Caucasia

Caucasia
Danzy Senna
New York: Riverhead Books, 1998
Rare Book Collection
Vanderbilt University Special Collections

Caucasia is American novelist and essayist Danzy Senna’s first novel. It earned the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the American Library Association’s Alex Award. A coming-of-age story, Caucasia treats issues of racial passing and biracial identity, focusing on two daughters, Birdie and Cole, of a multiracial family living in Boston during the 1970s and their lives after their parents’ divorce. Senna’s characterization of Birdie—the daughter that could more easily pass as white with her light skin and straight hair—rejects the trope of “the tragic mulatto” by having Birdie desire to be recognized as Black.

Typically, this literary trope, recurrent in American literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, focuses on a biracial individual deemed tragic for not fitting into a singular racial category and desiring to pass as white.