Speakers: Lipika Pelham, Matthew Stadlen

A slave woman in 1840s America dresses as a white, disabled man to escape to freedom; 170 years later a black rights activist is ‘cancelled’ for denying her whiteness. From Pope Joan to Parasite, as long as we’ve drawn lines describing ourselves and each other, people have naturally fallen or deliberately stepped between them. In Passing: An Alternative History of Identity, award-winning BBC journalist and filmmaker Lipika Pelham reflects on tales of fluidity and transformation, including her own as a Bengali-Indian-Bangladeshi with a Hindu-Muslim background, who now speaks Hebrew after her eight years in Jerusalem. In conversation with broadcaster Matthew Stadlen.