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A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life

A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life

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A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life

by Allyson Hobbs

  • Used
  • Fine
  • Hardcover
  • Signed
  • first
Condition
Fine/Fine
ISBN 10
067436810X
ISBN 13
9780674368101
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About This Item

First edition hardcover, which is in fine condition and signed and inscribed by the author. Please see photos for condition. Materials from National Archives event at which author signed book included. Seller will carefully wrap book in bubble wrap, box it, and ship it with tracking.

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.

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Details

Bookseller
Book Nook US (US)
Bookseller's Inventory #
D-457
Title
A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life
Author
Allyson Hobbs
Book Condition
Used - Fine
Jacket Condition
Fine
Quantity Available
1
Binding
Hardcover
ISBN 10
067436810X
ISBN 13
9780674368101
Publisher
Harvard University Press
Place of Publication
Cambridge
Date Published
2014-10

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Inscribed
When a book is described as being inscribed, it indicates that a short note written by the author or a previous owner has been...
Fine
A book in fine condition exhibits no flaws. A fine condition book closely approaches As New condition, but may lack the...

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