Open AccessImagining a Mestiza-Self Through the Double-Consciousness Trope
Author(s) -
Regina Sanders
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
latin american journal of development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2674-9297
DOI - 10.46814/lajdv3n4-058
Subject(s) - trope (literature) , consciousness , double consciousness , race (biology) , white (mutation) , racism , identity (music) , art , aesthetics , psychoanalysis , art history , sociology , literature , gender studies , philosophy , psychology , epistemology , biochemistry , chemistry , gene
This paper is a comparative study between two African-American novels: Caucasia by Danzy Senna (1998) and Quicksand by Lenna Larsen(1928). It specifically discusses how their respective mixed-race protagonist re-appropriates the double-consciousness trope –a term originally coined by African-American scholar W. E. Du Bois to describe the existence of blacks in the United States. More specifically, I argue that Danzy Senna’s novel Caucasia transcends traditional notions of mixed-race identity found in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand. First, I establish that Helga, the mulatta protagonist of Quicksand is constructed to play the version of the double-consciousness which assumes that mixed people (black and white) in United States live with internalized racism. Next, I demonstrate that Caucasia challenges Quicksand by providing us with a mulatta protagonist who re-appropriates the notions of double-consciousness by making it instrumental to her own survival and birth-right to be mixed.