{"id":35866,"date":"2014-02-17T17:21:49","date_gmt":"2014-02-17T17:21:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=35866"},"modified":"2014-02-17T17:21:49","modified_gmt":"2014-02-17T17:21:49","slug":"a-breezy-chameleon-blurring-social-borders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=35866","title":{"rendered":"A Breezy Chameleon, Blurring Social Borders"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/02\/17\/books\/passing-with-panache-and-feeling-little-guilt.html\" target=\"_blank\"><em><strong>A Breezy Chameleon, Blurring Social Borders<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\" target=\"_blank\">The New York Times<\/a><br \/>\n2014-02-16<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jennifer Schuessler<\/strong>, Staff Editor<\/p>\n<p>When the literary scholar <a href=\"http:\/\/english.arts.cornell.edu\/people\/?id=134\" target=\"_blank\">George Hutchinson<\/a> was in the archives at Howard University one afternoon a decade ago, he thought he knew which story of a neglected African-American woman writer he was chasing.<\/p>\n<p>He was at work on a biography of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Nella_Larsen\" target=\"_blank\">Nella Larsen<\/a>, whose classic <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Harlem_Renaissance\" target=\"_blank\">Harlem Renaissance<\/a> novel \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=2508\" target=\"_blank\">Passing<\/a>\u201d was rediscovered in the 1970s. But while poking around, Mr. Hutchinson noticed a listing for the papers of Anita Thompson Dickinson Reynolds, an obscure contemporary of Larsen\u2019s, and decided to take a look.<\/p>\n<p>There, amid a jumble of letters and cassette tapes, lay an unpublished memoir breezily recounting the Zelig-like adventures of a woman who had starred in some of the first black films made in Hollywood, mingled with the Harlem Renaissance elite, been drawn by Man Ray and Matisse in Paris and touched down in Spain during its Civil War, before packing up her Chanel dresses and heading home to a more conventional life as a psychologist.<\/p>\n<p>It was a story of passing stranger than anything Larsen had imagined, recounted with uncommon sexual frankness and blithe disregard for racial barriers. \u201cI was fascinated by the way she threaded together all these different worlds, with this total nonchalance,\u201d Mr. Hutchinson said in a recent interview. \u201cI had never read anything like it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Previously, Reynolds\u2019s name had survived mainly in a few scattered footnotes. But now, Harvard University Press is publishing her memoir, as \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=35040\" target=\"_blank\">American Cocktail: A \u2018Colored Girl\u2019 in the World<\/a>.\u201d&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire book review <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/02\/17\/books\/passing-with-panache-and-feeling-little-guilt.html\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Breezy Chameleon, Blurring Social Borders The New York Times 2014-02-16 Jennifer Schuessler, Staff Editor When the literary scholar George Hutchinson was in the archives at Howard University one afternoon a decade ago, he thought he knew which story of a neglected African-American woman writer he was chasing. He was at work on a biography [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,5,8,6462,20,25],"tags":[16552,16553,3136,16992],"class_list":["post-35866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-book-reviews","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","category-women","tag-anita-reynolds","tag-anita-thompson-dickinson-reynolds","tag-george-hutchinson","tag-jennifer-schuessler"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35866","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=35866"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35866\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}