UC Santa Cruz

Passing for Free, Passing for Sovereign examines the relationship between narratives of race and gender passing, histories of slavery that these narratives draw upon, and the hetero-nationalist imaginaries that they inform. Much of the scholarship on passing emphasizes the political and affective agency of “passers” to attain social mobility or escape racialized and gendered violence. However, this approach often pre-supposes an individual with autonomous and rational, liberal agency. It also leaves under-examined the accusation of passing itself. In contrast, this dissertation brings to the forefront accusations of passing as techniques of disciplining bodies and regulating populations in order to investigate the political assumptions embedded within them. It points to the ways the passing accusation has been institutionalized in a range of historical periods and spheres of activity including: positivist science, which centers the human as the knowing and unveiling subject; law and its role in defining free, liberal individuals and their belonging to the nation; and Enlightenment philosophy that posits an ethics based on rational universalism. It concludes by asking after the grounds for an ethical form of knowing not tethered to the anti-black epistemologies of passing but instead rooted in epistemologies of abolition.