Near Black
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€31.99
A01=Baz Dreisinger
American racial discourse history
American studies perspectives on race
Author_Baz Dreisinger
blues and jazz cultural narratives
Category=JBCC
Category=JBSL
civil rights era identity politics
commentary on miscegenation fears
commentary on racial power dynamics
constructions of whiteness and blackness
cross-racial embodiment in art
cultural authentication and race
cultural exchange and racial meaning
cultural history of racial transformation
cultural proximity and racial meaning
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
fiction exploring identity shifts
hip-hop cultural identity
historical cases of identity misrecognition
identity experiments in jou
identity performance in American culture
interracial anxieties in Reconstruction era
jazz era racial imagination
literary analysis of racial passing tropes
literary depictions of race
media portrayals of racial fluidity
metamorphosis of racial identity
metaphorical Blackness
music subcultures and racial meaning
narratives of self-fashioning
narratives shaped by community perception
portrayals of racial ambiguity
race in autobiographical writing
racial boundary crossing
racial identity as social construct
racial identity narratives
racial masquerade in literature
racial mimicry and social critique
reimagining racial boundaries
representations of race in popular culture
skin color symbolism
Southern racial history in narrative form
symbolic proximity to marginalized groups
transformation through cultural immersion
twentieth-century racial experimentation
white figures in Black cultural spaces
whiteness studies scholarship
Product details
- ISBN 9781558496750
- Weight: 321g
- Dimensions: 153 x 225mm
- Publication Date: 01 Oct 2008
- Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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This book offers a provocative look at the shifting contours of racial identity in America. In the United States, the notion of racial 'passing' is usually associated with blacks and other minorities who seek to present themselves as part of the white majority. Yet, as Baz Dreisinger demonstrates in this fascinating study, another form of this phenomenon also occurs, if less frequently, in American culture: cases in which legally white individuals are imagined, by themselves or by others, as passing for black.In ""Near Black"", Dreisinger explores the oft-ignored history of what she calls 'reverse racial passing' by looking at a broad spectrum of short stories, novels, films, autobiographies, and pop-culture discourse that depict whites passing for black. The protagonists of these narratives, she shows, span centuries and cross contexts, from slavery to civil rights, jazz to rock to hip-hop. Tracing their role from the 1830s to the present day, Dreisinger argues that central to the enterprise of reverse passing are ideas about proximity. Because 'blackness', so to speak, is imagined as transmittable, proximity to blackness is invested with the power to turn whites black: those who are literally 'near black' become metaphorically 'near black'. While this concept first arose during Reconstruction in the context of white anxieties about miscegenation, it was revised by later white passers for whom proximity to blackness became an authenticating badge.As Dreisinger shows, some white-to-black passers pass via self-identification. Jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow, for example, claimed that living among blacks and playing jazz had literally darkened his skin. Others are taken for black by a given community for a period of time. This was the experience of Jewish critic Waldo Frank during his travels with Jean Toomer, as well as that of disc jockey Hoss Allen, master of R&B slang at Nashville's famed WLAC radio. For journalists John Howard Griffin and Grace Halsell, passing was a deliberate and fleeting experiment, while for Mark Twain's fictional white slave in Pudd'nhead Wilson, it is a near-permanent and accidental occurrence.Whether understood as a function of proximity or behavior, skin color or cultural heritage, self-definition or the perception of others, what all these variants of 'reverse passing' demonstrate, according to Dreisinger, is that the lines defining racial identity in American culture are not only blurred but subject to change.
BAZ DREISINGER is assistant professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Village Voice, Vibe, Los Angeles Times, and other publications.
