{"id":38026,"date":"2014-10-30T20:23:53","date_gmt":"2014-10-30T20:23:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=38026"},"modified":"2017-06-27T15:28:56","modified_gmt":"2017-06-27T15:28:56","slug":"a-chosen-exile-a-history-of-racial-passing-in-american-life-by-allyson-hobbs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=38026","title":{"rendered":"A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, by Allyson Hobbs"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, by Allyson Hobbs<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Times Higher Education<\/a>
\nLondon, United Kingdom
\n2014-10-30<\/p>\n

Catherine Clinton<\/strong>, Denman Endowed Professor in American History<\/a> (University of Texas<\/em>); International Professor in U.S. History<\/a> (Queen\u2019s University, Belfast<\/em>)<\/p>\n

Those who masqueraded as white scarred more than just themselves, finds Catherine Clinton<\/em><\/p>\n

Questions of diversity and colour, race and status are central to studies of modern society, especially in 21st-century America, where the election of Barack Obama<\/a> \u2013 born of a white mother and a black African father \u2013 as president has made the consideration of all things African American both urgent and fashionable. These pursuits have spurred an ambitious generation of academics to reconsider scholarly convention and to embrace rather than evade complex issues of racial politics and practice \u2013 not least those highlighted in the histories of light-skinned black Americans who abandoned birth families, kin networks and communities to cross the colour line and \u201cpass<\/a>\u201d into the world of white privilege.<\/p>\n

While literary scholars have long mined the \u201ctragic mulatto<\/a>\u201d 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<\/a> 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 \u201closing what you pass away from\u201d…<\/p>\n

…A Chosen Exile<\/em><\/a> is given depth and resonance by Hobbs\u2019 excavation of a wide range of sources, and she is as adept at tracking nuance in antebellum \u201crunaway slave\u201d advertisements as she is at spotting the modern trend for advertising to address Generation E. A. \u2013 ethnically ambiguous \u2013 consumers. She is also insightful at capturing the tone and texture of life for those who saw masquerading as white as the road not taken. In the 1930s, the black writer Charles Chesnutt<\/a> told an interviewer who asked why he had not passed: \u201cI married a woman darker than myself, and I will never go where she is not welcome, too.\u201d…<\/p>\n

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

Those who masqueraded as white scarred more than just themselves, finds Catherine Clinton<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,459,8,6462,20],"tags":[9812,985,18310],"class_list":["post-38026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-history","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-allyson-hobbs","tag-catherine-clinton","tag-times-higher-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38026","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=38026"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38026\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54314,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38026\/revisions\/54314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}