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

Allyson Hobbs

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067436810X ISBN 13: 9780674368101

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2014

Synopsis

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."

About this title

Product Description

Title: A Chosen Exile( A History of Racial Passing in American Life) <>Binding: Hardcover <>Author: AllysonHobbs <>Publisher: HarvardUniversityPress

Review

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 067436810X
• ISBN 13: 9780674368101
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 350