A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life - Brossura

Hobbs, Allyson

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0674659929 ISBN 13: 9780674659926

Casa editrice: Harvard Univ Pr, 2016

Riassunto

Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. It was, as Allyson Hobbs writes, a chosen exile, a separation from one racial identity and the leap into another. This revelatory history of passing explores the possibilities and challenges that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions. It also tells a tale of loss.

As racial relations in America have evolved so has the significance of passing. To pass as white in the antebellum South was to escape the shackles of slavery. After emancipation, many African Americans came to regard passing as a form of betrayal, a selling of one’s birthright. When the initially hopeful period of Reconstruction proved short-lived, passing became an opportunity to defy Jim Crow and strike out on one’s own.

Although black Americans who adopted white identities reaped benefits of expanded opportunity and mobility, Hobbs helps us to recognize and understand the grief, loneliness, and isolation that accompanied—and often outweighed—these rewards. By the dawning of the civil rights era, more and more racially mixed Americans felt the loss of kin and community was too much to bear, that it was time to “pass out” and embrace a black identity. Although recent decades have witnessed an increasingly multiracial society and a growing acceptance of hybridity, the problem of race and identity remains at the center of public debate and emotionally fraught personal decisions.

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Recensione

"With remarkable research and deep feeling for her subjects, Hobbs uncovers the stories of countless Americans of African descent who severed their family ties to pass into a world where they would be accorded the privileges of whites. At turns sad, inspiring, and provocative, the book raises important questions about the enduring power of race in American life." --Martha A. Sandweiss, author of Passing Strange: Love and Deception Across the Color Line

"Here, Allyson Hobbs provides fresh analysis of an oft-ignored phenomenon, and the result is as fascinating as it is innovative [...] A Chosen Exile does not allow the traditional contradictions inherent in racial categories to go unchallenged [...] Hobbs is particularly good on the dilemmas faced by educated and ambitious blacks [...] Hobbs tackles the topic with creative sensitivity, exploring hybridity rather than hyping post-racialism. Her vivid vignettes recover hidden lives and contextualise them, shedding light on entanglements that heighten our appreciation of the absurdity of requisite disguises employed to evade racial barriers --Times Higher Education

L'autore

Allyson Hobbs is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Harvard Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0674659929
• ISBN 13: 9780674659926
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 382