A review of The Problem of Passing, Sandra Harvey, Duke University Press, 2026.
Sandra Harvey’s The Problem of Passing argues that racial passing should not be understood primarily as an individual’s choice to “become” or impersonate someone else—such as a light-skinned Black person passing for white. Instead, Harvey shifts attention to the people and institutions that accuse, identify, and police passing in a more general sense: passing for white or assuming a racial identity that contradicts one’s family history or genetic makeup; passing for the opposite sex in the case of transgender identities; passing for able-bodied when one is disabled; passing for straight when one is gay; etc. Historically and conceptually, Black slaves passing for white to escape pursuers in the Antebellum South constitute the matrix in which all forms of passing in America have been shaped, which makes Black studies the central discipline to address the problem of passing. Harvey treats passing as a structure of surveillance: a way the United States has historically organized fears about Black freedom, mobility, illegibility, and supposed criminality. Passing is not passé; we haven’t been able to move beyond the problem of passing. Harvey contends that narratives of Black racial passing remain essential for understanding contemporary Black life, even though scholarship often regards passing as a historical phenomenon superseded by civil-rights-era demands for Black visibility. Passing, she argues, has never disappeared; it continues to shape how Black people are watched, classified, and exposed to state and vigilante violence. Her key conceptual intervention is to move from the passing subject to the accuser; from passing as an individual strategy to passing as a collective experience; and from racial or gender passing to a move that is always already both. Her book is especially well suited to showing that racial passing is not a marginal literary trope; it is a route into the modern political architecture of identification, surveillance, scientific authority, and state power.
A structure of surveillance
Conventional accounts ask why an individual passes and what freedom, safety, or social mobility they seek. Harvey instead asks why observers feel compelled to decide whether someone is “really” who they appear to be. The accusation that someone is passing becomes a technique of racial discipline: it authorizes surveillance, fixes identities, and regulates movement and belonging. In this account, “passing” is not merely self-presentation. It is also something done to people through acts of reading, suspicion, documentation, classification, and narration. Harvey traces the modern U.S. logic of passing to chattel slavery. Enslaved people who moved without authorization could be deemed fugitives; written passes, free papers, clothing, bodily marks, and racialized descriptions became instruments for distinguishing the supposedly legitimate from the fraudulent. Runaway-slave advertisements helped turn the “pass” into a broader cultural story about Black people’s alleged capacity to deceive, evade capture, or pass for free. This history produces a persistent contradiction: Blackness is imagined as hypervisible—instantly legible as racial difference and criminal threat. Yet Blackness is also imagined as potentially unreadable or deceptive—capable of escaping the watcher’s gaze. Black people have nowhere to hide except in darkness, deception, and fraud. Harvey argues that this contradiction fuels an imperative to watch more intensely. The state, police, scientists, and ordinary citizens are positioned as “master hunters” who must continuously authenticate the racialized other. Surveillance thus responds not simply to what Blackness visibly is, but to an anxious fantasy that Blackness may evade classification and control.
Trayvon Martin’s killing, one of the tragedies at the origins of the Black Lives Matter movement, is a central contemporary frame for this argument. Harvey reads the suspicion directed at Martin—his presence in a white neighborhood, his clothing, especially the hoodie—not as an isolated misrecognition but as part of a long history in which free Black movement is cast as trespass, fugitivity, and danger. The hoodie becomes an “anchoring signifier”: an ordinary object attached to the Black body to stabilize a racist reading of criminality. According to Harvey, “the ritualized, everyday hunting of black people” is still a defining feature of the United States. And the suspicion or accusation of passing is part of a long history of surveillance and control. To pass for free by passing for white or forging a pass was a way for fugitive slaves to escape the plantation and run for freedom, evading scrutiny and arrest by patrollers. Passing narratives and the folklore surrounding them crop up as early cautionary tales about the way fugitives evaded capture. The well-publicized nineteenth-century story of Ellen and William Craft illustrates all the dimensions of passing. It involves a daring, multi-layered escape from slavery in 1848 where light-skinned Ellen Craft passed as a white, male, disabled planter while her husband, William, acted as her enslaved servant. Harvey’s analysis focuses on the less-studied figure of William, whose supposed hypervisibility as a dark-skinned man allowed the performance of master and slave to take place. She twists the Hegelian dialectic of the master and the servant to introduce the additional characters of the “knowing-hunting subject” and the fugitive, showing that inherent to the idea of capture and containment is the ever-present threat of escape. This allows her to move from passing as a historical experience to passing as a discursive complex or an epistemological structure.
Slavery and Indian removal
Runaway slaves passing for white weren’t the only anxiety that plagued white settlers policing the Antebellum South. Racial classifications and claims to national belonging were also entangled with the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the affirmation of settler colonialism. The drive for cotton land in the American South was fueled by the labor of enslaved people growing plantation crops and by the violent appropriation of fertile land through Indian removal. The next chapter of The Problem of Passing reads transcripts of rejected petitions for enrollment in the Choctaw Nation submitted by suspected black applicants “passing for Natives” between 1898 and 1914. Some historical background is in order. By the early 19th century, European Americans categorized the Choctaw Nation as one of the “Five Civilized Tribes” because they adopted centralized governments, written constitutions, and plantation practices, including slave ownership. This did not prevent President Andrew Jackson and his successors to dispossess the Choctaws from their ancestral lands and to relocate them west of the Mississippi River. The Choctaws who stayed were to be recognized as citizens of the state of Mississippi and to abandon their right to sovereignty. The signing of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek led to the Trail of Tears in the 1830s, when nearly 15,000 Choctaws were forced to march hundreds of miles in harsh conditions. Wealthy Native slaveholders forced hundreds of enslaved Black people to walk the Trail of Tears alongside them, enduring the same brutal winter conditions, disease, and starvation.
Established by Congress in 1898, the Dawes Commission (officially the Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes) was charged to dismantle the collective land ownership and sovereignty of the Five Tribes in Indian Territory and to distribute individual plots of land to tribal members. This politics of recognition opened Blacks and Natives up to accusations of “passing for Native”. The Dawes Commission drew strict, often arbitrary racial boundaries that heavily penalized applicants with African ancestry. Applicants were rigidly categorized into specific groups: Citizens by Blood (those with documented indigenous ancestry); Citizens by Marriage (white individuals legally married to tribal citizens); and Freedmen (formerly enslaved people who had been adopted into the tribes after the Civil War, and their descendants). The Commission worked under the assumption that applicants by intermarriage could only be white, never black; that Blacks could not be Native, or speak a Native language as their native tongue; and that Blacks “passing for Native” should be excluded from any form of sovereignty. Preserved in the National Archives, the rolls produced through this commission’s census remain important documents of recognition and enrollment as members of the Choctaw Nation into the present. To become a legally recognized citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma today, an applicant must prove direct, unbroken lineage to an ancestor whose name is listed on the Dawes Final Rolls as a Choctaw “by Blood”. Thus many Americans are still affected by the Dawes Commission’s prejudiced ideas about race, nation, and citizenship.
The “HeLa bomb”
The problem of passing is not limited to historical episodes accessible in the archives; it can also characterize science in the making, as conceptualized by science and technology studies. Harvey’s earlier work on Henrietta Lacks’s HeLa cells—which informs one chapter of this book—reads the panic over HeLa contamination as an accusation of racial and gender passing. HeLa is an immortal cell line derived in 1951 from Henrietta Lacks, a Black American woman whose cervical-cancer cells were taken at Johns Hopkins. In 1966, geneticist Stanley Gartler demonstrated that many supposedly distinct human cell lines had actually been overrun by HeLa cells. Because HeLa could be identified partly through genetic markers then associated in population studies with Black people, the discovery was framed as a dramatic scientific scandal—the “HeLa bomb.” A technical problem of cross-contamination came to be narrated as an alarming exposure: cells presumed to originate from white donors had, unbeknownst to researchers, been replaced by cells derived from a Black woman. Harvey argues that the contamination narrative repeated an older U.S. racial grammar organized around the “one-drop rule,” which imagined Black blood as a polluting substance capable of compromising white purity. In this framework, HeLa was portrayed as a Black presence that had slipped undetected into ostensibly white or racially unspecified cultures, “passing” as something else until science exposed it.
The contamination narrative also fastened the cells to racialized stereotypes of Black female sexuality. Although HeLa cells are laboratory materials, journalists and researchers routinely referred back to Lacks’s body, cervix, sexuality, and presumed sexual conduct. Accounts connected cervical cancer, HPV, and the cells’ spread to insinuations about Lacks’s sexual behavior; one writer inferred from HPV-related material that she had “slept around.” A journalist compared being notified of HeLa contamination to parents receiving news that “little Darlene had VD”—a metaphor that feminized contamination and associated it with sexual shame. The term “HeLa bomb,” in a Cold War context, made contamination sound like infiltration or internal enemy action. Harvey reads this episode of moral panic as part of a wider biopolitical imagination in which science, the state, and surveillance seek to identify and neutralize biological threats. In short, Harvey shows how the language surrounding HeLa transformed a laboratory event into a racial and gender drama: a Black woman’s cells were figured as invasive, sexually contagious, deceptively mobile, and laboring beyond control. Her larger intervention is to expose how scientific knowledge can inherit and reproduce social structures of racial surveillance, colonial mastery, and anti-Black gendered violence even when its immediate object is cellular biology.
The drive to know
This leads to her broader critique of an “ethics of knowing.” For Harvey, passing exposes a deeper problem in Western epistemology: the desire to know another person completely. The watcher or “master hunter” believes that proper knowledge means being able to identify, classify, and secure the truth of the other. This drive to know is inseparable from the desire to possess, regulate, and govern. Harvey draws attention to the double sense of apprehend: to understand, but also to seize or capture. Scientific objectivity is not outside the history of racial capitalism. Western ideals of the rational, autonomous, knowing subject depend on a fantasy of mastery over an objectified and racialized other. In this sense, fugitivity might be understood as a rejection of the sovereignty of the white master’s symbolic order. Black scholars like Fred Moten or Saidiya Hartman have shown how escaping captivity was not just a physical act of flight, but a radical refusal of the legal, cultural, and philosophical frameworks that defined Black people as property rather than human beings. The whole project of Black studies is oriented towards rethinking the question of the human from the perspective of fugitivity without “assuming to occupy the position of the normative subject, the transcendental subject.” Harvey’s book challenges liberal assumptions that autonomy, recognition, and inclusion alone can resolve racial violence. It allows the reader to move from the familiar literary history of racial passing to questions of surveillance, settler colonialism, scientific classification, policing, and racial capitalism. It suggests that racial classification itself is not neutral: it is historically connected to slavery, settler colonialism, state sovereignty, and white social authority. Narratives of passing help maintain these systems by turning uncertainty about identity into a reason for surveillance. The Problem of Passing ultimately calls for a decolonial or abolitionist ethics of knowing—one that refuses the violent aspiration to master the other through surveillance, classification, and exposure.
Brian Massumi owes his career to his ability to translate obscure texts into plain English, and to his penchant for doing the reverse. His first notoriety came from bringing Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus to an English-speaking audience. Without him, what became an essential text for feminists, literary theorists, social scientists, philosophers, and avant-garde artists may have remained a local event, known only to the francosphere. His meticulous translation from French into English proved that translating untranslatable language constitutes a challenge, not an impossibility. He may have understood Deleuze and Guattari’s work better than they understood it themselves: going through the detour of a foreign language allowed the text to shed some of its obscurities, and to take on new ones as the translator engaged in his own rap and wordplays. Meaning always exceeds linguistic conventions contained in national boundaries and syntaxic rules. In this case, the obscure clarity of A Thousand Plateaus inspired many creators beyond the field of continental philosophy. References to Deleuze and Guattari’s work can be found in literary artworks, blockbuster movies, electronic music, and even in financial theory and military thinking. Massumi was both a translator and an interpreter of Deleuzian philosophy: his User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia remains the most accessible and playful introduction to one of the major intellectual achievements of the late twentieth century. If, as Michel Foucault prophesied, the twenty-first century will be Deleuzian, it will be in no small part thanks to Brian Massumi and to his role as a translator and a go-between.
Why read Marx today? More to the point, why devote a book to how Marx was read in Japan in the mid-twentieth century, and in particular to the writings of a Marxist scholar named Uno Kōzō (1897-1977), Japan’s foremost Marxian economist and founder of what is usually referred to as the Uno School (Uno gakuha), Uno economics (Uno keizaigaku), or Uno-ist theory (Uno riron)? Books about this branch of Marxist theory now collect dust on the shelves of second-hand bookstores in the Kanda-Jinbōchō district in Tokyo. They remind us of Marxism’s surprising longevity in Japan’s academic circles: a Japanese publishing house, Kaizōsha, was the first editor in the world to publish the complete collected works of Marx and Engels (in thirty-two volumes), and Marxist theory was taught and studied with passion in the tumultuous years of campus upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. The generation that imbibed Marx’s shihonron in its formative years is now past retirement, and the few remaining bastions of Marxism are only to be found in philosophy or literature departments, not in faculties of economics. But Gavin Walker considers that something important was at stake in these economic debates, something that can still speak to our present. In his opinion, we need to understand the “sublime perversion of capital” in order to situate and possibly overcome our contemporary theoretical impasses and debates: the surprising persistence of the nation, the postcolonial situation, the enclosure of the new “digital commons,” the endless cycles of crisis and debt. Indeed, Walker argues, “this moment of globalization calls for a fundamental (re)examination of the central questions of Marxist theory itself.” For, like Marx wrote to his German readers in the 1867 preface of Das Kapital, “De te fabula narratur!”—it is of you that the story is told.
What is anthropology? What should it be about, and how should it be pursued? These questions were raised with great intensity in the politically loaded context of the seventies. Radically different visions of anthropology were offered; people experimented with new forms of writing and storytelling; and the discipline was mandated to take a political stance in reaction to the issues of the day. As a result, anthropology was deeply transformed. The two canonical concepts that defined its academic status, culture and society, were discarded in favor of other constructs or organizing schemes—although modern ethnography is still referred to as cultural anthropology in the United States and as social anthropology in the United Kingdom. Fieldwork, the close and sustained observation of native customs and modes of thought by a participant observer, ceased to define the discipline. The methodology was adopted by other social sciences—or even by other occupations such as journalism, militantism, and even art—, while anthropologists experimented with multi-sited ethnographies or with research based on archival work. As Clifford Geertz and other anthropologists working in his wake made it clear, the collection of data by the ethnographer on the field is just the tip of the iceberg: it is based on years of reading other anthropologists’ work and attending academic lectures, and it is followed by the nitty-gritty work of reconstruction and composition that leads to the journal article or the scholarly volume. The anthropologist was recognized as a writer, as a maker of forms and a designer of concepts.
In everyday language, a materialist is defined as a person who considers material possessions and physical comfort as more important than spiritual values. According to Madonna’s famous song, “we are living in a material world.” Says the Material Girl: “Some boys kiss me, some boys hug me / I think they’re okay / If they don’t give me proper credit, I just walk away /…/ ‘Cause the boy with the cold hard cash is always Mister Right.” Madonna may not have had in mind the new materialisms referred to in the book edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost. Here materialism refers to the philosophical doctrine that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications, as opposed to spiritualism that posits a dualism between subject and matter. But the material girl’s lyrics may provide a good entry point into this volume. After all, Madonna’s kissing and hugging addresses a strong message to the feminists who have been accused of routinely ignoring the matter of corporeal life. In exposing her body, Madonna draws our attention to what really matters (sex), while referring to non-bodily retributions (money) that also matter a great deal. So my materialist questions to the book will be: Do we still live in a material world according to these new versions of materialism? Do the authors give proper credit, and to whom? What does the reader get from his or her cold hard cash? And are the contributors always Mr (or Mrs) Right?
In The Nick of Time, Elizabeth Grosz wants to make Darwinism relevant for feminism, and for critical studies in general. This is a challenging task: social Darwinism has often been associated with a conservative or reactionary agenda. Darwin’s epigones, from Herbert Spencer to Francis Galton, who applied his theories to society and to culture, posited the hierarchy of races and the survival of the fittest. They in turn influenced Nietzsche and his theory of the overman, who was picked up by Nazis and by white supremacists for their nihilistic agenda. There seems to be an inherent contradiction between Darwin’s idea of natural determinism and a progressive agenda that emphasizes equal rights and opportunities. This contradiction is based, according to Elizabeth Grosz, on misreadings of Darwin and a deformation of Nietzsche’s thought. Darwin and Nietzsche never said what some people made them to say. The solution, for her, is to go back to the original texts and to read them in the light of recent advances in the biological sciences and in social theory. In doing so, one not only lays the foundation of a progressive social agenda; reconciling biology and culture, nature and society, is also a way to put back the body, and the corporeal, back at the center of political theory and feminist struggle. As Grosz argues, “the exploration of life—traditionally the purview of the biological sciences—is a fundamental feminist political concern.”
There are two kinds of Asian studies on North-American campuses. The first, area studies of Asia, grew out of the Cold War and of the United States’ need to know its allies and enemies better. It is politically neutral, although some critics would consider it conservative in essence, due to its modalities of topic selection, standards of scholarship, sources of research funding, and practical applications. It focuses on the production of experts on a specific region of the world which is of strategic interest for the United States. It usually requires the mastery of at least one Asian language, acquired through years of painful learning and extended stays in the country being studied. Great scholars have contributed to the field and have led distinguished careers that have brought them into positions of leadership within and outside academia.
There is a tradition of contemporary Japanese philosophers drawing from anthropology (the names of Shinichi Nakazawa and Akira Asada come to mind). There is also a Japanese tradition of philosophical re-readings of Marx (with Kozo Uno or Makoto Itoh). I am interested in the first tradition. I regard the second as negligible. In The Structure of World History, Kojin Karatani combines the two approaches. He offers a broad synthesis on the origins of the state, the market, and the national community, based on the works of classical anthropologists. And he provides a close reading of Marx’s texts in order to construct his own philosophical system, encompassing the whole of human history. I found the first part based on anthropology most valuable. I only skipped through the second part. Below are a few reading notes and commentary intended to provided a cursory reading of Karatani’s book.
My strong belief is that this book will prove as important as the volume Writing Culture, published in 1986, which marked a turning point in the orientation of anthropological writing. This is not to say that anthropologists didn’t engage philosophy before Anthropologists Engage Philosophy, or that they will with renewed strength thereafter. Many classical anthropologists were trained as philosophers, especially in the French tradition where disciplinary borders are more porous. Pierre Bourdieu described his work in anthropology and sociology as “fieldwork in philosophy.” Nowadays “theory”, which samples a limited set of authors from contemporary philosophy, is part of the toolbox that every graduate student learns to master, and that they often repeat devotedly as a shibboleth that will grant them their PhD. What is striking in The Ground Between is the variety of authors that the contributors discuss, as well as the depth of their engagement, which goes beyond scholarly debates and is often set out in existential terms. For many anthropologists, philosophers are a life’s companion, helping them to navigate through the pitfalls of scholarship and the vicissitudes of life.
