![]() ![]() Additionally, Senna shows the double consciousness African Americans and biracial individuals embody because of America’s fixation on the white, American Dream that manifests itself as life in Caucasia. Ultimately, Senna’s satire illuminates the tragic passing narrative as complicit in upholding and reinforcing assumptions of a binary world. The extraordinary national bestseller that launched Danzy Senna’s literary career, Caucasia is a modern classic, at once a powerful coming of age story and a groundbreaking work on identity and race in America. ![]() The all-white space the characters are forced to inhabit informs their racial identities and desires and leads to a double consciousness within the narrator, Birdie. Specifically, I look at Caucasia as a location in which the main characters – biracial Birdie and Cole Lee their white mother, Sandy and their black father, Deck – must find a way to live. Fearing a blood feud, his parents flee the village. I draw on the existing scholarship surrounding satire and traditional passing narratives and apply it to Senna’s work to analyze the ways this novel differs from traditional, early 20th-century passing narratives to comment on the absurdity of white desirability and the racial binary through the American Dream. In a remote Caucasian village, a young boy irrevocably disturbs the status quo when he returns a horse stolen by his family to its rightful owner. In this paper, I argue that Danzy Senna’s Caucasia is a satirical passing narrative that exposes the tragedy of traditional passing novels as archaic for relying on racial binaries and perpetuating white desirability. ![]()
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