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Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South - Paperback | Diverse Reads

Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South

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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.

ISBN-13: 9780814791332

Publisher: New York University Press

Publication Date: 04-23-2010

Pages: 296

Product Dimensions: 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

Leslie Bow is Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the Universityof Wisconsin, Madison. She is author of Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Scrutinizing the bipolar axis of power separating black from white under the Jim Crowe system of segregation, Bow tracks the oppression and elision of those who are "partly colored" — here chiefly Asian Americans but with comparative nods to Native Americans and the binaries characterizing gender and sexuality . . . What she finds is not a "third space" apart from black or white but an eneven extension of repression of racial differences into which Asian American subjects are shoehorned or erased."-The Journal of American History,

"An impressive and well-researched interdisciplinary response." -MELUS,

"Bow's work is an imoprtant contribution to Asian American studies and southern literary criticism, and it brings together two forms of intellectual inquiry that have been treated as quite distinct by other scholars."-Krystyn R. Moon,The Journal of Southern History

"Partly Colored is a work that should be read not only by those interested in the South or regionalism but by all scholars interested in issues of racialization."-Jennifer Ho,Journal of Asian American Studies

"In a refreshingly wide-ranging study, Bow compares the circumstances of the Lumbee Indians with those of Asians—the two groups were not classified as black or white. The author considers the consequences of intermarriage in the racialization of Asians, as well as the roles of class and gender. Above all, she explores the rich interstitial possibilities of Asians' being "in-between" set categories. This stimulating read is suitable for a broad audience... Highly Recommended."-CHOICE

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Thinking Interstitially 1

1 Coloring between the Lines: Historiographies of Southern Anomaly 23

2 The Interstitial Indian: The Lumbee and Segregation's Middle Caste 57

3 White Is and White Ain't: Failed Approximation and Eruptions of Funk in Representations of the Chinese in the South 91

4 Anxieties of the 'Partly Colored' 123

5 Productive Estrangement: Racial-Sexual Continuums in Asian American as Southern Literature 159

6 Transracial/Transgender: Analogies of Difference in Mai's America 197

Afterword: Continuums, Mobility, Places on the Train 229

Notes 239

Works Cited 261

Index 273

About the Author 285