The Crossroads of Race: Racial Passing, Profiling, and Legal Mobility in Twentieth-Century African American Literature and Culture

This dissertation analyzes a set of literary, legal, journalistic, and cinematic discourses produced between 1896 and the dawn of the twenty-first century to argue that racial passing and racial profiling have historically been competing yet mutually constitutive practices: the person who "passes" avoids and lives in fear of profiling; likewise, technologies of profiling develop in response to strategies of racial dissimulation or disguise. Each dissertation chapter does the work of establishing the direct connection between these two practices, and argues that they are bound together by law. The project begins with an analysis of the 1896 Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which establishes a foundational intersection of passing and profiling. Each subsequent chapter is developed around its historical relationship to other landmark United Sates Supreme Court cases. This historical-legal framework, then, allows analysis of the role that passing has played in the production of African American literature and culture, but it also establishes the activity's importance to American culture. Throughout, it is argued that racial passing narratives must be understood alongside the practice of racial profiling to appreciate how the literary genre continues to evolve and be redeployed for political purposes.nThe project attempts to make sense of the vexed relationship between racial passing and racial profiling. Moreover, "The Crossroads of Race" establishes a lexicon for navigating African American literary production and concerns, as well as an archive which acknowledges the broad implications African American literature has for American culture. Through bringing together different sets of texts and different tools, African American and American literature and culture can be fleshed out and put into converstation in more meaningful and productive ways.