This chapter examines the enduring significance of religion as a category of identity in contemporary U.S. society, analysing the ways in which religious discourse overlaps with raced and gendered identities in two novels by contemporary German American-Ojibway writer Louise Erdrich: Tracks (1988) and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001). Perhaps because of scholars' profound commitment to anti-essentialism from the 1980s on, race and gender, as categories that have been historically conceived as rooted in the body, have received the most attention. Erdrich's preoccupation with religious identity is mapped upon the bodies of two women who pass in order to take up their Catholic vocations. In her comprehensive study of tranvestism, Marjorie Garber warns against restricting discussions of cross-dressing ‘to the context of an emerging gay and lesbian identity’. For her, the cross-dresser represents a ‘third term’ that ‘questions binary thinking and introduces crisis’ and which ‘puts in question the idea of one: of identity, self-sufficiency, self-knowledge’. In Tracks and The Last Report, the category in crisis is Catholicism.

Passing is typically associated with a period stretching from post-Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement (the 1890s to the 1960s) or, even more specifically, yoked to the years of the Harlem Renaissance. According to Gayle Wald, by the time John Howard Griffin's memoir, Black Like Me, appeared in 1961, ‘passing was already beginning to “pass” out of style for African Americans, going the way of Jim Crow buses and segregated lunch counters’. This book examines texts in which protagonists not only play at racial and gender identities, but where authors play on the boundaries between novel and other types of textual production, between fiction and history, between novelistic genres, between author(ial persona) and protagonist. It analyses novels that pass as memoirs, as well as narratives whose dramatic impetus often derives from embedded documentation: letters, emails, poems, medical reports, dictionary or encyclopaedia entries. The book argues that passing and postmodernism make compatible bedfellows, and that only by revealing the instability of the category of blackness can the equation of ‘race’ with ‘blackness’ be disputed and ultimately dismantled.

In her famous defence of Bill Clinton, Toni Morrison articulated succinctly the question with which all standard racial passing narratives wrestle: if blackness is not physically manifest, then what is it? A form of behaviour? A state of mind? A set of cultural affiliations? Conversely, if blackness is physically apparent but the behaviour/state of mind/cultural affiliations do not accompany this, is the subject still ‘black’? This chapter analyses Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle (1996) and Philip Roth's The Human Stain (2000), neither of which fits easily within the ‘standard racial pass’ (black-to-white) and ‘reverse racial pass’ (white-to-black) schema that Phillip Brian Harper elucidates: the first, because it features an African American protagonist who passes to become black(er); the second, because it foregrounds black-for-Jewish passing. Both Gunnar Kaufman from The White Boy Shuffle and Coleman Silk from The Human Stain grapple with the weight of their genealogy and ancestors. Both rely on their bodies as a key site of self-definition through their commitment to their respective sports (basketball; boxing). Both are, moreover, committed writers.

This chapter examines contemporary first-person fictions of adolescence in which the protagonists' adolescence, as an in-between stage that is not childhood and not adulthood, is inextricably bound up with other indeterminacies mapped upon their bodies, especially those of race and gender. Danzy Senna's Caucasia (1998) and Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex (2002) invoke the alienating experience of adolescence as a lens through which to refract their protagonists' ‘othered’ bodies. Crucially, in both novels, the protagonists engage, with varying degrees of commitment and success, in the act of creative writing, which serves to reflect back inevitably upon the authorship of the novels themselves. In Caucasia, non-normative gender and sexual identities accompany the subject's racial in-betweenness, while in Middlesex, indeterminacy of sexual orientation and ethnicity go hand in hand with the protagonist's ambiguously gendered body. Caucasia is a contemporary novel of racial passing, while Middlesex is not ‘about’ gender passing in the strictest sense, for its protagonist is intersexed.

In his satirical response to the controversies involving J. T. LeRoy and James Frey, Tim Carvell makes explicit the connections between the acts of passing and writing. This is due in no small part to the fact that the visual economies of race and gender are transliterated onto the book jacket he describes in the form of an author photograph. This chapter examines three recent controversies of authorship in which the connection between the contemporary fascination with the theme of passing and authorial concealment, subterfuge and deception becomes glaringly evident. The first is the exposure of LeRoy as a ‘fake’; the second, the ‘embellishments’ Frey added to his memoir of drug and alcohol addiction, A Million Little Pieces (2005); and the third, the passing of a middle-class white woman, Margaret Seltzer, as Margaret B. Jones, a working-class ‘mixedblood’, in authoring a ghetto memoir entitled Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival (2008). In producing embellished or ‘fake’ memoirs, itself a form of (auto)biography, the authors in question also engage in acts of racial and gender passing.

This chapter focuses on contemporary fiction that deploys passing plots in order to consider the act of writing, in particular, examining texts which invoke passing at both a narrative and meta-narrative level in order to reflect upon the politics of the literary marketplace. It looks at two African American novels: Percival Everett's Erasure (2001) and Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative (2002). In Erasure, the attempt to resolve the seemingly incompatible demands of autobiography and sociology, and the facility with which ‘authenticity’ may be faked, are evident in the publicity surrounding the appearance of Juanita Mae Jenkins's book, We's Lives in Da Ghetto.