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Nov 9, 2020
That Middle World
Race, Performance, and the Politics of Passing
Summary
In this chronologically and thematically ambitious study of racial passing literature, Julia Charles highlights how mixed-race subjects invent cultural spaces for themselves—a place she terms that middle world. Charles, an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Auburn University, focuses on the construction and performance of racial identity in works by writers from the antebellum period through Reconstruction, connecting these passing or crossing narratives to more contemporary examples of racial performativity - including Rachel Dolezal and her Black-passing controversy, the FX show Atlanta, and the musical Show Boat.
Provocative and theoretically innovative, Charles’s That Middle World: Race, Performance, and the Politics of Passing (UNC Press, 2020) offers a nuanced approach to African American passing literature and examines how mixed-race performers articulated their sense of selfhood and communal belonging in both past and present.
James West is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in History at Northumbria University, UK. He is the author of Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America (University of Illinois Press, 2020)
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James West
James West is a historian of race, media and business in the modern United States and Black diaspora. Author of "Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America" (Illinois, 2020), "A House for the Struggle: The Black Press and the Built Environment in Chicago" (Illinois, 2022), "Our Kind of Historian: The Work and Activism of Lerone Bennett Jr. (Massachusetts, 2022).
