A key concern in postwar America was ""who's passing for whom?""
Analyzing representations of passing in Hollywood films reveals
changing cultural ideas about authenticity and identity in a
country reeling from a hot war and moving towards a cold one. After
World War II, passing became an important theme in Hollywood
movies, one that lasted throughout the long 1950s, as it became a
metaphor to express postwar anxiety. The potent, imagined fear of
passing linked the language and anxieties of identity to other
postwar concerns, including cultural obsessions about threats from
within. Passing created an epistemological conundrum that
threatened to destabilize all forms of identity, not just the
longstanding American color line separating white and black. In the
imaginative fears of postwar America, identity was under siege on
all fronts. Not only were there blacks passing as whites, but women
were passing as men, gays passing as straight, communists passing
as good Americans, Jews passing as gentiles, and even aliens
passing as humans (and vice versa). Fears about communist
infiltration, invasion by aliens, collapsing gender and sexual
categories, racial ambiguity, and miscegenation made their way into
films that featured narratives about passing. N. Megan Kelley shows
that these films transcend genre, discussing Gentleman's Agreement,
Home of the Brave, Pinky, Island in the Sun, My Son John, Invasion
of the Body-Snatchers, I Married a Monster from Outer Space, Rebel
without a Cause, Vertigo, All about Eve, and Johnny Guitar, among
others. Representations of passing enabled Americans to express
anxieties about who they were and who they imagined their neighbors
to be. By showing how pervasive the anxiety about passing was, and
how it extended to virtually every facet of identity, Projections
of Passing broadens the literature on passing in a fundamental way.
It also opens up important counter-narratives about postwar America
and how the language of identity developed in this critical period
of American history.
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