| Description |
1 online resource (viii, 184 pages) |
| Contents |
White panic and white passing: slavery and reconstruction -- Dy(e)ing to be black: "Mars Jeems's nightmare," Black like me, and Watermelon man -- Black like she: Grace Halsell and the sexuality of passing -- Contagious beats: passing, autobiography, and discourses of American music -- Is passing passé in a "post-race" world? -- Epilogue: hits and misses of a racial free-for-all |
| Summary |
"In Near Black, Baz 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." |
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"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."--Jacket |
| Analysis |
"Multi-User" |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 151-178) and index |
| Notes |
Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL |
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English |
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digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL |
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Print version record |
| Subject |
White people -- Race identity -- United States
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Passing (Identity) -- United States
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Popular culture -- United States.
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Race in literature.
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Race in motion pictures.
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American literature -- History and criticism.
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Motion pictures -- United States -- History
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SOCIAL SCIENCE -- General.
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American literature
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Motion pictures
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Passing (Identity)
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Popular culture
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Race in literature
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Race in motion pictures
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Race relations
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White people -- Race identity
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Ethnische Identität
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Massenkultur
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Ethnische Beziehungen
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Passing Motiv
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United States -- Race relations.
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United States
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USA
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Weiße.
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| Genre/Form |
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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History
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| LC no. |
2008028712 |
| ISBN |
9781613760833 |
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1613760833 |
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