Tag: Danzy Senna

  • 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,…

  • 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 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…

  • 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…

  • ‘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…

  • 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.

  • Imitation of Life, one of the classic narratives of racial passing, originated as a 1933 novel by Jewish writer Fannie Hurst, but it is perhaps best known as the 1959 melodrama directed by Douglas Sirk inducing finale of the Sirk film, the prodigal black daughter, who has crossed the color line and passed for white, returns home…

  • English 4640G: Construction of Racial Identity in Post Civil War America Huron University College at Western University London, Ontario, Canada Winter 2013 Neil Brooks, Associate Professor, English Course Description: Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination argues that the canonical American literary tradition can only be understood after recognizing the presence…

  • 350:445 Revisiting Racial Passing in the 21st Century Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Summer 2013 This is a course on racial passing, which many people wrongly believe is an antiquated phenomenon. Passing has historically referred to light-skinned African Americans who use their phenotypes to pretend to be white and enjoy the privileges of…

  • Deconstructing the Mixed-Race Experience of Passing California State University, San Marcos May 2006 172 pages Victoria Baldo Segall A Thesis Submitted for Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Literature and Writing Studies In “Beauty and the Beast: On Racial Ambiguity” Carla Bradshaw describes passing as an attempt to…