Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

While literary scholars have long mined the “tragic mulatto” theme, until recently US historians have rarely explored and barely acknowledged the clandestine world of the tens of thousands of black people, across many generations, who masqueraded as white. Here, Allyson Hobbs provides fresh analysis of an oft-ignored phenomenon, and the result is as fascinating as it is innovative. She foregrounds the sense of loss that passing inflicted, and argues that many of those who were left behind were just as wounded and traumatised as those who departed. Those who passed may have had much to gain, but what were the hidden costs, the invisible scars of enforced patterns of subversion and suppression? She suggests that the core issue of passing is not what an individual becomes, but rather “losing what you pass away from”

Catherine Clinton, “A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, by Allyson Hobbs,” Times Higher Education, (October 30, 2014). http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/books/a-chosen-exile-a-history-of-racial-passing-in-american-life-by-allyson-hobbs/2016548.article.

An Unexpected Blackness

Posted in Articles, Canada, Identity Development/Psychology, New Media, Social Science on 2009-11-12 02:07Z by Steven

An Unexpected Blackness

Transition: An International Review
Feb 2009
No. 100
Pages 112-132

Naomi Pabst, Assistant Professor of African American Studies and American Studies
Yale University

What does it mean to be of African descent while residing in Canada, where the hypodescent rule does not hold sway? Naomi Pabst reflects upon the complexity of life for people of color regarded as neither, nor.

Tags: hypodescent, Naomi Pabst, Transition: An International Review

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Mixed Race Studies

An Unexpected Blackness

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