Near Black
Subtitle: White-to-Black passing in American culture
By: Baz Dreisinger.
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Amherst
Language: eng
Number of pages: 184
ISBN-13: 9781558496750; 9781558496743
Subjects: Whites -- Race identity -- United States; Passing (Identity) -- United States; Popular culture -- United States; Race in literature; Race in motion pictures; American literature -- History and criticism; Motion pictures -- United States -- History; United States -- Race relations
Description: "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." "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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.