Books like A Chosen Exile by Allyson Hobbs
Between the eighteenth and mid‑twentieth centuries, countless African Americans chose to pass as white, a radical act of exile that left families, friends, roots, and community behind. Allyson Hobbs presents passing as a deliberate departure from one racial identity toward another. In the antebellum South, passing offered an escape from slavery; after Reconstruction’s brief promise of equality, it became a tool to confront Jim‑Crow laws and carve independent lives. Hobbs examines both the possibilities and the challenges facing men and women living in a nation obsessed with racial distinctions, while also documenting the grief, loneliness, and isolation that often accompanied the rewards of this complex identity negotiation.
First publish date: 2014
Genre: History/Modern History
Authors: Allyson Hobbs
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Some Other Similar Books
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