the group The Last Poet, is recognized as having set
the stage for the emergence of contemporary rap,
especially in its earlier and more politically charged
manifestations. Reflecting this reevaluation, after
a 12-year hiatus, Scott-Heron reemerged as a re-
cording artist with the much-praised album Spirits
in 1994.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Erlich, Dimitri. “Gil Scott-Heron.” Rolling Stone, 25
August 1994, p. 46.
Bordowitz, Hank. “Music Notes: Gil Scott-Heron.”
American Visions 13, no. 3 (June 1998): 40.
Terry Rowden
Senna, Danzy (1970– )
Writer Danzy Senna was born in Boston, the
daughter of two writers active in the CIVIL RIGHTS
MOVEMENT—Carl Senna, a journalist, and Fanny
Howe, a poet and novelist. During the 1970s and
1980s Boston was convulsed over court-directed
mandatory school desegregation through busing.
Senna, the biracial daughter of a black-Mexican fa-
ther and white mother, came of age in this racially
charged environment. A graduate of Stanford Uni-
versity, Senna received an M.F.A. from the Univer-
sity of California at Irvine. She holds the William
H. Jenks Chair in Contemporary English Letters
in the department of English at the College of the
Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Drawing on her own experiences, Senna ex-
plored the complexities and paradoxes of race
in the United States in her debut novel, Caucasia
(1997). Birdie, the heroine, is the biracial daughter
of a black father and white mother who is raised
with her sister, Cole, in 1970s Boston. The tortured
racial politics of the day finally rip the young fam-
ily apart. Birdie’s father leaves the United States for
Brazil, where he hopes to find a multiracial para-
dise. He takes Cole, the darker of the siblings, with
him. On the run from Boston and from an imag-
ined pursuit by the feds, Birdie and her mother,
Sandy, change their identities. They camouflage
Birdie’s black identity by self-identifying as the
wife and daughter of a deceased Jewish professor.
Birdie, now Jesse Goldman, struggles to figure out
her identity as a biracial child who looks white and
is forced to “pass” as white.
Boosted by critical acclaim, Caucasia became
popular with the general reading public. Within
educational institutions, where it is also popular,
it is studied for its arresting treatment of the in-
tersections of issues of gender, race, and class. Like
RALPH ELLISON’s INVISIBLE MAN and NELLA LARSEN’s
Passing, Caucasia focuses on the manner in which
race and class challenge and define American cul-
ture. Rather than offering a strident polemic or
resorting to the pedantries of the melting pot, the
novel foregrounds the paradox of race in America
in the 20th century.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Boudreau, Brenda. “Letting the Body Speak: ‘Becom-
ing’ White in Caucasia.” Modern Language Studies
32, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 59–70.
Hunter, Michele. “Revisiting the Third Space: Read-
ing Danzy Senna’s Caucasia.” In Literature and
Racial Ambiguity, edited by Teresa Hubel and
Neil Brooks, 297–316. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press,
2002.
Milian Arias, Claudia. “An Interview with Danzy
Senna.” Callaloo 25, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 447–452.
Nicolé N. AljoeSethe
Few fictional characters of the African-Ameri-
can literary tradition have the indelible impact
on readers of Sethe, the infanticide-committing
heroine of TONI MORRISON’s award-winning novel
BELOVED (1987). In order to protect her “already
crawling baby girl” from the atrocities of the slave
economy, including the inevitable desecration of
her body, Sethe, a fugitive slave who runs from
the Kentucky Sweet Home Plantation of her slave
owners, the Garners, to 28 days of freedom in Cin-
cinnati, Ohio, before she is found by slave catch-
ers, decides to kill her children. She succeeds in
killing only her infant daughter, whom she even-
tually names Beloved. Sethe is sent to prison for
her crime; however, once released, she is haunted454 Senna, Danzy