5/13/2023 0 Comments Caucasia book![]() ![]() ![]() Peterson highlights “the problem of historical memory in contemporary America where the pressure to assimilate - to forget one’s personal and ethnic history in order to become fully “American”- remains immense” (7). In Against Amnesia: Contemporary Women Writers and the Crises of Historical Memory (2001), Nancy J. While, during my undergraduate education, I studied a number of texts that addressed these genres and themes, Caucasia highlights the racialisation of the traditional American Bildungsroman and the American identity that it constructs in a way that none of the other texts I studied did. ![]() ![]() It is a story deeply indebted to the history of the American Bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, and its philosophical preoccupations, providing poignant commentary on the trope of “lighting out,” a term taken from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, meaning going west, shedding history, and switching identities. The story follows the highly problematic construction of the young girl’s identity after being separated from her sister and black father and growing up with her white mother on the road around New England assuming different racial identities, which she is able to do due to her ambiguous ethnicity and her ability to “pass” for white. Danzy Senna’s first novel, Caucasia (1998), is a coming-of-age story about a girl named Birdie with a black academic father and a white mother who is the estranged descendant of a prominent Bostonian family. ![]()
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