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Can I read Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (New Americanists) on EtoBox?
Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (New Americanists) by Gayle Wald, Donald E. Pease is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.
What is Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (New Americanists) about?
As W. E. B. DuBois famously prophesied in The Souls of Black Folk, the fiction of the color line has been of urgent concern in defining a certain twentieth-century U.S. racial ''order.'' Yet the very arbitrariness of this line also gives rise to opportunities for racial ''passing,'' a practice through which subjects appropriate the terms of racial discourse. To erode race's authority, Gayle Wald argues, we must understand how race defines and yet fails to represent identity. She thus uses cultural narratives of passing to illuminate both the contradictions of race and the deployment of such contradictions for a variety of needs, interests, and desires. Wald begins her reading of twentieth-century passing narratives by analyzing works by African American writers James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen, showing how they use the ''passing plot'' to explore the negotiation of identity, agency, and freedom within the context of their protagonists' restricted choices. She then examines the 1946 autobiography Really the Blues, which details the transformation of Milton Mesirow, middle-class son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, into Mezz Mezzrow, jazz musici
Who reads Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (New Americanists)?
It is typically read by self-directed learners exploring a subject in depth.
Common subject areas: history, science, philosophy, social sciences.
- Author
- Gayle Wald, Donald E. Pease
- Publisher
- Duke University Press Books
- Published
- 2000
- Language
- EN
- ISBN
- 9780822324799
- Category
- nonfiction
- Subjects
- Literary Fiction, History, Science
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