Category: Passing

  • Opinion: “White spaces” are everywhere – including ARC The American River Current Sacramento, California 2016-09-26 Shiavon Chatman Imagine being alone in a place where there was no one who looked like you or understood your experiences. Imagine having a conversation with someone who assumed the actions and behaviors of people who looked like you and…

  • Real Native Genius: How an Ex-Slave and a White Mormon Became Famous Indians by Angela Pulley Hudson (review) The Journal of the Civil War Era Volume 6, Number 3, September 2016 pages 439-442 DOI: 10.1353/cwe.2016.0058 Adam Pratt, Assistant Professor of History University of Scranton, Scranton, Pennsylvania Real Native Genius: How an Ex-Slave and a White…

  • Meta-Melodrama: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Appropriates Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon Modern Drama Volume 59, Number 3, Fall 2016 pages 285-305 Verna A. Foster, Professor of English Loyola University Chicago In adapting the nineteenth-century melodrama The Octoroon, Jacobs-Jenkins both satirizes Boucicault’s racial assumptions and emulates his aesthetic principles to produce a meta-melodrama, a play that at once celebrates…

  • Racism faced by black nuns in America called ‘dangerous memory’ Crux: Taking the Catholic Pulse 2016-08-18 Andrew Nelson, Catholic News Service In early American history black women could be accepted into orders of nuns only if they could “pass for white,” and later they faced significant racial prejudice. Despite all that, they became role models…

  • Herriman: Cartoonist who equalled Cervantes The Telegraph 2007-07-07 Sarah Boxer Sarah Boxer marvels at the world of George Herriman, the creator of the ludicrously imaginative comic strip Krazy Kat We call him “Cat,” We call him “Crazy” yet is he neither. – George Herriman on the title character of Krazy Kat There is no comic…

  • Surrealism, Non-Normative Sexualities, and Racial Identities in Popular Culture: the Case of the Newspaper Comic Strip Krazy Kat Revista Comunicación Number 11, Volume 11 (2013) pages 51-66 Jesus Jiménez-Varea, Professor University of Seville, Seville, Spain In Krazy Kat, George Herriman painted with humorous strokes the endless variations of a sexual pantomime that challenged the boundaries…

  • CSER W4701 Troubling the Color: Passing, Inter-racial Sex, and Ethnic Ambiguity. Barnard College New York, New York 2016-17 Catalogue Karl Jacoby, Professor of History Columbia University, New York, New York Passing, remarked W.E.B. Du Bois in 1929, “is a petty, silly matter of no real importance which another generation will comprehend with great difficulty.”  Yet passing and…

  • In front of his friends and girlfriend, he criticized my mother for divorcing him and called her, multiple times, “a whore”; then he called her mother—my grandmother—”a nigger.” To prove his point, he slurred, with a knowing tone, as if he were somehow enlightening me, “Your grandmother had nigger lips.”…

  • Passing in Boston: The Story of the Healy Family WGBHForum 2014-03-26 Boston College history professor, James O’Toole discusses his newest book Passing for White: Race, Religion, and the Healy Family, 1820-1920, which documents the extraordinary life of the Healy brothers of Boston. In the mid-1800’s, the Healy brothers of Boston, James, Patrick, and Sherwood, looked…

  • On passing, wishing for darker skin, and finding your people: A conversation between two mulattos Fusion 2015-06-15 Collier Meyerson In 10th grade, I auditioned for the role of Julie in the musical Show Boat, one of the most famous portrayals of the tragic mulatto trope. I was cast, instead, as Queenie, the mammy. I deserved…