From Necessity to Possibility

This article applies theories of fragmented postmodern identity and Heidegger’s modes of existence and concept of historicality to the issue of passing and traces the treatment of that motif across six African American novels that move from the largely realistic perspective of the 19th century to the subjectivist perspective of the early 20th century. These novels thus foreshadow the postmodernist questioning of the basis of discrete personal identity. The article claims that, across these novels, the act of passing and its relationship to human identity through time and historical circumstance becomes problematized from a necessary tool for escaping slavery, and so sustaining identity in its most basic form as life itself, to a potential existential dilemma of identity as a matter of authenticity and possibility. The article further discusses whether the individual is constrained by his or her background, especially, by race itself, or is a totally free, ungrounded agent.