The essay focuses on the uses and significance of the trope of passing, as both theme and literary strategy, in African American fiction from the 19th to the 21st century. Passing as a theme pushed the boundaries of arbitrary, but operative, racial dichotomies, while passing as a literary strategy enabled radical experimentation with novelistic conventions. African American writers revised the tragic mulatta and mulatto characters by articulating a black-centered racial imaginary that infused the trope of passing with profound political and literary relevance. Deploying the high visibility of all-but-white characters as a screen to introduce new figures in American literature, they advanced a far from monolithic understanding of blackness that foregrounded its intraracial diversification and intersection with gender and class. African American writers adopted the trope of passing in order to expose the sociopolitical construction of “race,” unsettle prevailing racial epistemologies of blackness, popularize a more complex racial imaginary, and teach self-consciously critical modes of reading literature and, by extension, reality. Through a diachronic approach, the essay shows how the trope of passing was repurposed in different literary-historical periods and how it retains its relevance as a malleable literary strategy of cultural and political intervention.

This chapter considers Bahktin’s theories of the novel not only as heteroglossic but as defining this as a genre of overhearing or snooping about private life in a public form. It contributes to an emergent body of scholarship on the sonic in African American literature that newly attends to the ways in which other literary texts not merely were models in a by-now thoroughly debunked dismissal of Black aesthetics as imitative but were inscribed as “overhead.” Both the early African American novel and slave narratives politicized this defining generic characteristic, exposing the “compromised privacy and surveilled speech” endemic to slavery as preconditions of “insurgent listening.” Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents of the Life of a Slave Girl, Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave, Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends, Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig, and Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative are read through an attention to the sonic and overhearing that reveals the novel as both a contested genre and a way of “representing contested space and power.” Overhearing stages a dialectical politics of withholding and risky disclosure, the policing and violations the aural made possible, and the emergence of the early African American novel from this nexus of “a space of ‘conflicted listening.’”