Allyson Hobbs. A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life. [Smith-Pryor Review]

Allyson Hobbs. A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life. [Smith-Pryor Review]

The American Historical Review
Volume 120, Issue 5, December 2015
pages 1903-1904
DOI: 10.1093/ahr/120.5.1903

Elizabeth M. Smith-Pryor, Associate Professor of History
Kent State University, Kent, Ohio

Allyson Hobbs. A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014. Pp. 382. $29.95.

In A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, Allyson Hobbs provides a well-written and sweeping overview of the phenomenon of passing from the colonial era through the present. With five chapters, a prologue, and an epilogue Hobbs charts a “longue duree” (27) of passing as white, while tracing its connections to changing meanings of race and racial identity in America. Drawn to the topic through her own family stories of long lost relatives, Hobbs contends too many historians and literary scholars only view passing as an act that leads to the benefits of whiteness. Instead, Hobbs suggests we cannot fully understand passing without “reckoning with loss, alienation, and isolation that accompanied, and often outweighed, its rewards” (6). For, Hobbs argues, “the core issue of passing” is not becoming white but losing a black identity (18). Consequently, she suggests the study of passing allows us to see how people live and experience “race.”

Hobbs’s study relies on the…

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