Uncovering Hidden Histories: Hobbs Discusses Her Award-Winning BookPosted in Articles, History, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2016-04-12 22:01Z by Steven |
Uncovering Hidden Histories: Hobbs Discusses Her Award-Winning Book
The Colgate Maroon-News
Hamilton, New York
2016-03-31
Megan Leo, Section Editor
On Monday, March 21, Colgate students and faculty gathered in the Persson Auditorium to listen to Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University Allyson Hobbs, who gave a lecture about her book A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life.
Racial passing occurs when a member of a certain racial group is also accepted as a member of another racial group. In the context of her book and lecture, Hobbs specifically examined the phenomenon of African Americans passing as Caucasian to escape systematic racism in the United States.
“[Passing is fundamentally] a social act, with enormous social consequences,” Hobbs said…
…Assistant Professor of History Daniel Bouk was instrumental in bringing Hobbs to speak at Colgate.
“Professor Heather Roller and I dreamed up a plan of inviting Professor Hobbs out to campus after we decided to assign her book to both our introductory history workshop classes and our senior honors seminar. We were thrilled when Hobbs said yes and when we won the support of the History Department, the Africana and Latin American Studies Program and the Sio Chair in Diversity in Community, which made the visit possible,” Bouk said.
Bouk provided some background as to why he made the decision to assign A Chosen Exile to Colgate students.
“We assigned Hobbs’s book because we thought it was a model for writing cultural history – it is beautifully crafted and draws on sources in very clear ways to tell its story. We hoped to inspire our history students to commit themselves in similar ways to telling the stories of people who are often lost to history,” Bouk said…
Read the entire article here.