Search Results

A Chosen Exile

Download or Read eBook A Chosen Exile PDF written by Allyson Hobbs and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-13 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle.
A Chosen Exile
Author :
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Total Pages : 395
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780674368101
ISBN-13 : 067436810X
Rating : 4/5 (01 Downloads)

Book Synopsis A Chosen Exile by : Allyson Hobbs

Book excerpt: Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. It was, as Allyson Hobbs writes, a chosen exile, a separation from one racial identity and the leap into another. This revelatory history of passing explores the possibilities and challenges that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions. It also tells a tale of loss. As racial relations in America have evolved so has the significance of passing. To pass as white in the antebellum South was to escape the shackles of slavery. After emancipation, many African Americans came to regard passing as a form of betrayal, a selling of one’s birthright. When the initially hopeful period of Reconstruction proved short-lived, passing became an opportunity to defy Jim Crow and strike out on one’s own. Although black Americans who adopted white identities reaped benefits of expanded opportunity and mobility, Hobbs helps us to recognize and understand the grief, loneliness, and isolation that accompanied—and often outweighed—these rewards. By the dawning of the civil rights era, more and more racially mixed Americans felt the loss of kin and community was too much to bear, that it was time to “pass out” and embrace a black identity. Although recent decades have witnessed an increasingly multiracial society and a growing acceptance of hybridity, the problem of race and identity remains at the center of public debate and emotionally fraught personal decisions.


A Chosen Exile Related Books

A Chosen Exile
Language: en
Pages: 395
Authors: Allyson Hobbs
Categories: Biography & Autobiography
Type: BOOK - Published: 2014-10-13 - Publisher: Harvard University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. It wa
Near Black
Language: en
Pages: 202
Authors: Baz Dreisinger
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2008 - Publisher:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A provocative look at the shifting contours of racial identity in America.
Passing for Black
Language: en
Pages: 212
Authors: Wade H. Hall
Categories: Biography & Autobiography
Type: BOOK - Published: 1997-11-25 - Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

to pass for white in a segregated society, Mae felt that she was doing the opposite - choosing to assert her black identity. Passing for Black is her story, in
Passing
Language: en
Pages: 159
Authors: Nella Larsen
Categories: Fiction
Type: BOOK - Published: 2022 - Publisher: Alien Ebooks

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen (1891 –1964) published just two novels and three short stories in her lifetime, but achieved lasting literary acclaim.
Black for a Day
Language: en
Pages: 231
Authors: Alisha Gaines
Categories: Social Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2017-03-27 - Publisher: UNC Press Books

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In 1948, journalist Ray Sprigle traded his whiteness to live as a black man for four weeks. A little over a decade later, John Howard Griffin famously "became"
Scroll to top