{"id":57200,"date":"2018-12-31T04:21:21","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T04:21:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=57200"},"modified":"2018-12-31T04:21:21","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T04:21:21","slug":"danzy-sennas-darkly-comic-take-on-racial-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=57200","title":{"rendered":"Danzy Senna’s darkly comic take on racial identity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Danzy Senna’s darkly comic take on racial identity<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Writers & Company with Eleanor Wachtel<\/a>
\nCBC Radio<\/a>
\n2018-06-15<\/p>\n

Eleanor Wachtel<\/strong><\/a>, Host<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
\nDanzy Senna’s<\/a> novel New People<\/em><\/a> follows graduate student Maria through bohemian Brooklyn<\/a> in the 1990s as she wrestles with her identity and her future. (Mara Casey)<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

American novelist Danzy Senna<\/a> draws on her experience growing up in an interracial family in her edgy, prize-winning fiction. In her latest novel, New People<\/em><\/a>, she writes with insight and subversive humour about what it means to be half-black and half-white.<\/p>\n

Senna was born in Boston<\/a> in 1970 to parents from very different worlds, who wed a year after interracial marriage became legal. Her mother, the poet and novelist Fanny Howe<\/a>, came from a privileged background, with English\/Irish family roots going back to the Mayflower<\/a>. Her father, the African-American editor and academic Carl Senna, grew up in poverty in the South, the son of an orphaned black mother and absent Mexican father. In her 2009 memoir, Where Did You Sleep Last Night? A Personal History<\/em><\/a>, Senna traces her father’s family story and her own complicated upbringing following her parents’ breakup when she was five years old. Raised with an acute black consciousness, during a time when, as Senna describes it, “‘mixed’ wasn’t an option; you were either black or white,” she brings to all her writing an awareness \u2014 and astute analysis \u2014 of class, race and identity…<\/p>\n

Read the entire story here<\/a>. Listen to the full episode (00:54:47) here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

American novelist Danzy Senna draws on her experience growing up in an interracial family in her edgy, prize-winning fiction. In her latest novel, “New People,” she writes with insight and subversive humour about what it means to be half-black and half-white.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2850,13743,8,6462,20],"tags":[21842,13560,25461,1340,29212,29210,29209,29211],"class_list":["post-57200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-audio","category-interviews","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-canadian-broadcasting-corporation","tag-cbc","tag-cbc-radio","tag-danzy-senna","tag-eleanor-wachtel","tag-writers-company","tag-writers-company-with-eleanor-wachtel","tag-writers-and-company"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57200","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=57200"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57202,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57200\/revisions\/57202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}