{"id":58795,"date":"2019-08-31T18:13:15","date_gmt":"2019-08-31T18:13:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=58795"},"modified":"2019-08-31T18:13:15","modified_gmt":"2019-08-31T18:13:15","slug":"allyson-hobbs-a-chosen-exile-a-history-of-racial-passing-in-american-life-cambridge-ma-harvard-university-press-2014-382-pp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=58795","title":{"rendered":"Allyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. 382 pp."},"content":{"rendered":"

Allyson Hobbs, <\/strong><\/em>A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life<\/strong>. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. 382 pp.<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

49th Parallel: an interdisciplinary journal of North American Studies<\/a>
\nIssue 37 (2015)<\/a>
\npages 66-68<\/p>\n

Christopher Allen Varlack<\/strong><\/a>, Lecturer
\nUniversity of Maryland, Baltimore County<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Popularized in part during the Harlem Renaissance<\/a> of the early to midtwentieth century, the passing<\/a> novel, including James Weldon Johnson\u2019s<\/a> 1912 The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man<\/em><\/a>, Walter White\u2019s<\/a> 1926 Flight<\/em><\/a>, and Jessie Redmon Fauset\u2019s<\/a> 1928 Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral<\/em><\/a>, has received a wide range of scholarship. Elaine K. Ginsberg\u2019s 1996 study, Passing and the Fictions of Identity<\/em><\/a> explores the politics of passing from the early experiences of African slaves through the present day while Gayle Wald\u2019s<\/a> 2000 Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture<\/em><\/a> explores cinematic and literary representations of passing produced in the United States<\/a>. Together, these works reveal the struggle of an African-American community marginalized and disenfranchised within an American society defined by its Jim Crow<\/a> culture and racial hierarchy. Under these circumstances, racial passing<\/a> is most often an attempt to obtain what Cheryl L. Harris<\/a> terms \u201cwhiteness as property<\/a>\u201d as a result of the very limited opportunities and restricted social mobility afforded to blacks. Such scholarship provides insight into the historical function of passing and the ways in which the passing novel brings to the forefront of the American consciousness an increased awareness of its changing socio-racial landscape.<\/p>\n

In her critical work, appropriately titled, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life<\/em><\/a>, Allyson Hobbs<\/a> seeks to add a new dimension to this existing conversation, her book is \u201can effort to recover those lives\u201d lost in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as \u201ccountless African Americans [knowingly] passed as white<\/a>, leaving behind families, friends, and communities without any available avenue for return\u201d (4). Hobbs\u201f work, a welcomed addition to the field, thus uses the lives of the everyday participants of passing to show not only what they gained from assuming their white identities\u2014economic opportunity, social mobility, increased acceptance, etc.\u2014but also what they lost along the way\u2014the all-important connection to family and community that had long sustained the African-American people in the midst of cultural oppression. Because racialization exists all around us and \u201c[r]ace is reproduced . . . at every level of society, including in our everyday lives\u201d, the concerns that Hobbs advances in what proves a vital study of racial passing in American life will certainly remain, even despite the growing number of claims (which Hobbes disputes) that America has transitioned into a post-racial society (277).<\/p>\n

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

Extensive in its research, “A Chosen Exile” includes eighty-two pages of supplementary end notes and critical commentary that offer readers an in-depth perspective on the American racial landscape, the politics of passing (from a cultural and intra-personal lens), and the notion of loss so vital to a history still prevalent. <\/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":[10445,10444,9812,22083,22081],"class_list":["post-58795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-history","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-49th-parallel","tag-49th-parallel-an-interdisciplinary-journal-of-north-american-studies","tag-allyson-hobbs","tag-christopher-a-varlack","tag-christopher-allen-varlack"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58795","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=58795"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58795\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58797,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58795\/revisions\/58797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}