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Google Drive for progress:

Caucasia Update 04.18.19: Peer Editing on Google Doc

Link for Caucasia edits: https://docs.google.com/document/d/12RyTvy9wl1f1mUBiDBzNW0iNjd4hgbLLKof0Z9j6lE4/edit?usp=sharing

Link for Sarah Phillips edits (by me): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1E-qopTuzcUI3r4wusHwKSkIRcN50_MvefqdTEOtVllU/edit?usp=sharing

Link for I Am Not Sidney Poitier edits (by me):

Sandy and Birdie were on the run for four years, and took fake identities, becoming the widow Sheila Goldman and Jewish, white daughter Jesse Goldman. Sheila/Sandy is able to find jobs wherever she and Jesse/Birdie go because she plays up her whiteness and well-educated demeanor. Sheila/Sandy finally decides to settle down in a small town in New Hampshire, where they rent out a small cottage maintained by Walter and Libby Marsh. Birdie/Jesse meets the Marsh's son, fifteen-year-old Nicholas Marsh, who is back home for the summer before heading back to Exeter for school. He makes some romantic advances towards Birdie.

Sandy meets a Jim Campbell at the bar, and a relationship begins to form, much to Jesse's displeasure. Jesse begins to realize she wants to be identified as black when Nicholas calls her "Poca" in reference to her skin tone in the light. When summer ends, Nicholas heads back to Exeter and Birdie attends the local public school with the other "townies." Birdie ends up befriending a clique of girls by imitating their appearances and interests. In this school, Birdie notices Samantha Taper, who is also half-black, but unlike Birdie, does not "pass" as white and is bullied for this.

Birdie finds a postcard from Dot in Sandy's room and realizes she has been in contact with the family after all. By Christmas, Sandy has told Jim the truth about Birdie's parentage. Birdie feels betrayed and begins to question if the FBI ever was after her mother. By the end of this section, she decides to run away from home to Boston and look for her Aunt Dot, and hopefully find answers to where her father and her sister are.

In Boston, Birdie uses the address on the postcard to find Aunt Dot, who now has a daughter, Taj. Aunt Dot notifies Sandy that Birdie has run away to Boston, but when Sandy and Jim come to pick up Birdie, she refuses to leave with them. Birdie reconnects with her first boyfriend from Nkrumah, Ali Parkman, whose father Ronnie was Deck's best friend. From Ronnie, she learns that her own father returned from Brazil and settled in California years earlier. Ronnie provides her with Deck's most recent phone number and address. While distraught that he hadn't tried to find her, she commits to going to San Francisco to find Deck and Cole. With financial help from her white, parochial grandmother, Penelope Lodge, Birdie flies to San Francisco.

In San Francisco, Birdie breaks into Deck's home before he arrives. Upon their reunion, Birdie finds out he lives alone and although he professes to be glad to see Birdie again, he is emotionally distant. When the topic of Sandy is broached, he alludes to her flight from the FBI, confirming Birdie's suspicions that Sandy was in little, if any, danger of being pursued by COINTELPRO. He eagerly shares his philosophy about race, a project he'd been working on since the Roxbury years, that "... mulattos had historically been the gauge of how poisonous American race relations were," as part of his " Canaries in the Coal Mine" theory (416-417). His preoccupation with his theories on race causes Birdie to express her anger towards him.

Eventually, Birdie's father brings her to where Cole is and the two sisters reunite after years of being apart. Birdie gives Cole Sandy's number and the three of them decide they will meet during the summer. Birdie decides she will stay in San Francisco with Cole and go to school there. The story ends with Birdie seeing a mixed, black girl in a school bus as it drives away from her.


 * Theme: Passing


 * Passing in the Post-Race Era: Danzy Senna, Philip Roth, and Colson Whitehead
 * (W)Rites-of-passing: shifting racial and gender identities in Caucasia and Middlesex:
 * "The novel of adolescence, then, rejects the linear progression that is typical of the Bildungsroman. This makes it particularly receptive to the introduction of a passing plot, which is also non-linear, frequently involving multiple journeys back and forth across the color line, and sometimes featuring multivalent typologies of passing (racial, gender, sexual), all of which impinge upon and intersect one another.8 In Caucasia non-normative gender and sexual identities accompany the subject’s racial in-betweenness" (84)
 * Almost forty years later, however, the narrative of passing does, finally, experience a significant shift. In contrast to most literary and cultural representations of "passing, Danzy Senna's 1998 novel, MELUS, Volume 30, Number 1 (Spring 2005) This content downloaded from 130.58.99.171 on Fri, 19 Apr 2019 20:47:06 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms LORI HARRISON-KAHAN Caucasia, casts blackness as the ideal, desired identity."
 * Passing in the Post Soul-Era is different than passing before the 1960s
 * Passing was to avoid being discriminated against, segregation in 1960s. (126) Kawash Samira (751)
 * During "beyond race" or Post Soul era: "racial passing is born again, reanimated as an interpretive mode of both social inquiry and literary analysis, representing for some merely a theoretical 'mistake,' and for others, an epistemological lodestar." (750)
 * Post-Soul literature on passing meant to challenge the institutionalized perceptions of race
 * Passing is not a way to fake an identity or to thwart socially imposed identification (14) Jackson and Jones (750)
 * Senna uses passing to reveal "class and racial inequalities"
 * Race is a social construct, and so passing is a phenomenon grounded in something not grounded in anything real Michaels (143) (752)
 * Senna-shows the complicated result of this:
 * All because of "somebody else's four hundred yr old mistake"
 * Despite the acknowledgment of race as myth on Deck's part, there are real consequences 753 (754)
 * Deck takes Cole to Brazil and Sandy takes Birdie who passes as white (752)
 * Her identity, and racial identity are relative to her location- "half a girl, half-caste, half-mast, and half-baked" identity "The novel suggests that it is precisely the moving target of her social location that uniquely positions her to critique colorism and classism." (753)
 * Passing shows not only own identity but social arrangements (753)
 * Nkrumah black nationalist school-but shuns Birdie
 * Grandma shuns Cole
 * Puerto Rican, French, Italian, Pakistani, Greek, Cape Verdean or Jewish.
 * Passing as Denzy Senna
 * "When you go into passing, you assume that youll always be clear on the original real self; that the performance will be just the performance. But for Birdie I think that when you do it long enough, you know, that becomes really blurry and dangerous. Your sense of identity becomes really, um, kind of precarious, and nebulous, and so, it became that, for her" (131)
 * An Interview with Danzy Senna Callaloo
 * Birdie has no official name as metaphor for her racial identity-it's who's naming her and her personal choice
 * "The name Birdie is a construction in the same way that race is constructed and mutable." (449)
 * "Racial fluidity, ambiguity, comes with privilege." (449)
 * Race isn't just physical features, we attribute race based on language, socioeconomic background, gender
 * Dis-integration
 * Hates living as a Jewish white girl in NH and runs away to seek "rebellion and renewal"
 * "She lives with a kind of nostalgia for a lost blackness she never really owned" (24)
 * Initial, then scholarly

The concept of passing has evolved since the 1960s. Before the civil rights movement up until the 1970s, literature reflected on the desire to pass as analogous to the desire to bypass legal discrimination. However, literature on passing has been "born again" during Post-soul, as a concept used to challenge the institutionalized perceptions of race. In Caucasia, the concept of passing is treated as something less than desirable, in which the main protagonist, Birdie, does not want to pass, but rather be seen as black. The novel deals with the complex relationship that racial identity has with the self and the external environment. In the novel, Deck raises the argument that "...there is no such thing as passing. We're all just pretending. Race is a complete illusion, make-believe." This dichotomy between the idea that race is fictional, yet manifested in reality is something that is analyzed in several instances throughout the novel. Senna notes how passing can be a disorienting experience for one's identity, and in an interview she said,"When you go into passing, you assume that you'll always be clear on the original real self; that the performance will be just the performance. But for Birdie I think that when you do it long enough, you know, that becomes really blurry and dangerous. Your sense of identity becomes really, um, kind of precarious, and nebulous, and so, it became that, for her."For example, Deck takes Cole off to Brazil with him while Sandy takes Birdie because Birdie is able to pass as white, allowing her and her mother to travel more discretely. Passing as a white, Jewish girl in New Hampshire is what makes Birdie run away in the name of "rebellion and renewal" to confront the "nostalgia for a lost blackness she never really owned."