{"id":37053,"date":"2014-08-13T01:26:20","date_gmt":"2014-08-13T01:26:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=37053"},"modified":"2014-08-15T05:38:53","modified_gmt":"2014-08-15T05:38:53","slug":"in-a-novelists-world-you-choose-your-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=37053","title":{"rendered":"In a Novelist\u2019s World, You Choose Your Race"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a Novelist\u2019s World, You Choose Your Race<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2014-08-11<\/p>\n

Felicia R. Lee<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the weak light of a February afternoon, Kelly Thorndike has a strange chance encounter in a Baltimore<\/a> parking lot with Martin Lipkin, an old friend from high school. But time has brought a big change. The Martin that Kelly knew was white. The man standing before him is black.<\/p>\n

Their meeting sets the stage for \u201cYour Face in Mine<\/a>,\u201d Jess Row\u2019s<\/a> debut novel, which is to be published on Thursday by Riverhead Books<\/a>, joining a long tradition of fiction about racial guises. Mr. Row\u2019s tale is set in a near future in which Martin is the first person to undergo \u201cracial reassignment surgery\u201d to change his features, skin color, hair texture and even his voice. His surgical package includes a new biography and even a dialect coach \u2014 all a corrective for Martin\u2019s \u201cracial dysphoria.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted to make the novel the logical outcome of the way certain vectors in our society are going,\u201d Mr. Row, 39, a soft-spoken, self-described WASP<\/a>, said during a recent interview. He pointed to the current state of plastic surgery, in which it\u2019s possible for features and body parts to be changed to mask or remake ethnicity. \u201cI wanted people to ask, \u2018If I could have the surgery, would I?\u2019 \u201d said Mr. Row, the author of two story collections, \u201cThe Train to Lo Wu\u201d and \u201cNobody Ever Gets Lost.\u201d<\/p>\n

A fan of James Baldwin\u2019s<\/a> work, Mr. Row said he set out to have \u201cYour Face in Mine\u201d explore the ways people try to escape their racial identities, as well as investigate their desire for racial reconciliation and deeply unconscious fears and discomforts around race.<\/p>\n

\u201cPassing<\/a>\u201d has been a major theme in African-American literature for over a century, and has usually meant blacks living as whites to escape bias. \u201cYour Face in Mine\u201d owes something to classic stories of passing like \u201cThe Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man<\/a>,\u201d by James Weldon Johnson<\/a> (published anonymously in 1912 and under his name in 1927), and the 1931 satire \u201cBlack No More<\/a>,\u201d by George S. Schuyler<\/a>, in which blacks rush to embrace a new scientific process to become white.<\/p>\n

It also calls to mind \u201cBlack Like Me<\/a>,\u201d the groundbreaking 1961 account by John Howard Griffin<\/a>, a white journalist, who darkened his skin to appear African-American and wrote about the discrimination he experienced…<\/p>\n

…\u201cIs Race Plastic?<\/a>,\u201d a recent New York magazine<\/em> cover article, considered just this issue, exploring the implications of \u201cethnic plastic surgery\u201d with its menu of procedures that go about \u201csharpening the stereotypically flat noses of Asians, blacks and Latinos, while flattening the stereotypically sharp noses of Arabs and Jews.\u201d<\/p>\n

Allyson Hobbs<\/a>, an assistant professor of history at Stanford, whose book, \u201cA Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life<\/a>,\u201d comes out in October, said that in life and in literature, passing showed the complexity, and even absurdity, of racial categories.<\/p>\n

\u201cHistorically, it was much clearer what was to be gained by being white, in the literature as well,\u201d she said. \u201cThere was a social and economic logic to becoming white.\u201d About \u201cYour Face in Mine,\u201d she said: \u201cWhat this book sort of raises as a question is what someone expects to gain by being black, Hispanic or Asian in the 21st century? What is gained and what is lost through a racial reassignment in the 21st century?\u201d…<\/p>\n

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

In a Novelist\u2019s World, You Choose Your Race The New York Times 2014-08-11 Felicia R. Lee In the weak light of a February afternoon, Kelly Thorndike has a strange chance encounter in a Baltimore parking lot with Martin Lipkin, an old friend from high school. But time has brought a big change. The Martin that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8,6462,20],"tags":[9812,4913,4912,17726,2640,2327],"class_list":["post-37053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-allyson-hobbs","tag-felicia-lee","tag-felicia-r-lee","tag-jess-row","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37053","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=37053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37053\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}