Online conference hosted by the University of Liège, Belgium, and Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany

 

Keynote Speakers   |   Programme   |   Conference Outline   |   Registration

 

Keynote Speakers

Pamela L. Caughie (Loyola University Chicago, USA)

Keynote address: “On the Ethics of Passing, Still and Again”

Read the abstract here.

Pamela L. Caughie (she/her/hers) is Professor of English and Women’s Studies and Gender Studies at Loyola University Chicago. A former president of the Modernist Studies Association, Professor Caughie is a feminist and gender theorist whose research and teaching focus on modernist and postmodernist literatures and culture. She is author of two monographs, Passing and Pedagogy: The Dynamics of Responsibility (1999) and Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism (1991), has edited three additional works, and published nearly four dozen articles and book chapters. Over the past decade Professor Caughie has become increasingly involved in the digital humanities, serving as a co-editor of Woolf Online (www.woolfonline.com); co-director of Modernist Networks (www.modnets.org); and Project Director for the Lili Elbe Digital Archive (www.lilielbe.org), a companion to her most recent book publication, Man into Woman: A Comparative Scholarly Edition (2020), co-edited with Sabine Meyer.

 

Lipika Pelham (author, documentary filmmaker, and journalist)

Keynote address: “Un-belonged: Ambiguous Boundaries of Self-definition of an Ex-colonised”

Read the abstract here.

Lipika Pelham is a historian, journalist, filmmaker and the author of Passing: An Alternative History of Identity (2021), Jerusalem on the Amstel: The Quest for Zion in the Dutch Republic (2019), Conversations across Place (2021), and The Unlikely Settler (2014). She works as a producer/reporter/regional editor in the BBC World Service Newsroom, frequently appearing on TV and radio commenting on South Asian and Arab-Israeli affairs. She also makes long-form documentaries for the BBC, including for the flagship programmes Assignment and Heart & Soul. In the 1990s and 2000s, Lipika Pelham reported for the BBC from the Middle East, North Africa, Asia and made several award-winning documentary films, including Deadly Honour, about honour killing in Israel. Her essays and reports have appeared in The New York Times, BBC Online, The Guardian, Daily Beast, Tikkun magazine, Haaretz, The Times of Israel. She is currently a doctoral researcher at the University of Westminster, London, completing a commentary on her book, Jerusalem on the Amstel: The Quest for Zion in the Dutch Republic, which has been selected for a History PhD by Published Work.

 

Suzanne Scafe (University of Brighton, UK)

Keynote address: “Power, Play and Multi-Directional Passing in Jamaican/Diasporic Contexts”

Read the abstract here.

Suzanne Scafe is a Visiting Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Brighton. Her recent work includes essays and book chapters on Caribbean literary history, affect, empathy and ethics in contemporary Caribbean prose fiction, and Caribbean diasporic literature. She has written extensively on Black British women’s literary fiction, life writing, and poetry. She is the co-editor of a collection of essays, I Am Black/White/Yellow: The Black Body in Europe (2007) and several special issues of peer reviewed journals including two special issues of Feminist Review entitled Creolization and Affect (2013) and Black British Feminisms (2014); a special issue on Caribbean Women’s short fiction for the journal Short Fiction in Theory and Practice (2016), and special issues of the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies (2019) and Africa and Black Diaspora: An International Journal (June 2020). She was the Principal Investigator for an Arts and Humanities Council (UK) Research Network grant entitled African-Caribbean Women’s Mobility and Self-Fashioning in Post-Diaspora Contexts (2016-18) and is currently completing a monograph on ethical criticism.

Programme

Times mentioned in the programme are Central European Summer Time (Brussels).

 

Thursday 12 May 2022

 

10.00–10.15 Welcome and opening remarks

10.15–11.15 PANEL SESSION 1, Australian Passings

Chair: Valérie-Anne Belleflamme (University of Liège, Belgium) / Tech moderator: Jana-Katharina Mende

Victoria Herche (University of Cologne, Germany), “Postcolonial Passing and the Ethics of Mobility in the Works of Ivan Sen”

Claudia Davidson-Novosivschei (Independent Scholar, Romania), “Reverse Passing in Peter Carey’s A Long Way from Home”

 

11.15–11.30 Break

11.30–12.30 KEYNOTE ADDRESS 1

Chair: Rebecca Romdhani (University of Liège, Belgium) / Tech moderator: Jana-Katharina Mende

Suzanne Scafe (University of Brighton, UK), “Power, Play and Multi-Directional Passing in Jamaican/Diasporic Contexts”

 

12.30–14.00 Break in virtual Wonder room

 

14.00–15.30 PANEL SESSION 2, Passing and Performance

Chair: Daria Tunca (University of Liège, Belgium) / Tech moderator: Jana-Katharina Mende

Tehmina Pirzada (Texas A&M University, Qatar), “‘She Will Be a Boy’: Gender Passing and Emancipated Spectatorship in Baran and Osama”

Izuu Nwankwọ (Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany), “‘Press Their Mumu Button’: Converse Passing and Reiterations of Power/Privilege in Western Embodiments of Africa(ns)”

Rowland Chukwuemeka Amaefula (Alex Ekwueme Federal University, Ndufu-Alike, Nigeria), “Passing and Protest in Bobrisky’s Transgender Acts on Social Media”

15.30–16.00 Break in virtual Wonder room

16.00–17.00 PANEL SESSION 3, American Passings

Chair: M'Balia Thomas (Kansas University, USA) / Tech moderator: Daria Tunca

Sarah Back (Leopold Franzens University, Innsbruck, Austria), “‘Why Wouldn’t You Be White If You Could Be . . . She Had Just Made the Rational Decision”: An Intersectional Investigation of the Ethics of Passing in Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half”

Gail Lukasik (author, Illinois, USA), “Identity Passing: White Like Her: My Family’s Story of Race and Racial Passing”

17.00–17.45 Break in Wonder room

17.45–18.45 KEYNOTE ADDRESS 2

Chair: Rebecca Romdhani (University of Liège, Belgium) / Tech moderator: Jana-Katharina Mende

Pamela L. Caughie (Loyola University Chicago, USA), “On the Ethics of Passing, Still and Again”

 

Friday 13 May 2022

 

11.00–12.00 PANEL SESSION 4, Passing and Transfers

Chair: Valérie Bada (University of Liège, Belgium) / Tech moderator: Daria Tunca

Eva Ulrike Pirker (Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf, Germany), “Desires of Passing: Perspectives on (Self-)translation in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s The Last Gift”

Beate Sommerfeld (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland), “Passing: The Fluid Identity of Translators”

12.00–13.30 Break in Wonder room

13.30–14.30 PANEL SESSION 5, Passing and Movement

Chair: Victoria Herche (University of Cologne, Germany) / Tech moderator: Daria Tunca

Jana-Katharina Mende (Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg, Germany), “‘Who Am I and If So, How Many?’ Passing as a Narratological Strategy in Modern German Postmigrant Literature”

Maryam Mirza (Durham University, UK), “Class Passing and Erotic Resistance in Wajiha Tabassum’s “Utran” (“Cast-offs”) and Ru Freeman’s A Disobedient Girl”

14.30–15.45 Break in Wonder room

15.45–17.15 PANEL SESSION 6, Limitations and Extensions of Passing

Chair: Izuu Nwankwọ (Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany) / Tech moderator: Jana-Katharina Mende

Daria Tunca (University of Liège, Belgium), “Passing in Zadie Smith’s NW” 

Alice Poncelet (University of Liège, Belgium), “The Limitations of Passing in Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani”

Rebecca Romdhani (University of Liège, Belgium), “Passing in Whose Eyes? The Hubris of Human Intelligence in André Alexis’s Fifteen Dogs”

17.15–18.00 Break in Wonder room

18.00–19.00 KEYNOTE ADDRESS 3 [FREE PUBLIC EVENT]

Chair: Daria Tunca (University of Liège, Belgium) / Tech moderator: Jana-Katharina Mende

Lipika Pelham (author, London, UK), “Un-belonged: Ambiguous Boundaries of Self-definition of an Ex-colonised”

Conference Outline

January 2021 saw the premiere of the adaptation of Crucian-Danish-American Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing at the Sundance Film Festival. Racial passing in the USA, both as lived experience and as it is represented in the arts, has been one of the most frequently analysed forms of passing, along with the Jewish experience of passing as non-Jewish during the Nazi regime. In Passing: An Alternative History of Identity (2021), Lipika Pelham offers a fresh perspective on such widely studied cases through placing them alongside lesser known real and fictional accounts from around the globe in a thought-provoking way. Her selection includes examples of caste, gender, and sexuality passing in India, religious and ethnic passing between Palestine and Israel, and racial passing in South Africa, Brazil, and Britain. While, in the stories documented by Pelham, passing is sometimes portrayed as an experience of “self-invention, rebirth and opportunity,” it also often entails “loneliness, alienation, uncertainty and terror” (80).

In the field of postcolonial studies, analyses of passing in creative writing and film (outside the USA) have so far consisted of isolated articles, many of them focusing on a single form of passing, even when multiple forms are at play simultaneously. The complexities involved in the lived experiences and representations of postcolonial passings, whether comparative and/or intersectional, are yet to be investigated in depth.

As Pamela L. Caughie reminds us in Passing and Pedagogy: The Dynamics of Responsibility (1999), passing has traditionally been studied employing one of two positions. The binary logic of identity distinguishes between authenticity and fraudulence: one is either x or y. Claudia Mills in her article “Passing: The Ethics of Pretending to Be What You Are Not” (1999) argues that the social privilege of certain groups and the oppression of others are the central motivating factors in a person’s need to pass. However, this is challenged by cases of reverse passing such as those of Rachel Dolezal and Jessica Krug, white and Jewish American women who passed for black for apparently different reasons: Dolezal claims to be transracial and Krug maintains it was an attempt to escape trauma. In contrast to the binary logic, the double logic of identity views identity as complex and layered; passing is therefore a social practice that is a performative strategic intervention rather than an act of self-denial or inauthenticity. In this sense, the passer does not abandon one identity for another, but rather creates their identity through performance: identity is what one does. Thus, for example, following Kelby Harrison in Sexual Deceit: The Ethics of Passing (2013), there is no difference between being x or passing for x, as both perform social scripts attributed to x. While this double logic has been welcomed for presenting a more fluid approach to identity that deconstructs socially ingrained categories such as race or gender, Caughie in her book calls attention to what cultural theorists have viewed as the problematic potential of such fluidity, as it leads to “the collapse of categories, to the levelling of distinctions, and thus the ‘disappearing’,” in the case of race, “of actual black people” (22). Consequently, the erasure of distinctions that have historically been invoked to oppress certain categories of people may be used to delegitimize rights-based discourses.

Theorists do converge in stressing the importance of geographical and socio-political contexts in manifestations of passing, whose intricacies lend themselves particularly well to artistic explorations. This is strikingly illustrated in Suzanne Scafe’s 2020 analysis of Mojisola Adebayo’s Moj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey (2008), a one-woman performance that stages the story of Ellen Craft who, in the nineteenth century, fled enslavement in the American South by passing as a white disabled gentleman, with her husband posing as her servant. Analysing this instance of quadruple passing – race, gender, class, and able-bodiedness – recorded in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860) and reimagined by Adebayo, Scafe astutely shows how Craft, whose enslavement defined her as an ungendered non-subject, reclaimed her subjectivity by conforming to conventional gender categories from which enslaved people were excluded. As Craft’s complex story shows, context plays an important role in how subjectivity is asserted and in how identity is performed, both in real life and in writing. This idea applies across different genres, including speculative fiction and film, which often probe not only identity but also what it means to be human, inhuman, superhuman, transhuman, or subhuman, which are explored in figures such as the zombie, the vampire, or the anthropomorphic robot, all of whom may pass or fail to pass as human, or complicate notions of what is human or the identity category for which human/non-human is a metaphor.

Caughie contends that passing is a frequent practice in many people’s lives. For example, she questions whether teaching a literature from another culture is to perform as an authority, hence to pass: “How can we teach that which we do not know?” (124). Pelham for her part asks whether creative writing itself is not a form of passing in which authors pass as narrators and characters. Such discussions raise questions over the multiple forms of passing that may occur in the creation, translation, reading, analysis, and teaching of postcolonial literatures and film. Passing in pedagogical settings has also been at the centre of a recent controversy in the USA, following an Asian-American professor’s decision to show his class the 1965 film version of Othello, in which Lawrence Olivier performs in blackface. In response to the outrage, some shared Fred Moten’s article “Letting Go of Othello” (2019) on social media, a piece in which Moten argues that the use of blackface in the film may actually call attention to the fact that the character Othello is consciously performing (therefore, passing) and that he is also the creation of a white man’s imagination. This prompts Moten to ask a provocative question: “Isn’t it absolutely appropriate, then, that a white actor should enact […] a white fantasy of blackness?” While Moten is here thinking within the binary logic of identity, writers such as Lionel Shriver and Bernadine Evaristo, by contrast, position themselves in favour of the more fluid double logic when, questioned by Pelham, they defend a writer’s right to inhabit characters whose identities differ from their own. Extending the idea of writing as passing, one might even wonder whether forms of reading that involve identification with narrators or characters may not similarly adopt strategies of passing, thus raising further ethical quandaries.

These reflections lead to a series of questions. What do intersectional and/or comparative readings of passing tell us about identity and about the specific socio-political context in which passing occurs? What happens when writers, narrators, readers, and translators are viewed as passers? Do traditional postcolonial theories of mimicry, hybridity, and creolization help to elucidate theories of passing or, conversely, do they challenge or complicate them? Is a “postcolonial” identity, whether applied to a person, character, or writer, yet another form of performance? Those who work in postcolonial studies are often assumed to be committed to an anticolonial, decolonial, anti-racist ideology in their lives rather than merely in their profession. Is being a postcolonial academic an identity that is authentic or fraudulent, or is it merely a performative role as any other? Does the duration in which one passes matter to the theorization of identity?

Possible topics explored include, but are not limited to:

• Identity passings (religion, gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, caste, nationality, disability, being human)
• Ideological passings (religion, political views, philosophical stance)
• Voluntary and involuntary passings
• Permanent or temporary passings
• Passing vs. reverse passing
• Passing as a positive or negative experience
• The ethics of passing
• Comparative passings (different literary traditions, different characters, different forms)
• Writers, readers, critics as passers
• Translation: is a translator passing as a writer, a narrator, a character, and/or a cultural insider?
• Linguistics: passing as a native speaker, a competent speaker, a speaker of another language; multilingual language practices (style shifting, register shifting, code-switching)
• Passing in the digital world
• Passing and the law: undocumented migrants passing as legal citizens; unlawful passings

Papers will be delivered in English.

Convenors:
Rebecca Romdhani and Daria Tunca (postcolonial research centre CEREP, University of Liège)
Jana-Katharina Mende (Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany)

Member of the organizing committee:
Laura Gerday (postcolonial research centre CEREP, University of Liège)

A PDF version of the call for papers is available here.

Registration

Ordinary rate, two days: 20 euros

Ordinary rate, one day: 12 euros

Concession rate,* two days: 12 euros

Concession rate,* one day: 6 euros 

* This category includes: unwaged participants (incl. students); scholars from Africa, Eastern Europe, the Caribbean, Central and South America, and South Asia.

Attendance is free for ULiège staff and students.


Registration is now open. If you wish to register, please send an email to PocoPassings@uliege.be with the following information:

- Your name and the email address that you will be using to attend the event;

- Which day(s) you will be attending, or whether you only wish to register for the free public event at the end of the conference;

- If the name appearing on the bank account used for payment does not match the name of the person who is registering, please inform us of the name on the bank account.

 

Payment is to be made out to:

Colloque DPP, c/o Daria Tunca

IBAN: BE35 3400 9045 2437

BIC/SWIFT: BBRUBEBB

Address of the bank: ING, Rue du Fort, 3, 4671 Barchon, Belgium

 

Enquiries can be sent to: PocoPassings@uliege.be