Mixed Race Studies

Book Review: CAUCASIA

MixedRaceBooks
2016-07-26

Bethany Lam

Senna, Danzy, Caucasia: A Novel (New York: Riverhead, 1999)

Two biracial sisters—one light-skinned, one dark—are separated as children. The younger, lighter girl grows into a troubled teenager, but she never forgets her beloved older sister. Can she find her sister again … and with her sister, her self?

Plot Summary:

Seven-year-old Birdie Lee idolizes her big sister, Cole. Growing up biracial in 1970s Boston, she needs Cole’s protection and support to cope with the racial tensions of the time (see “Boston busing desegregation“).

The two girls are so close that they have developed a secret language, “Elemeno.” Together, they dream of a fantasy world, also called “Elemeno,” whose inhabitants can change appearance as needed to blend in and survive. As young children, the sisters retreat to this world to escape the things that threaten them, especially the slow crumbling of their parents’ dysfunctional marriage…

Read the entire review here.

Oreo: A Comeback Story

On The Media
WNYC FM
New York, New York
Friday, 2015-07-17

Mythili Rao, Host and Producer

Guests: Mat Johnson, Harryette Mullen, Mark Anthony Neal and Danzy Senna

In 1974, Fran Ross published her first and only novel, “Oreo.” The satirical tale of a biracial teenager’s Theseus-style quest to find her father was almost completely overlooked in its era. Now, more than 4 decades later, its re-issue is being met with critical praise. Producer Mythili Rao explores why Ross’s take on racial identity was so ahead of its time.

Listen to the interview (00:10:58) here.

Review: ‘Oreo,’ a Sandwich-Cookie of a Feminist Comic Novel

The New York Times
2015-07-14

Dwight Garner

Fran Ross’s first and only novel, “Oreo,” was published in 1974, four years after Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and two years before Alex Haley’s “Roots.” It wasn’t reviewed in The New York Times; it was hardly reviewed anywhere.

It’s interesting to imagine an alternative history of African-American fiction in which this wild, satirical and pathbreaking feminist picaresque caught the ride it deserved in the culture. Today it would be where it belongs, up among the 20th century’s lemony comic classics, novels that range from “Lucky Jim” and “Cold Comfort Farm” to “Catch-22” and “A Confederacy of Dunces.”

These sorts of lists have been for too long, to borrow a line from the TV show “black-ish,” whiter than the inside of Conan O’Brien’s thigh.

“Oreo” might have changed how we thought about a central strand of our literature’s DNA. As the novelist Danzy Senna puts it in her introduction to this necessary reissue: “ ‘Oreo’ resists the unwritten conventions that still exist for novels written by black women today. There’s nothing redemptively uplifting about her work. The title doesn’t refer to the Bible or the blues. The work does not refer to slavery. The character is never violated, sexually or otherwise. The characters are not from the South.”

Instead, in “Oreo” Ms. Ross is simply flat-out fearless and funny and sexy and sublime. It makes a kind of sense that, when this novel didn’t find an audience, its author moved to Los Angeles in the late 1970s to write for Richard Pryor…

Read the review here.

Oreo: Fiction by Fran Ross with a contribution by Danzy Senna and Harryette Mullen

New Directions Publishing
2015-07-07 (originally published in 1974)
240 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780811223225
Ebook ISBN: 9780811223232

Fran Ross (1935–1985)

A pioneering, dazzling satire about a biracial black girl from Philadelphia searching for her Jewish father in New York City

Oreo is raised by her maternal grandparents in Philadelphia. Her black mother tours with a theatrical troupe, and her Jewish deadbeat dad disappeared when she was an infant, leaving behind a mysterious note that triggers her quest to find him. What ensues is a playful, modernized parody of the classical odyssey of Theseus with a feminist twist, immersed in seventies pop culture, and mixing standard English, black vernacular, and Yiddish with wisecracking aplomb. Oreo, our young hero, navigates the labyrinth of sound studios and brothels and subway tunnels in Manhattan, seeking to claim her birthright while unwittingly experiencing and triggering a mythic journey of self-discovery like no other.

An Overlooked Classic About the Comedy of Race

The New Yorker
2015-05-07

Danzy Senna

Illustration by Roman Muradov

The first time I read Fran Ross’s hilarious, badass novel, “Oreo,” I was living on Fort Greene Place, in Brooklyn, in a community of people I thought of as “the dreadlocked élite.” It was the late nineteen-nineties, and the artisanal cheese shops and organic juice bars had not yet fully arrived in the boroughs, though there were hints of what was to come. Poor people and artists could still afford to live there. We were young and black, and we’d moved to the neighborhood armed with graduate degrees and creative ambitions. There was a quiet storm of what the musician and writer Greg Tate described as “Black Genius” brewing in our midst. Spike Lee had set up a production studio inside the old firehouse on DeKalb Avenue. Around the corner, on Lafayette Street, was Kokobar, a black-owned espresso shop decorated with Basquiat-inspired paintings; there were whispers that Tracy Chapman and Alice Walker were investors. Around the corner, on Elliott Street, Lisa Price, a.k.a. Carol’s Daughter, sold organic hair oils and creams for kinky-curly hair out of a brownstone storefront.

Years earlier, I had read Trey Ellis’s seminal essay “The New Black Aesthetic” in my West Coast dorm room, curled beside my dreadlocked, half-Jewish boyfriend. We saw glimmers of ourselves in his description of a new generation of black artists. We, too, had been born post-civil-rights movement, post-Loving, post-soul, post-everything. We were suspicious of militancy, black or otherwise; suspicious of claims to authenticity, racial and otherwise. We were culturally hybrid—“cultural mulattos,” as Ellis put it—whether we had one white parent or not.

Now, in nineties Fort Greene, we had arrived. Many of the black kids in our midst were recovering oreos: they had grown up listening to the Clash, not Public Enemy, playing hacky-sack, not basketball. They were all too accustomed to, as my friend Jake Lamar once put it, being the only black person at the dinner party.

Only now we were throwing our own dinner party. We were demi-teint—half-tone—a shade of blackness that had been formed in a clash of disparate symbols and signifiers; there was nothing pure about us. We were authentically nothing. Each of us had experienced a degree of alienation growing up—too black to be white, or too white to be black, or too mixed to be anything—and somehow, at the same moment in time, we’d all moved into the same ten-block radius of Brooklyn.

“Oreo” came to me in this context like a strange, uncanny dream about a future that was really the past. That is, it read like a novel not from 1974 but from the near future—a book whose appearance I was still waiting for. I stared at the author photo of the woman wearing the peasant smock and her hair in an Afro and could easily imagine her moving through the streets of Fort Greene. She belonged to our world. Her blackness was our blackness…

Read the entire article here.

Identity as Skin Color: Performing a “White” Identity in Caucasia

Scholars: Journal of Undergraduate Research
Issue 16 – Winter 2011
McKendree University Online Journal of Undergraduate Research
Lebanon, Illinois

Anastasia Bierman

‘My body would fill in the blanks, tell me who I should become, and I would let it speak for me,’ says Birdie Lee, the lost and searching multiracial protagonist of Danzy Senna’s novel Caucasia (Senna 1). The ‘blanks’ are her identity, agency, and individuality. Satirically, Birdie acknowledges the impossibility of a body speaking for a person, but she also points out that with race, a person’s body does speak for him/her. Danzy Senna, in writing Caucasia, exposes identity and the race one affiliates with as a facade someone can assume rather than a concrete, unchangeable sense of self. As Birdie shows throughout the novel, identity is perception as she takes on the identity of Jesse Goldman, a young Jewish girl, in a small, racist New Hampshire town while she is really a young half-black, half-white girl who grew up in Boston during the racial upheaval of the 1970s. The novel follows Birdie from ages 8 to 14, from Boston to New Hampshire back to Boston again. Birdie’s parents, Deck and Sandy Lee, strive to create a family blind to the racial stratification surrounding them. Living blind to race eventually destroys the family and forces them to play the racial game, causing the family to split up and separating the sisters, Cole, Birdie’s darker and older sister, and Birdie. In this separation, they revert to the roles they are most able to fit, not the ones in which they most identify. For Sandy and Birdie, it is White, and for Deck and Cole, it is Black. Birdie loses her true sense of identity by passing and performing as opposed to possessing it. She feels fragmented and disembodied, looks to other people for her own sense of self, developing a double consciousness.

Race is like a crayon box configuration; it attempts to assign a distinct name to a color that could have various hues. A ‘black’ person is anyone with a brown tint to their skin while a ‘white’ person is more or less a peach colored person. As it relates to a person, the colors ‘black’ and ‘white’ are not exactly what they seem to be. Anyone with lighter complexion can be categorized as white even though the person’s ethnicity can be anything from Italian to Asian-American. Critics Joan Ferrante and Prince Browne Jr. agree with this by pointing out, ‘Whether people fit into a racial category or not, the categories remain central to how people think about their own identity and the racial identity of others’ (Ferrante 113). The key is the physical appearance and the perception of that physical appearance to others. Performing identity, however, is only essential because of the many problems race creates for Birdie Lee and her family. Race, in Caucasia, permeates everything around the Lee family, even the construction of the family. The effect, psychologically and socially, is the breakdown of their family unit, loss of relationships, and obsessive focus on color…

Read the entire article here.

The mixed-race girl’s guide to the art of passing: racial simulations in Danzy Senna’s Caucasia and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand

Florida Atlantic University
May 2014
65 pages

Gyasi S. Byng

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts, Florida Atlantic University

Racial identifications are continually influenced by and constructed through one’s environment. Building on Jean Baudrillard’s “The Precession of Simulacra” and Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, this thesis argues that houses and clothing are the material objects that allow characters Birdie Lee from Danzy Senna’s Caucasia and Helga Crane from Nella Larsen’s Quicksand to construct their mixed race identities. Birdie Lee’s childhood home is the place where she develops a mixed race identity. When she leaves that home, she is forced to take on simulacra in order to pass for white. Without a stable childhood or adult home, Helga Crane’s wardrobe becomes the space where she unconsciously develops a mixed race identity. Her clothing choices allow her to simulate an entirely black identity that masks her mixed race heritage. Ultimately, the fates of Birdie and Helga are determined by whether or not they can occupy a space that is accepting of their mixed race identities.

Read the entire thesis here.

Rewriting the Passing Novel: Danzy Senna’s Caucasia

The Griot
Volume 26, Issue 2, Fall (October 2007)
14 pages

Kathryn Rummell, Professor of English
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Passing (here, signifying African Americans passing for whites) has long been a fixture of the American social landscape. Passers have masqueraded for a variety of reasons, the most common being to flee from slavery, to Improve their economic situation, and of course to escape racism. The practice of passing, according to Werner Sollors in Neither Black Nor White, Yet Both, reached the height of its popularity from the nineteenth through the middle of the twentieth century (Sollors 247), and the majority of narratives of passing were written during this era. These narratives were especially popular during the Harlem Renaissance, when writers such as Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and James Weldon Johnson employed the motif of passing to explore the psychological, emotional, and intellectual dilemmas involved In passing for white. Novels of passing typically share several characteristics: interracial sex, fear of discovery, feelings of guilt and betrayal, and the struggle to find and claim an identity. Perhaps because of the Renaissance’s emphasis on racial pride and solidarity, these novels of passing often indict the passers, portraying them as so-called tragic mulattoes or racial sell-outs. For Instance, Clare Kendry falls (or is pushed) to her death at the end of Larsen’s Passing, and Johnson’s unnamed narrator In Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man wonders If by passing he “sold [his] birthright for a mess of pottage” (211). These portrayals highlight the raclalized social structure of the early twentieth century: mixed-race Individuals often felt trapped in a society that recognized only two racial identities: white and black…

Read the entire article here.

‘A Chosen Exile,’ by Allyson Hobbs [Senna Review]

The New York Times
Sunday Book Review
2014-11-21

Danzy Senna

A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life By Allyson Hobbs; Illustrated. 382 pp. Harvard University Press. $29.95.

One of the best birthday presents anybody ever gave me was a “calling card” by the conceptual artist Adrian Piper. I was in college at the time, and it felt like the ultimate inside joke handed from one racially ambiguous person to another.

Slim and innocuous as a business card, it reads: “Dear Friend, I am black. I am sure you did not realize this when you made/laughed at/agreed with that racist remark. In the past I have attempted to alert people to my identity in advance. . . . I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I’m sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing me.”

To be black but to be perceived as white is to find yourself, at times, in a racial no man’s land. It is to feel like an embodiment of W. E. B. Du Bois’s double consciousness — that sense of being in two places at the same time. It is also to be perpetually aware of both the primacy of race and the “bankruptcy of the race idea,” as Allyson Hobbs, an assistant professor of history at Stanford University, puts it in her incisive new cultural history, “A Chosen Exile.”

Hobbs is interested in the stories of individuals who chose to cross the color line — black to white — from the late 1800s up through the 1950s. It’s a story we’ve of course read and seen before in fictional accounts — numerous novels and films that have generally portrayed mixed-race characters in the sorriest of terms. Like gay characters, mulattoes always pay for their existence dearly in the end. Joe Christmas, the tormented drifter in William Faulkner’s “Light in August,” considers his blackness evidence of original sin (a.k.a. miscegenation) and ends up castrated and murdered. Sarah Jane, a character in Douglas Sirk’s 1959 remake of the film “Imitation of Life,” denies her black mother in her attempt to be seen as white. Her tragedy once again feels like mixed fate. As her long-suffering mother puts it, “How do you tell a child that she was born to be hurt?”…

Read the entire review here.

Passing Interest: Racial Passing in US Novels, Memoirs, Television, and Film, 1990–2010

State University of New York Press
July 2014
352 pages
Hardcover ISBN13: 978-1-4384-5227-2
Electronic ISBN13: 978-1-4384-5229-6

Edited by:

Julie Cary Nerad, Associate Professor of American Literature
Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland

Explores how the trope of racial passing continues to serve as a touchstone for gauging public beliefs and anxieties about race in this multiracial era.

The first volume to focus on the trope of racial passing in novels, memoirs, television, and films published or produced between 1990 and 2010, Passing Interest takes the scholarly conversation on passing into the twenty-first century. With contributors working in the fields of African American studies, American studies, cultural studies, film studies, literature, and media studies, this book offers a rich, interdisciplinary survey of critical approaches to a broad range of contemporary passing texts. Contributors frame recent passing texts with a wide array of cultural discourses, including immigration law, the Post-Soul Aesthetic, contemporary political satire, affirmative action, the paradoxes of “colorblindness,” and the rhetoric of “post-racialism.” Many explore whether “one drop” of blood still governs our sense of racial identity, or to what extent contemporary American culture allows for the racially indeterminate individual. Some essays open the scholarly conversation to focus on “ethnic” passers—individuals who complicate the traditional black-white binary—while others explore the slippage between traditional racial passing and related forms of racial performance, including blackface minstrelsy and racial masquerade.

Table of Contents

• Preface: The “Posts” of Passing / Gayle Wald
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: The (Not So) New Face of America / Julie Cary Nerad
• 2. On the Margins of Movement: Passing in Three Contemporary Memoirs / Irina Negrea
• 3. “A Cousin to Blackness”: Race and Identity in Bliss Broyard’s One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life / Lynn Washington and Julie Cary Nerad
• 4. Can One Really Choose? Passing and Self-Identification at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century / Jené Schoenfeld
• 5. Passing in Blackface: The Intimate Drama of Post-Racialism on Black. White / Eden Osucha
• 6. Broke Right in Half: Passing of/in Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone / Julie Cary Nerad
• 7. Passing for Chicano, Passing for White: Negotiating Filipino American Identity in Brian Ascalon Roley’s American Son / Amanda Page
• 8. Race in the Marketplace: Postmodern Passing and Ali G / Ana Cristina Mendes
• 9. Passing for Black, White, and Jewish: Mixed-Race Identity in Rebecca Walker and Danzy Senna / Lori Harrison-Kahan
• 10. Smiling Faces: Chameleon Street, Racial Passing/Performativity, and Film Blackness / Michael B. Gillespie
• 11. Consuming Performances: Race, Media, and the Failure of the Cultural Mulatto in Bamboozled and Erasure / Meredith McCarroll
• Bibliography
• Contributor Biographies
• Index