Near Black

by Dreisinger, Baz

• ISBN13: 9781558496743
• ISBN10: 1558496742
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-10-31
• Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Pr

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." "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."--BOOK JACKET.

Author Biography

Baz Dreisinger is assistant professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction	p. 1
White Panic and White Passing: Slavery and Reconstruction	p. 15
Dy(e)ing to Be Black: "Mars Jeems's Nightmare," Black Like Me, and Watermelon Man	p. 41
Black Like She: Grace Halsell and the Sexuality of Passing	p. 71
Contagious Beats: Passing, Autobiography, and Discourses of American Music	p. 93
Is Passing Passe in a "Post-Race" World?	p. 121
Epilogue: Hits and Misses of a Racial Free-for-All	p. 141
Notes	p. 151
Index	p. 179
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