This chapter focuses on the Black body in the narrative genre of passing literature, which combines issues of embodiment with those of visuality. It begins by arguing that, whereas recent literary culture habituates us to immediacy, access, and confession, the passing plot operates on different terms. At a moment when many artists and critics are arguing for the importance of opacity to relational frameworks, the passing plot comes into focus as a special testing ground for viewing racialized embodiment and ethical sociality in fresh ways. The chapter goes on to argue that just as the passing plot proves a rich container for considering the ethics of relation, dramatic literature offers a particularly productive platform for considering passing literature today. My case study for these claims is Branden Jacob-Jenkins’s play An Octoroon (2014). A metatheatrical riff on a prominent nineteenth-century melodrama called The Octoroon (1859), the play avoids conveying some intimate truth about racial embodiment – the secret ostensibly kept by the passing figure – in order to offer new opportunities for Jacobs-Jenkins’s audience to become aware of their embodied participation in acts of racialization.

This chapter places race and disability in dialogue to highlight the complex, often contradictory, negotiations of exclusionary discourse within sensation narratives of the 1860s. The first half of the chapter discusses Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The ital Octoroon (1861–62), as a sensational text which places issues of race center stage and demonstrates how racial rhetoric is encoded through melodrama. Through exploiting the heightened topicality of racial questions in the midst of public discussions about the American Civil War, the novel exposes contradictory constructions of racial difference in the decade and implicitly displaces and elides British imperial violence. Issues of miscegenation and hybridity are analyzed in relation to the “octoroon fever” of the 1860s, before moving to a consideration of the ways in which contemporary discourses of race and mental disability converge in the slave figure, Tristan. The final part of the chapter extends this analysis of the constitutive relationship of race and disability in two of Wilkie Collins’s major novels of this no quote marks. Ital. all titles decade, Armadale (1866) and The Moonstone (1868).

If there was no Civil War drama written during the conflict, there was an active theater culture thriving before, during, and after the war, one represented most clearly in American melodrama. Tracing the particular genealogy of racial melodrama from before the Civil War to the beginnings of Black Lives Matter, this chapter discovers the way in which playwrights have deployed and manipulated melodrama’s black-or-white aesthetic mode both to retrench and to reimagine Black and white racial relations. From sensational melodramas before the war, through conservative ones after it, to radical ones today, racial melodrama has a long genealogy. Recovering this genealogy allows us to witness how the American theater played a crucial role in not only staging this country’s fraught racial relations for audiences, but also inviting these audiences—from the nineteenth century to today—to think and feel differently about the unfinished racial drama of the American Civil War.