Ithaca College

Derek Adams, Assistant Professor of English, has published an essay in the collection Neo-Passing:  Performing Identity after Jim Crow, edited by Mollie Godfrey and Vershawn Young.  Adams' essay is entitled "The Pass of Least Resistance:  Sexual Orientation and Race in ZZ Packer's 'Drinking Coffee Elsewhere'."

Adams' essay examines the title story from Packer's 2003 debut collection Drinking Coffee Elsewhere.  The story follows the protagonist Dina, who has arrived for her freshman year at Yale University after growing up in an inner-city neighborhood in Baltimore.  Dina's experience with both Yale as an institution and with her classmates forces her to navigate and to reconsider facets of her identity that, Adams suggests, she may not previously have confronted.  Adams argues that the story reveals a number of crucial yet subtle ways in which evolving senses of both racial and sexual identity are negotiated through the narrative logic of "passing," which serves both to highlight and to efface different elements of Dina's subjectivity.

The essays in Neo-Passing explore a series of new practices and theories of "passing" that encompass multiple aspects of individual and collective identity, and chart the evolution of such practices since the end of the Jim Crown era in the U.S. in the 1960s.  The collection is now available from the University of Illinois Press.