Allyson Hobbs’ A Chosen Exile makes summer reading listsPosted in Articles, History, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2017-07-17 00:15Z by Steven |
Allyson Hobbs’ A Chosen Exile makes summer reading lists
Stanford News
Stanford University, Stanford, California
2017-07-14
A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, written by historian ALLYSON HOBBS, made it to the 2017 summer reading lists of Harvard University Press and The Paris Review.
The 2014 book examines the phenomenon of racial passing, which is an intentional attempt by a person to assume a different racial identity, in the United States from the late 18th century to the present. Hobbs was inspired by a story her aunt told her about a distant cousin who passed as a white woman in the 1940s.
“Necessarily, Hobbs writes, passing involves erasure: gradations gone, subtleties of color and culture reduced to black and white,” wrote Julie Orringer in The Paris Review. “What’s lost in the process: families and friends, a sense of belonging. A Chosen Exile illuminates those losses with acuity, rigor and compassion.”…
Read the entire article here.