Passing And The Fictions Of Identity

Author : Elaine K. Ginsberg
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780822317647
Total Pages : 316 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Passing and the Fictions of Identity written by Elaine K. Ginsberg and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1996-04-29 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Passing refers to the process whereby a person of one race, gender, nationality, or sexual orientation adopts the guise of another. Historically, this has often involved black slaves passing as white in order to gain their freedom. More generally, it has served as a way for women and people of color to access male or white privilege. In their examination of this practice of crossing boundaries, the contributors to this volume offer a unique perspective for studying the construction and meaning of personal and cultural identities. These essays consider a wide range of texts and moments from colonial times to the present that raise significant questions about the political motivations inherent in the origins and maintenance of identity categories and boundaries. Through discussions of such literary works as Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, The Autobiography of an Ex–Coloured Man, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Hidden Hand, Black Like Me, and Giovanni’s Room, the authors examine issues of power and privilege and ways in which passing might challenge the often rigid structures of identity politics. Their interrogation of the semiotics of behavior, dress, language, and the body itself contributes significantly to an understanding of national, racial, gender, and sexual identity in American literature and culture. Contextualizing and building on the theoretical work of such scholars as Judith Butler, Diana Fuss, Marjorie Garber, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., Passing and the Fictions of Identity will be of value to students and scholars working in the areas of race, gender, and identity theory, as well as U.S. history and literature. Contributors. Martha Cutter, Katharine Nicholson Ings, Samira Kawash, Adrian Piper, Valerie Rohy, Marion Rust, Julia Stern, Gayle Wald, Ellen M. Weinauer, Elizabeth Young

Author : Barbara Fuchs
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 0252091329
Total Pages : 162 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Passing for Spain written by Barbara Fuchs and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Passing for Spain charts the intersections of identity, nation, and literary representation in early modern Spain. Barbara Fuchs analyzes the trope of passing in Don Quijote and other works by Cervantes, linking the use of disguise to the broader historical and social context of Counter-Reformation Spain and the religious and political dynamics of the Mediterranean Basin. In five lucid and engaging chapters, Fuchs examines what passes in Cervantes’s fiction: gender and race in Don Quijote and “Las dos doncellas”; religion in “El amante liberal” and La gran sultana; national identity in the Persiles and “La española inglesa.” She argues that Cervantes represents cross-cultural impersonation -- or characters who pass for another gender, nationality, or religion -- as challenges to the state’s attempts to assign identities and categories to proper Spanish subjects. Fuchs demonstrates the larger implications of this challenge by bringing a wide range of literary and political texts to bear on Cervantes’s representations. Impeccably researched, Passing for Spain examines how the fluidity of individual identity in early modern Spain undermined a national identity based on exclusion and difference.

Author : Nella Larsen
Publisher : Alien Ebooks
ISBN 13 : 166762265X
Total Pages : 159 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Passing written by Nella Larsen and published by Alien Ebooks. This book was released on 2022 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen (1891 –1964) published just two novels and three short stories in her lifetime, but achieved lasting literary acclaim. Her classic novel Passing first appeared in 1926.

Author : Allyson Hobbs
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 067436810X
Total Pages : 395 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book A Chosen Exile 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. 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.

Author : Lisa Nakamura
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135222061
Total Pages : 190 pages
Book Rating : 4.62/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Cybertypes written by Lisa Nakamura and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2002. In Cybertypes, Lisa Nakamura turn sour assumption that the Net is color-blind on its head. Examining all facets of everyday web-life, she shows that racial and ethnic stereotypes, or 'cybertypes' are hardwired into our online interactions: Identity tourists masquerade in chat rooms as Asian_Geisha or Alatiniolover. Web directories sharply delimit racial categories. Anonymous computer users are assumed to be white. Lively, provocative, Cybertypes takes up computer relationship between race, ethnicity and technology and offers a candid and nuanced understanding of identity in the information age.

Author : Mollie Godfrey
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 025205024X
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Neo-Passing written by Mollie Godfrey and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2018-02-21 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African Americans once passed as whites to escape the pains of racism. Today's neo-passing has pushed the old idea of passing in extraordinary new directions. A white author uses an Asian pen name; heterosexuals live "out" as gay; and, irony of ironies, whites try to pass as black. Mollie Godfrey and Vershawn Ashanti Young present essays that explore practices, performances, and texts of neo-passing in our supposedly postracial moment. The authors move from the postracial imagery of Angry Black White Boy and the issues of sexual orientation and race in ZZ Packer's short fiction to the politics of Dave Chappelle's skits as a black President George W. Bush. Together, the works reveal that the questions raised by neo-passing—questions about performing and contesting identity in relation to social norms—remain as relevant today as in the past. Contributors: Derek Adams, Christopher M. Brown, Martha J. Cutter, Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Michele Elam, Alisha Gaines, Jennifer Glaser, Allyson Hobbs, Brandon J. Manning, Loran Marsan, Lara Narcisi, Eden Osucha, Gayle Wald, and Deborah Elizabeth Whaley

Author : Kathleen Wehnert
Publisher : Diplomica Verlag
ISBN 13 : 3836685116
Total Pages : 53 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Passing written by Kathleen Wehnert and published by Diplomica Verlag. This book was released on 2010-02 with total page 53 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Larsen and other African-American writers, including James Weldon Johnson, explored the intricacies and contradictions of the concept of race at the beginning of the 20th century, in particular by addressing the phenomenon of 'passing'. Passing has many definitions, most often it is associated with the term 'passing for white', which implies the crossing of the colour line from black to white in order to transcend racial barriers. Until the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, writers hardly had addressed the passing figure in literature. Passing has always been a much camouflaged topic because the successful passer does not want their identity to be uncloaked. This constitutes probably also the main reason why only little, and rather pioneering, research has been conducted up to today and why it still remains difficult to investigate the issue. The sole witnesses of the concepts of passing in the time period are passing narratives. James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man (1912), Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) and her novella Passing (1929) are perhaps the most exemplary examples of an analysis of the passing figure and classic epitomes of the racial situations during the Harlem Renaissance. The novels challenge stereotypes of race and disclose concepts of doubleness and visibility. In order to disentangle the complexities of the theme, these novels, will serve to examine in depth in the nature and the motifs of the phenomenon of passing. In this book, I will be exploring the motifs of passing in these novels of the Harlem Renaissance in the context of DuBois' concept of double consciousness and the discourse of race. Chapter One will set the critical historical and cultural context for the passing narratives, as this is indispensable and crucial for the understanding of the motifs of the theme. With this in mind, the second Chapter will account for what destabilizes the African-American identity and thus identify the motives of p

Author : Gayle Wald
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780822325154
Total Pages : 278 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Crossing the Line written by Gayle Wald and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2000-07-24 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVExamines constructions of racial identity through the exploration of passing narratives including Black Like Me and forties jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow’s memoir Really the Blues./div

Author : Karla FC Holloway
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822377055
Total Pages : 176 pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Legal Fictions written by Karla FC Holloway and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-16 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Legal Fictions, Karla FC Holloway both argues that U.S. racial identity is the creation of U.S. law and demonstrates how black authors of literary fiction have engaged with the law's constructions of race since the era of slavery. Exploring the resonance between U.S. literature and U.S. jurisprudence, Holloway reveals Toni Morrison's Beloved and Charles Johnson's Middle Passage as stories about personhood and property, David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as structured by evidence law, and Nella Larsen's Passing as intimately related to contract law. Holloway engages the intentional, contradictory, and capricious constructions of race embedded in the law with the same energy that she brings to her masterful interpretations of fiction by U.S. writers. Her readings shed new light on the many ways that black U.S. authors have reframed fundamental questions about racial identity, personhood, and the law from the nineteenth into the twenty-first centuries. Legal Fictions is a bold declaration that the black body is thoroughly bound by law and an unflinching look at the implications of that claim.

Author : Brigitte Fielder
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 1478012684
Total Pages : 235 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Relative Races written by Brigitte Fielder and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-21 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Relative Races, Brigitte Fielder presents an alternative theory of how race is ascribed. Contrary to notions of genealogies by which race is transmitted from parents to children, the examples Fielder discusses from nineteenth-century literature, history, and popular culture show how race can follow other directions: Desdemona becomes less than fully white when she is smudged with Othello's blackface, a white woman becomes Native American when she is adopted by a Seneca family, and a mixed-race baby casts doubt on the whiteness of his mother. Fielder shows that the genealogies of race are especially visible in the racialization of white women, whose whiteness often depends on their ability to reproduce white family and white supremacy. Using black feminist and queer theories, Fielder presents readings of personal narratives, novels, plays, stories, poems, and images to illustrate how interracial kinship follows non-heteronormative, non-biological, and non-patrilineal models of inheritance in nineteenth-century literary culture.