This chapter focuses on the Black body in the narrative genre of passing literature, which combines issues of embodiment with those of visuality. It begins by arguing that, whereas recent literary culture habituates us to immediacy, access, and confession, the passing plot operates on different terms. At a moment when many artists and critics are arguing for the importance of opacity to relational frameworks, the passing plot comes into focus as a special testing ground for viewing racialized embodiment and ethical sociality in fresh ways. The chapter goes on to argue that just as the passing plot proves a rich container for considering the ethics of relation, dramatic literature offers a particularly productive platform for considering passing literature today. My case study for these claims is Branden Jacob-Jenkins’s play An Octoroon (2014). A metatheatrical riff on a prominent nineteenth-century melodrama called The Octoroon (1859), the play avoids conveying some intimate truth about racial embodiment – the secret ostensibly kept by the passing figure – in order to offer new opportunities for Jacobs-Jenkins’s audience to become aware of their embodied participation in acts of racialization.

Structural racism requires racialized economic agents. Racial identities are a strategically determined social norm, designed for governing differential access to resources, especially wealth, power, and information, as well as protection from other-group antagonism. When applied to the labor market, the differential power of racial groups means that racial identity is a sorting mechanism, such that persons of otherwise equal productive capacity will have racially differential access to employment, compensation, promotion, training, and the probability of layoff according to the manager–worker identity match. Racial identity norms evolve from social interactions between and among persons of alternative ancestral groups. Within these interactions persons select strategies that strengthen or weaken racial identity norms. These social interactions increase the productivity of persons if they are mutually altruistic. Mutually antagonistic social interactions reduce each person’s productivity. Racialization is an ongoing process of social and economic evolution. Self-identification and labeling conventions are social norms that emerge to distinguish social groups. Both actual and perceived skin shade and other physical differences are imprecise and subjective.

The 1980s saw a shift in Black women’s literary production on and about Jamaica and its transnational relationship to the United States and Canada in particular. While these texts are largely set in Jamaica, they received acclaim among an international audience. This chapter offers a dialogue between dramaturgical reading and the Jamaican concept of ruination, evaluating how adopting the form of play text and dramatic writing aids in the creation of Black feminist writing on Jamaica’s place in the transnational imagination in North America. By mirroring both play text and production, a form that is always under the threat of temporal evaporation and erasure at the end of performance, a dramaturgical reading of these texts will evaluate how dramaturgical methods also serve as an apt analogy for the workings of ruination (something that is at once so fecund and rich that it resists all attempts at the imposition of permanence).

[12.1] An Act is passed when the final stage of the enactment process is completed. It may not come into operation for some time after it is passed. It may come into operation wholly at the one time or in stages over a period.

This chapter examines the distinctions made between slaves and free persons in Greek law, politics, religion and civic ideology. It also explores the ways that slaves subverted these distinctions in everyday life and thereby exposes their artificiality.

This chapter considers the prominence of the Bildungsroman in the Harlem Renaissance. Classically structured around the tension between self-fulfillment and social acclimation, the genre became an important site for African American authors to consider the Jim Crow logics of what childhood and maturation meant in the USA. It was also the vehicle for many of the Renaissance’s explorations of the multiple meanings of education – both education for race leadership, and conversely what W. E. B. Du Bois called the “caste schooling” system designed to replicate white hegemony. The genre also has a close relationship to the passing novel in a social situation where normative narratives of success and achievement were coded as racially white. The chapter focuses on Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter and Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun, but includes discussion of fiction by Nella Larsen, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Wallace Thurman.