A01=Julia S. Charles
Author_Julia S. Charles
Category=DSB
Category=DSRC
Category=JBSL
Category=NHK
Charles W. Chesnutt
drag performance
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
gender performance
gender presentation
interracial relationships
James Weldon Johnson
Jean Toomer
Jessie Redmon Fauset
mixed-race citizenship
Mixed-race fugitivity
mixed-race studies
Nella Larsen
performance studies
Rachel Dolezal
racial borders
racial crossing
racial hybridity
racial identity
Racial passing
racial passing literature
racial performance
sexual identity in African American literature
Product details
- ISBN 9781469659572
- Weight: 355g
- Dimensions: 155 x 233mm
- Publication Date: 12 Oct 2020
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In this study of racial passing literature, Julia S. Charles highlights how mixed-race subjects invent cultural spaces for themselves - a place she terms that middle world - and how they, through various performance strategies, make meaning in the interstices between the Black and white worlds. Focusing on the construction and performance of racial identity in works by writers from the antebellum period through Reconstruction, Charles creates a new discourse around racial passing to analyze mixed-race characters' social objectives when crossing into other racialized spaces. To illustrate how this middle world and its attendant performativity still resonates in the present day, Charles connects contemporary figures, television, and film - including Rachel Dole&382;al and her black-passing controversy, the FX show Atlanta, and the musical Show Boat - to a range of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary texts. Charles's work offers a nuanced approach to African American passing literature and examines how mixed-race performers articulated their sense of selfhood and communal belonging.
Julia S. Charles is assistant professor of English at Auburn University.
