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  • Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South
  • Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly
Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South. By Leslie Bow. New York: New York University Press. 2010.

How fitting is it that a professor of English would write a book dedicated to documenting the lives of Americans who lived beyond, or alongside the black-white divide? When it comes to investigating and interpreting the existence of groups or individuals who did not fit neatly into the binary racial system which, until recently, framed the history of American identity formation, the discipline of English has traditionally been ahead of its historical counterpart.

Leslie Bow's Partly Colored is a welcomed addition to the study of the American experience that is beyond a black-white framework. Bow's work is a direct answer to Houston Baker's and Dana Nelson's 2001 call to include into the study of "a new Southern" history, the presence of Asian, Latin, and Indigenous Americans (20). Her focus is twofold in that it confronts segregation as it was practiced both before and after 1954. Most of her research is aimed at exploring the Asian American "interstitial" experience between Black and White Southerners. Despite the fact that there have always existed multiracial people on either side of the color line, her treatment of the Asian American experience in the segregated South is a successful effort to displace [End Page 171] an exclusive black-white narrative, which, for the most part, continues to dominate US Southern history in both popular memory and academia. In an era and region that legally sanctioned racial separation between White and Black Americans she chronicles the awkward inconsistencies endemic to Jim Crow culture. Bow's work is situated between scholars like David Roediger who, like W.E.B. Du Bois before him, linked the construction of whiteness in America to black antipathy, and Paul Spickard, who provided the intellectual template for analyzing the anomalous and intersecting aspects of a multiracial and multiethnic American populace. Partly Colored is clearly an extension of the work produced by Neil Foley and Tomás Almaguer who explored the historical interplay and structure of a tri-part racial system, which included various racial or ethnic communities residing in Texas and California.

With regards to a system of segregation that rigidly delineated public space along a black-white color line, Bow simply asked the question: How did Asian Americans struggle or benefit as they maneuvered within that system? Bow's scholarship moves us one step further along the quest to chronicle the entire American experience. By invoking the "public restroom" as a primary site of segregation Bow includes the experience of transgendered people into the analysis of race. Her effort is truly provocative and represents an epistemological leap forward. To those who might argue that racial and gender identity formation are, at times, incongruent sites of scholarship, Bow explains, "I have perhaps assumed too great a mobility between history, sociology, anthropology, literature, and queer and feminist theory. But these figures find unity . . ." (233). Moreover, she challenges the reader to consider the notion that all occasions of exclusion might fit under the same analytical umbrella. When considering the exclusionary experiences of marginalized people Bow compels the reader to view various manifestations of exclusion as comparable. If we consider that the U.S. constitution, in its original intent, afforded privileges exclusively to White men; it then follows that within the margin resides a wide, all-inclusive group of people, of various races, ethnicities, sexual orientations and identifications.

As far back as 1940, Du Bois argued that the intent and impact of segregation was in effect to construct Blackness, not in the biological sense, but in the institution's ability to mark and maintain privilege. In Dusk of Dawn he wrote, "I recognize it quite easily and with full legal sanction; the black man is a person who must ride 'Jim Crow' in Georgia" (666). Bow's interpretation is supported by Du Bois's argument that the most pernicious aspect of segregation was its ability to publically imprint a "badge of servitude" not only on Black-identified Americans, but on Asian, Latin...

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