The past two decades have seen a growing influx of biracial discourse in fiction, memoir, and theory, and since the 2008 election of Barack Obama to the presidency, debates over whether America has entered a post-racial phase have set the media abuzz. In this penetrating and provocative study, Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins adds a new dimension to this dialogue as she investigates the ways in which various mixed-race writers and public figures have redefined both blackness and whiteness by invoking multiple racial identities.
Focusing on several key novels-Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), Lucinda Roy’s Lady Moses (1998), and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998)-as well as memoirs by Obama, James McBride, and Rebecca Walker and the personae of singer Mariah Carey and actress Halle Berry, Dagbovie-Mullins challenges conventional claims about biracial identification with a concept she calls black-sentient mixed-race identity. Whereas some multiracial organisations can diminish blackness by, for example, championing the inclusion of multiple-race options on census forms and similar documents, a black-sentient consciousness stresses a perception rooted in blackness- a connection to a black consciousness, writes the author, that does not overdetermine but still plays a large role in one’s racial identification. By examining the nuances of this concept through close readings of fiction, memoir, and the public images of mixed-race celebrities, Dagbovie-Mullins demonstrates how a black-sentient mixed-race identity reconciles the widening separation between black/white mixed race and blackness that has been encouraged by contemporary mixed-race politics and popular culture.
A book that promises to spark new debate and thoughtful reconsideration’s of an especially timely topic, Crossing B(l)ack recognises and investigates assertions of a black-centred mixed-race identity that does not divorce a premodern racial identity from a postmodern racial fluidity.
