(In)Visible Bodies: Rewriting the Politics of Passing in Incognegro, a Graphic Mystery by Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece

How can passing across racial lines be described and conveyed in the comics form? Can the medium develop specific strategies to comment on the themes of transgression and crossing inherent to the trope of passing? This paper shows how the graphic novel Incognegro (2008) goes beyond the traditional socio-historical analysis of passing and plays thematically, generically, and visually with the politics of the trope. Incognegro, set in the US in the early 1930s, depicts a light-skinned African American reporter who passes for white in order to investigate lynchings of blacks in the deep South. Because white papers do not consider these events to be news, the reporter condemns these dreadful acts in the column titled “Incognegro” that he writes for a New York-based newspaper, The New Holland Herald. Thus he risks his life using his “passing abilities” to protect the rights of the community he is trying to defend from white hegemony. In this way, Incognegro challenges the conventional tragic mulatto figure that passes for white to avoid racism and violence or to improve his/her social status. In addition, it echoes the common black trickster figure who practices “masking” to outwit his enemies or opponents, and calls into question the biological, social, and cultural representations of race as perceived by the white dominant group. Here the racial passer functions as an “outsider from within” who can challenge the black vs. white binary model. Moreover, the text subverts narrative paradigms from superhero comics and detective fiction to point out the arbitrariness of racial ideologies and the fallibility of notions of justice and truth. This subversion is further complicated by the comic’s “color free” art (black and white, sans halftones or gray tones), which defies essentialist representations of race. In sum, Incognegro argues that the ambiguities of racial categorization are best represented through a similarly ambiguous literary genre—one that not only challenges generic norms and traditions but also “writes back” to both the mainstream and alternative wings of American comics production.