Review: Identity in Passing: RACE-ING and E-RACE-ING in American and African American HistoryPosted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Caribbean/Latin America, Europe, History, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2017-11-18 01:19Z by Steven |
Review: Identity in Passing: RACE-ING and E-RACE-ING in American and African American History
The Journal of African American History
Volume 101, No. 3, Summer 2016
pages 344-355
DOI: 10.5323/jafriamerhist.101.3.0344
Thomas J. Davis, Professor of History
Arizona State University, Tempe
- Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012. Pp. 269. Cloth $49.95.
- Baz Dreisinger, Near Black: White to Black Passing in American Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008. Pp. 196. Paper $26.95.
- Mary Frances Berry, “We Are Who We Say We Are”: A Black Family’s Search for Home Across the Atlantic World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. 206. Paper $19.95.
Passing is a long-standing theme in American and African American history.1 Indeed, because identity has been an ever-present element in history, passing has been an ever-present element in history generally. Distinguishing between and among groups and categorizing individual members has again and again prompted questions about who is who, about what exactly distinguishes one from another, and about who belongs where. But passing is about more than contested and oft-disputed categories. When it reaches to lived-experience, passing is about self and society, about individual image and imagining, about self-image and self-imagining, about social image and social change. Passing is about the scope, source, substance, and control of individual identity.
Despite its centrality, identity appears in historical narratives typically as a given, or at least as taken for granted. Except for persons cast as “others,” group labels conveniently cover flawed lines of distinction. Our focus concentrates on identity only when it becomes contested, when uncertainty or ambiguity raise doubts; when identity becomes an issue of power, when such questions as “who…
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