{"id":38449,"date":"2014-11-22T03:00:17","date_gmt":"2014-11-22T03:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=38449"},"modified":"2015-04-28T01:53:10","modified_gmt":"2015-04-28T01:53:10","slug":"a-chosen-exile-by-allyson-hobbs-senna-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=38449","title":{"rendered":"\u2018A Chosen Exile,\u2019 by Allyson Hobbs [Senna Review]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018A Chosen Exile,\u2019 by Allyson Hobbs [Senna Review]<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\nSunday Book Review<\/a>
\n2014-11-21<\/p>\n

Danzy Senna<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life<\/em><\/a> By Allyson Hobbs; Illustrated. 382 pp. Harvard University Press. $29.95.<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the best birthday presents anybody ever gave me was a \u201ccalling card\u201d by the conceptual artist Adrian Piper<\/a>. I was in college at the time, and it felt like the ultimate inside joke handed from one racially ambiguous person to another.<\/p>\n

Slim and innocuous as a business card, it reads: \u201cDear Friend, I am black. I am sure you did not realize this when you made\/laughed at\/agreed with that racist remark. In the past I have attempted to alert people to my identity in advance. . . . I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I\u2019m sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing me.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be black but to be perceived as white is to find yourself, at times, in a racial no man\u2019s land. It is to feel like an embodiment of W. E. B. Du Bois\u2019s double consciousness<\/a> \u2014 that sense of being in two places at the same time. It is also to be perpetually aware of both the primacy of race and the \u201cbankruptcy of the race idea,\u201d as Allyson Hobbs<\/a>, an assistant professor of history at Stanford University, puts it in her incisive new cultural history, \u201cA Chosen Exile<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hobbs is interested in the stories of individuals who chose to cross the color line \u2014 black to white<\/a> \u2014 from the late 1800s up through the 1950s. It\u2019s a story we\u2019ve of course read and seen before in fictional accounts \u2014 numerous novels and films that have generally portrayed mixed-race characters in the sorriest of terms. Like gay characters, mulattoes<\/a> always pay for their existence dearly in the end. Joe Christmas, the tormented drifter in William Faulkner\u2019s<\/a> \u201cLight in August<\/a>,\u201d considers his blackness evidence of original sin (a.k.a. miscegenation<\/a>) and ends up castrated and murdered. Sarah Jane, a character in Douglas Sirk\u2019s<\/a> 1959 remake of the film \u201cImitation of Life<\/a>,\u201d denies her black mother in her attempt to be seen as white. Her tragedy once again feels like mixed fate. As her long-suffering mother puts it, \u201cHow do you tell a child that she was born to be hurt?\u201d…<\/p>\n

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

\u2018A Chosen Exile,\u2019 by Allyson Hobbs [Senna Review] The New York Times Sunday Book Review 2014-11-21 Danzy Senna A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life By Allyson Hobbs; Illustrated. 382 pp. Harvard University Press. $29.95. One of the best birthday presents anybody ever gave me was a \u201ccalling card\u201d by the […]<\/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":[16585,9812,1340,88,17448,1996,2640,2327,16589],"class_list":["post-38449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-history","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-albert-johnston","tag-allyson-hobbs","tag-danzy-senna","tag-ellen-craft","tag-elsie-roxborough","tag-jean-toomer","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times","tag-thyra-johnston"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38449","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=38449"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38449\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}