Passing traces the continued relevance of Black racial passing for contemporary Black life, Black studies, philosophy, and narratives of passing more generally. In this critical and interdisciplinary journey through historical archives, literature, law, and conceptual art, Sandra Harvey argues that narratives of passing are at the core of past and present-day violence toward all Black subjects. She reframes passing as a set of reader relations, at once cultural, discursive, aesthetic, and metaphysical. From antebellum slavery to modern genomics, each chapter traces how seemingly disparate institutional complexes like law, science, and philosophy are animated by logics of Black race-gender passing that support the national project and the modern knowing subject. The Problem of Passing untangles the messy, unstable sites of encounter between subject and object, self and other, to bring to light the ways Black racial passing and its mythology are bound up in logics of settler colonialism, the nation-state, white sovereignty, and policing.
Sandra Harvey is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine.
