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Podcast: In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Episode: Lipika Pelham, "Passing: An Alternative History of Identity" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Description: A slave woman in 1840s America dresses as a white, disabled man to escape to freedom, while a twenty-first-century black rights activist is 'cancelled' for denying her whiteness. A Victorian explorer disguises himself as a Muslim in Arabia's forbidden holy city. A trans man claiming to have been assigned male at birth is exposed and murdered by bigots in 1993. Today, Japanese untouchables leave home and change their name.All of them have "passed," performing or claiming an identity that society hasn't assigned or recognized as theirs. For as long as we've drawn lines describing ourselves and each...