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From Dangerous Rites of Passing to Staging Oneself in a Multicultural America: _The Human Stain_ and _Native Speaker_

This chapter aims at answering several questions. What does passing portend about the historicity of the construct of "race"? What are the semantics of passing as a predominant stake in a black-white game? Does "race" affect a much wider spectrum of identities than the Black and White ones? The author compares the strategies and the effects of passing in Philip Roth's novel _The Human Stain_ and Chang-rae Lee's _Native Speaker_. While Roth's approach to passing relies on the notions of guilt and betrayal as constructed in the Greek and the Shakespearean tragedies, Lee's more decidedly postmodernist strategy relies on the ironic signifying and culminates with the invalidation of the notions of black and white, the boundaries between them and subsequently, all racial categories. Paradoxically, passing does not make race an irrelevant category in American society. On the contrary, race continues to be a major mechanism in the functioning of American society.

The Human Stain, Native Speaker, Philip Roth, Chang-rae Lee, passing, multiculuralism, Blackness, whiteness

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