{"id":23178,"date":"2012-05-18T00:37:30","date_gmt":"2012-05-18T00:37:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=23178"},"modified":"2012-05-18T00:37:30","modified_gmt":"2012-05-18T00:37:30","slug":"%e2%80%98brother-mine%e2%80%99-highlights-unique-relationships","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=23178","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Brother Mine\u2019 highlights unique relationships"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018Brother Mine\u2019 highlights unique relationships<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Oakland Post: Oakland University’s Independent Newspaper<\/a>
\nRochester, Michigan
\n2011-02-08<\/p>\n

Ryan Hegedus<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reading other peoples\u2019 mail can land you in serious trouble with the government.
\n\u00a0
\nOr, in the case of Dr. Kathleen Pfeiffer<\/a>, it can land you a book deal.
\n\u00a0
\nPfeiffer, an associate professor of English at Oakland University, is the author of \u201cBrother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank<\/a>, a back-and-forth account of over 120 letters between the two in the 1920s.\u201d
\n\u00a0
\nToomer<\/a>, a young black author, began writing to Frank<\/a>, an established white writer in New York, and the book details the unique friendship between the two.
\n\u00a0
\n\u201cDr. Pfeiffer\u2019s work provides an important tool for understanding the dynamics of the relationship between Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank,\u201d said associate history professor and chair of the history department, Karen Miller. \u201cBoth Toomer and Frank were participants in the conflict over the construction of racial identity. Their correspondence helps us to understand how the debates over race worked themselves into friendships.\u201d
\n\u00a0
\nIn the summer of 1993, Pfeiffer was deciding on the topic of her dissertation at Yale University, and ended up at the university\u2019s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library<\/a>, one of the country\u2019s best resources for African-American literature. The opportunity gave her the chance to do research in the primary archives.
\n\u00a0
\nIt was at Beinecke that she decided on the topic of race passing<\/a>.
\n\u00a0
\nRace passing was a \u201chot topic\u201d in American literature at the turn of the century, Pfeiffer explained, where people who were legally defined as black because of previous generations, were actually light enough to pass for a white person.
\n\u00a0
\n\u201cThese people would take on a new identity and pass for white,\u201d Pfeiffer said. \u201cThey would have this better opportunity as a white person than they would have as a black person, but then there would be all of this guilt and sense of loss because they\u2019d have to leave their families. That\u2019s really what my dissertation was about \u2014 about stories of characters who \u2018pass.\u2019\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018Brother Mine\u2019 highlights unique relationships The Oakland Post: Oakland University’s Independent Newspaper Rochester, Michigan 2011-02-08 Ryan Hegedus Reading other peoples\u2019 mail can land you in serious trouble with the government. \u00a0 Or, in the case of Dr. Kathleen Pfeiffer, it can land you a book deal. \u00a0 Pfeiffer, an associate professor of English at Oakland […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8,6462,20],"tags":[1996,5209,10781,10782,10779,10780,10778],"class_list":["post-23178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-jean-toomer","tag-kathleen-pfeiffer","tag-oakland-post","tag-oakland-university","tag-ryan-hegedus","tag-the-oakland-post","tag-waldo-frank"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23178\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}