{"id":45416,"date":"2016-01-27T18:56:33","date_gmt":"2016-01-27T18:56:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=45416"},"modified":"2016-01-27T18:56:33","modified_gmt":"2016-01-27T18:56:33","slug":"her-fathers-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=45416","title":{"rendered":"Her Father’s People"},"content":{"rendered":"

Her Father’s People<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Stanford Magazine<\/a>
\nJuly\/August 2009<\/p>\n

Erin Aubry Kaplan<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
\nAntonin Kratochvil<\/em>
\nWEDDED IDEALISM: Danzy Senna<\/a> was the middle child born to Fanny Howe<\/a> and Carl Senna.<\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

For years, Danzy Senna<\/a> thoughtfully explored issues of race and identity in fiction, including her novels Caucasia<\/a><\/em> and Symptomatic<\/em><\/a>. And then one day the author, walking through Harvard Square<\/a>, found herself surrounded by signs, buildings and businesses bearing the names and images of Boston\u2019s<\/a> most prominent families. DeWolfe, Quincy, Howe\u2014they were names of Senna\u2019s forebears via her mother, poet and professor Fanny Howe<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The display reminded Senna, \u201992, how much she had always known about her mother\u2019s people\u2014and how little she knew about her father\u2019s. In 1968, Carl Senna, soon to become the youngest editor at Beacon Press, and Fanny Howe married\u2014a commitment that was headily symbolic (personal but also political) in that Carl was black and from Southern poverty, while Fanny, \u201962, was white and raised with Mayflower<\/a> privilege. Their wedding photograph, Danzy Senna writes, showed \u201cthe \u2018Negro of exceptional promise\u2019 taking the hand of the descendant of slave traders.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Senna contemplated those names in Boston, she thought, \u201cWhat about my father\u2019s side?\u201d After all, \u201che gave me both my first and last names. Yet I knew so little about him.\u201d So begins her nonfiction book, Where Did You Sleep Last Night?<\/a><\/em> (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which seeks to bring some balance to her family history, and to a larger narrative that reflexively puts whites at the center of the American story and blacks at the margins…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Her Father’s People Stanford Magazine July\/August 2009 Erin Aubry Kaplan Antonin Kratochvil WEDDED IDEALISM: Danzy Senna was the middle child born to Fanny Howe and Carl Senna. For years, Danzy Senna thoughtfully explored issues of race and identity in fiction, including her novels Caucasia and Symptomatic. And then one day the author, walking through Harvard […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,459,8,20],"tags":[22833,1340,11766,8436,22832],"class_list":["post-45416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-history","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-carl-senna","tag-danzy-senna","tag-erin-aubry-kaplan","tag-fanny-howe","tag-stanford-magazine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45416"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45418,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45416\/revisions\/45418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}