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4.01 AVERAGE
4.01 AVERAGE
An interesting and informative look at a topic in black history that isn't talked about much, if at all. But a downside for me was that the book felt more like a history of biracial blacks than an actual history of racial passing, especially once you got past the prologue. Even though there was a great deal of information in the book it felt dry in places and near the middle and the end I found myself skimming.
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced
This is an altogether 'new' topic for a historical narrative and though comparatively short does the subject matter justice. I am glad that Dobbs kept herself controlled in organizing her book so as to be ranging enough to emerge as a possible direction for study in the future, and yet not going so far as to become merely a name dropping text. In the early chapters Dobbs does some really very excellent analysis of texts: their context and reception, but the latter portions of the work feels incomplete. Namely more could have been covered for the Harlem Renaissance, and I thought that the epilogue was weak. That being said her section on Jean Toomer in this portion was top notch, and it outshone much of everything else in the chapter. There were also some difficult sentences I thought which could have used some polishing, but considering the information she provides I don't feel that they were detrimental to the overall text.
Allyson Hobbs does a convincing job of opening a window into the phenomenon of “passing,” when light-skinned African Americans successfully live as White. Her history begins in slavery, when those with white slave-holding fathers and enslaved mothers were most easily able to escape bondage. In Reconstruction Blacks very briefly had hope that their identity would not hold them back, hope that was dashed in the South by the backlash against Black office-holders. One of the most fascinating chapters looks at three writers of the Harlem Renaissance—Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, and Langston Hughes—and how they navigated their mixed race heritage. Ultimately, she argues, passing pits a network of heritage and social networks against one’s ambitions in a racist society; to pass, in most cases, is to be out of the history of one’s people. But hers is a sympathetic and non-judgmental history of a complex phenomenon.
This could have been a much better book. There is such a thing as too many notes!
An interesting examination on the issue of African Americans passing for white. The book starts in the antebellum period and goes up to the 1940's, when the burgeoning Civil Rights movement made blacks in the U.S feel more optimistic about the future and less likely to pass.
While there are some personal stories of passing, the secretive nature of the act means that much of the book is about the general risks and rewards (but more risks) of crossing the color line.
It is a thoughtful and well researched book.
While there are some personal stories of passing, the secretive nature of the act means that much of the book is about the general risks and rewards (but more risks) of crossing the color line.
It is a thoughtful and well researched book.
This is an eye opening book for anyone who is not familiar with "passing". It sheds a light on some mixed race people who chose self-preservation above all else to escape the bondage of slavery or racial discrimination.
It also expresses the complexity of some mixed race people who opted to stay true to their African American bloodlines and the effect this decision had on their lives.
I would recommend this book to anyone that is interested in the subject of ”passing".
It also expresses the complexity of some mixed race people who opted to stay true to their African American bloodlines and the effect this decision had on their lives.
I would recommend this book to anyone that is interested in the subject of ”passing".
In Allyson Hobbs' prologue to A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, she argues "that the core issue of passing is not becoming what you pass for, but losing what you pass away from" (18). As the book's title suggests, loss, displacement, and stratification assume quite literal and symbolic significance throughout A Chosen Exile. Hobbs contends that scholars too often frame passing in terms of what people of color gain by assuming a white identity. By casting passing in terms of loss, A Chosen Exile reads like an elegy of black displacement from that which shapes all of us: family and community.
Hobbs succinctly articulates this sense of displacement in "Lost Kin," the book's third chapter. She writes, "Passing--the anxious decision to break with a sense of communion--upset the collective, 'congregative character' of African American life; it undermined the ability for traditions, stories, jokes, and songs to be shared across generations. Even the task of completing a family history became prickly, if not impossible" (159). According to Hobbs, narrative and identity (for both the individual and the collective) are lost in the wake of passing. The significance of collective narratives, especially for groups oppressed and segregated by racial inequality, is unambiguously clear. Collective narratives, especially those narratives that are whole and unified, function as antidotes to DuBois' "twoness" and help to contradict, without fully eradicating, the "two unreconciled strivings" that all forms of racism produce.
But Hobbs suggests later in "Lost Kin" that "The fragmentation of one's identity and ancestral memory and the scattering of family relationships represent only a handful of passing's most troubling dilemmas" (159). These dilemmas are on display in the following chapter, "Searching for a New Soul in Harlem." While it is hard to say that any single chapter is more engaging than another, "Searching for a New Soul in Harlem" is, if one were so inclined, that chapter. In it, Hobbs uses three authors of color, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, and Langston Hughes, to explore the "spectrum" of racial identities on display during the early 20th century (181). Toomer's "holistic self-understanding" is intriguing and philosophically rich, while Larsen's story compounds the sense of racial displacement since she "did not trace her ancestry to the American South or to the long history of Southern slavery" (194;198). Therefore, Larsen "remained an outsider and never truly belonged to any group" (199). By contrast to both Toomer and Larsen, Hughes "had tremendous affinity for African Americans" and "interlaced his life with his people" (214). What each author's orientation to racial identity suggests is the ways the Harlem Renaissance created the conditions "of reimagining race," yet those conditions were "thwarted by the prevailing ideas and attitudes of American society and the deep imprint racial thinking had made in the national consciousness" (216).
A Chosen Exile is a thoughtful and engaging piece of scholarship that attempts to appeals to a wide reading audience. It's thorough without pandering to mass-audience sensibilities.
Hobbs succinctly articulates this sense of displacement in "Lost Kin," the book's third chapter. She writes, "Passing--the anxious decision to break with a sense of communion--upset the collective, 'congregative character' of African American life; it undermined the ability for traditions, stories, jokes, and songs to be shared across generations. Even the task of completing a family history became prickly, if not impossible" (159). According to Hobbs, narrative and identity (for both the individual and the collective) are lost in the wake of passing. The significance of collective narratives, especially for groups oppressed and segregated by racial inequality, is unambiguously clear. Collective narratives, especially those narratives that are whole and unified, function as antidotes to DuBois' "twoness" and help to contradict, without fully eradicating, the "two unreconciled strivings" that all forms of racism produce.
But Hobbs suggests later in "Lost Kin" that "The fragmentation of one's identity and ancestral memory and the scattering of family relationships represent only a handful of passing's most troubling dilemmas" (159). These dilemmas are on display in the following chapter, "Searching for a New Soul in Harlem." While it is hard to say that any single chapter is more engaging than another, "Searching for a New Soul in Harlem" is, if one were so inclined, that chapter. In it, Hobbs uses three authors of color, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, and Langston Hughes, to explore the "spectrum" of racial identities on display during the early 20th century (181). Toomer's "holistic self-understanding" is intriguing and philosophically rich, while Larsen's story compounds the sense of racial displacement since she "did not trace her ancestry to the American South or to the long history of Southern slavery" (194;198). Therefore, Larsen "remained an outsider and never truly belonged to any group" (199). By contrast to both Toomer and Larsen, Hughes "had tremendous affinity for African Americans" and "interlaced his life with his people" (214). What each author's orientation to racial identity suggests is the ways the Harlem Renaissance created the conditions "of reimagining race," yet those conditions were "thwarted by the prevailing ideas and attitudes of American society and the deep imprint racial thinking had made in the national consciousness" (216).
A Chosen Exile is a thoughtful and engaging piece of scholarship that attempts to appeals to a wide reading audience. It's thorough without pandering to mass-audience sensibilities.
2.5 stars, but we round up in my family.
Very repetitive writing - the author tells us what she's going to tell us, then tells it to us, then recaps what she just told us, for each new bit of information. In fact, almost everything that's covered in the book is covered in the prologue, so if you are strapped for time you could just read that. Basically, the author took a topic that is fascinating and rather juicy and made it almost boring via lackluster writing.
Very repetitive writing - the author tells us what she's going to tell us, then tells it to us, then recaps what she just told us, for each new bit of information. In fact, almost everything that's covered in the book is covered in the prologue, so if you are strapped for time you could just read that. Basically, the author took a topic that is fascinating and rather juicy and made it almost boring via lackluster writing.