Mixed Race Studies

Language variation, audience design, and racial identity: an analysis of discourse in Danzy Senna’s “Caucasia”

Purdue University
2015
81 pages
ISBN: 9781339183824

Rachelle R. Henderson

Previous studies examining sociolinguistic language variation, race, and identity focus primarily on self-defining monoracial audiences. Additionally, previous studies examining mixed race identity in interracial literature use traditional literary or historical methodologies. The current study seeks to bridge a connection between sociolinguistics and literature. To date, there are few, if any, studies which apply sociolinguistic theories of language variation to discourse in interracial literature. The current research project is one such study, examining character dialogue of self-defining monoracial and black-white mixed race interlocutors in Danzy Senna’s contemporary interracial novel, Caucasia. The current research project asks two primary questions: 1) How is language variation is Caucasia (Senna, 1998) motivated by the race of both speaker and the audience and 2) How do mixed race and self-defining monoracial audiences evaluate language variation in Caucasia (Senna, 1998)? The overarching research objective is the exploration of mixed race identity.

The current thesis is composed of four chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the rationale behind the current project. Chapter 2 provides a background of the relevant literature, ad Chapter 3 analyzes data within the text through sociolinguistic methodology, and Chapter 4 offers a discussion of the analysis, in addition to a conclusion.

Purchase the Masters thesis here.

Fading to white, fading away: biracial bodies in Michelle Cliff’s Abeng and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia

African American Review
2006-03-22

Michelle Goldberg

However dissimilar individual bodies are, the compelling idea of common, racially indicative bodily characteristics offers a welcome short-cut into the favored forms of solidarity and connection, even if they are effectively denied by divergent patterns in life chances and everyday experiences.—Paul Gilroy, Against Race

the invisible in me is counter to the visible.—Michelle Cliff, “The Black Woman As Mulatto”

Michelle Cliff’s Abeng (1986) and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998) typify a recent literary uptrend: a dramatic increase in biracial fiction, memoir, and theory, in biracial discourses of passing, invisibility, and identity. Abeng, which received widespread critical acclaim, and Caucasia, the winner of numerous 1998 “Best Book” awards, introduce characters whose mixed race parentage holds true for a growing number of multiracial Americans. Both novels offer biracial characters who resist racial labels while staying especially connected to “blackness.” In Abeng and Caucasia, respectively, the white bodies of Clare Savage and Birdie Lee misrepresent identities that remain ascribed to, yet not confined by, “blackness.”…

Read the entire article here.