Danzy Senna Critical Essay | Caucasia

Critical Review by June Unjoo Yang

SOURCE: "Watching the Canary." in Hungry Mind Review, No. 45, Spring, 1998, p. 34.

[In the following review, Yang points out certain flaws in Senna's Caucasia, including sounding too much like a race treatise and problems with time.]

In Danzy Senna's debut novel, Caucasia, a father compares the status of his biracial daughter to that of canaries used by coal miners to test the air quality underground: "They would bring a canary in with them, and if it grew sick and died, they knew the air was bad and that eventually everyone else would be poisoned by the fumes. My father said that likewise, mulattos had historically been the gauge of how poisonous American race relations were. The fate of the mulatto in history and in literature, he said, will manifest the symptoms that will eventually infect the rest of the nation."

No need to check that valentine from Daddy...
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