{"id":54756,"date":"2017-08-09T14:41:03","date_gmt":"2017-08-09T14:41:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=54756"},"modified":"2017-08-09T14:41:03","modified_gmt":"2017-08-09T14:41:03","slug":"danzy-sennas-new-black-woman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=54756","title":{"rendered":"Danzy Senna\u2019s New Black Woman"},"content":{"rendered":"

Danzy Senna\u2019s New Black Woman<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New Yorker<\/a>
\n2017-08-07<\/p>\n

Doreen St. F\u00e9lix<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nIn Danzy Senna\u2019s<\/a> latest novel, \u201cNew People<\/a>,\u201d the ugliness of segregation has given way to a class of upwardly mobile light-skinned black people.<\/em>
\nAgence Opale \/ Alamy Stock Photo<\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

In an essay published in 2006<\/a>, the novelist Paul Beatty<\/a> recalled the first book he\u2019d ever read by a black author. When the Los Angeles Unified School Board<\/a>\u2014\u201cout of the graciousness of its repressive little heart\u201d\u2014sent him a copy of Maya Angelou\u2019s<\/a> \u201cI Know Why the Caged Bird Sings<\/a>,\u201d he made it through a few \u201cmaudlin\u201d pages before he grew suspicious, he wrote. \u201cI knew why they put a mirror in the parakeet\u2019s cage: so he could wallow in his own misery.\u201d Observing that the \u201cdefining characteristic of the African-American writer is sobriety,\u201d Beatty described his own path toward a black literary insobriety, one that would lead to the satirical style of his novels \u201cWhite Boy Shuffle<\/a>\u201d and \u201cThe Sellout<\/a>.\u201d Along the way, he discovered a select canon of literary black satire, including Zora Neale Hurston\u2019s<\/a> freewheeling story \u201cThe Book of Harlem\u201d and Cecil Brown\u2019s<\/a> \u201cThe Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Danzy Senna<\/a>, Beatty\u2019s friend and fellow novelist, makes an appearance in that essay, smiling \u201cwistfully\u201d as she shows him \u201cthe cover of Fran Ross\u2019s<\/a> hilarious 1974 novel, \u2018Oreo<\/a>.\u2019\u201d As Senna later wrote in the foreword to the novel\u2019s reissue<\/a>, \u201cOreo<\/a>,\u201d about a biracial girl searching for her itinerant white father, manages to probe \u201cthe idea of falling from racial grace\u201d while avoiding \u201cmulatto<\/a> sentimentalism.\u201d Since her 1998 d\u00e9but novel, \u201cCaucasia<\/a>,\u201d a stark story about two biracial sisters, Senna, like Ross before her, has developed her own kind of insobriety, one focussed on comically eviscerating the archetype of the \u201ctragic mulatto<\/a>\u201d\u2014that nineteenth-century invention who experiences an emotional anguish rooted in her warring, mixed bloods. Both beautiful and wretched, the mulatto was intended to arouse sympathy in white readers, who had magnificent difficulty relating to black people in literature (to say nothing of life). Senna, the daughter of the white Boston<\/a> poet Fanny Howe and the black editor Carl Senna, grew up a member of the nineties Fort Greene<\/a> \u201cdreadlocked \u00e9lite\u201d; her light-skinned black characters, who dodge the constraints of post-segregation America, provide an excuse for incisive social satire. Thrillingly, blackness is not hallowed in Senna\u2019s work, nor is it impervious to pathologies of ego. Senna particularly enjoys lampooning the search for racial authenticity. Her characters, and the clannish worlds they are often trying to escape, teeter on the brink of ruin and absurdity.<\/p>\n

Senna\u2019s latest novel, the slick and highly enjoyable \u201cNew People<\/a>,\u201d makes keen, icy farce of the affectations of the Brooklyn<\/a> black faux-bohemia in which Maria, a distracted graduate student, lives with her fianc\u00e9 among the new \u201cNiggerati<\/a>.\u201d Maria and Khalil Mirsky\u2014the latter\u2019s name a droll amalgamation<\/a> of his black and white Jewish parentage\u2014are the \u201csame shade of beige.\u201d…<\/p>\n

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

Senna\u2019s latest novel, the slick and highly enjoyable \u201cNew People,\u201d makes keen, icy farce of the affectations of the Brooklyn black faux-bohemia in which Maria, a distracted graduate student, lives with her fianc\u00e9 among the new \u201cNiggerati.\u201d Maria and Khalil Mirsky\u2014the latter\u2019s name a droll amalgamation of his black and white Jewish parentage\u2014are the \u201csame shade of beige.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,8,6462,20],"tags":[1340,27418,16819,3886],"class_list":["post-54756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-danzy-senna","tag-doreen-st-felix","tag-new-yorker","tag-the-new-yorker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54756","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=54756"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54756\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54757,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54756\/revisions\/54757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}