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Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South
2012 Honorable mention for the Book Award in Cultural Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies
Arkansas, 1943. The Deep South during the heart of Jim Crow-era segregation. A Japanese-American person boards a bus, and immediately is faced with a dilemma. Not white. Not black. Where to sit?
By elucidating the experience of interstitial ethnic groups such as Mexican, Asian, and Native Americans--groups that are held to be neither black nor white--Leslie Bow explores how the color line accommodated--or refused to accommodate--"other" ethnicities within a binary racial system. Analyzing pre- and post-1954 American literature, film, autobiography, government documents, ethnography, photographs, and popular culture, Bow investigates the ways in which racially "in-between" people and communities were brought to heel within the South's prevailing cultural logic, while locating the interstitial as a site of cultural anxiety and negotiation.
Spanning the pre- to the post- segregation eras, Partly Colored traces the compelling history of "third race" individuals in the U.S. South, and in the process forces us to contend with the multiracial panorama that constitutes American culture and history.
Arkansas, 1943. The Deep South during the heart of Jim Crow-era segregation. A Japanese-American person boards a bus, and immediately is faced with a dilemma. Not white. Not black. Where to sit?
By elucidating the experience of interstitial ethnic groups such as Mexican, Asian, and Native Americans--groups that are held to be neither black nor white--Leslie Bow explores how the color line accommodated--or refused to accommodate--"other" ethnicities within a binary racial system. Analyzing pre- and post-1954 American literature, film, autobiography, government documents, ethnography, photographs, and popular culture, Bow investigates the ways in which racially "in-between" people and communities were brought to heel within the South's prevailing cultural logic, while locating the interstitial as a site of cultural anxiety and negotiation.
Spanning the pre- to the post- segregation eras, Partly Colored traces the compelling history of "third race" individuals in the U.S. South, and in the process forces us to contend with the multiracial panorama that constitutes American culture and history.
296 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2010
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August 13, 2018
I was really expecting this book to make more use of interviews with Asian Americans who were raised or live in the Deep South, and I was a bit disappointed to find that this book focuses a lot more on analyzing books and film about Asian Americans in the Deep South. It felt like the author wrote a few essays analyzing books and documentaries that had an Asian American individual in the Deep South, and then strung them together to create this book. And while that's not a bad thing, per se (there's a lot of very insightful analysis), it just wasn't what I was hoping to get out of this book. It was also a tad too academic for my reading preferences.
Displaying 1 of 1 review