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This essay provides an analysis of Danzy Senna's novel Caucasia from the perspective of American history, with its enslavement of and discrimination against African Americans, resulting in anti-miscegenation laws in the 1660s, banning marriage between blacks and whites. Because of this tortured history of race, Caucasia's mixed-race family faces the herculean task of trying to stay together while facing multiple racial crises. Caucasia is examined also as a neo-slave narrative since the fractured family is forced to run like fugitives. The postmodern imperative reveals its dual distinctions of destabilizing biologically fixed identities based on race, yet offering the bi-racial sisters the artful language games of self-empowerment.
Born in 1970, in Boston, Massachusetts, to a white mother and black father, both activists and intellectuals, Danzy Senna received national attention after the publication of her quasi-autobiographical novel, Caucasia, 1998. Among other prestigious awards, Senna received the Book of the Month Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction. Lauded by the press for her hauntingly realistic portrayal of the sheer pathology of American racism while avoiding the cliché of the tragic mulatta who lacks self-agency, Senna writes a novel about a bi-racial character coming of age, a Bildungsroman, and resisting the identities superimposed upon her by racial essentialists. Her protagonist, Birdie Lee, rejects the racial binary of identity politics and attempts to invent a third space of identity, neither white nor black, to explore individual aspiration and promise.
Birdie's heroic effort, however, is fraught with the tensions of American history, as seen in Senna's ubiquitous allusions to slavery and miscegenation. Thus, Werner Sollors's reference to the anthropologist Michael Fischer's theory on the reinvention of ethnicity resonates with meaning for Caucasia and its challenge. He writes, "What the newer works bring home forcefully is the paradoxical sense that ethnicity is something reinvented and reinterpreted in each generation by each individual and that it is often something quite puzzling to the individual, something over which he or she lacks control" (Sollors, 1989, p. xi). Attempting to acquire control over her body, a migrating Birdie faces a herculean task because race is assumed to be a rigidly, fixed biological essence, even as prominent sociologists like Michael Orni and Howard Winant assert history's evolving discourse on the social construction of race...