Queer Black Futurity in Danzy Senna's Caucasia

Abstract

In my thesis, I examine how Birdie’s existence, action, and environment all make the case that any kind of racial utopia will not erase race but embrace it. Specifically, it will embrace blackness, the essential “mixed” and hybrid quality of blackness, and it will embrace queerness. Furthermore, this utopia is necessarily incomplete or unfinished, and this very quality of unfinishedness is utopic. I argue that Birdie herself reaches for a queer, mixed black utopia, and, in doing so, destabilizes linear time as well as liberal norms of the human. I start with an analysis of Birdie’s blackness – how she comes to it, how she maintains it alongside the existence of white, Jewish, Jesse Goldberg, and the essential role of mixedness in her black identity. I argue that blackness itself destabilizes notions of the human, as does Birdie’s dual subjectivity. I trace the importance of kinship in Birdie’s identity formation, and point out the ways in which the uniquely black forms of kinship Birdie engages in point toward queerness. Birdie’s blackness has a unique, non-linear relationship to time given the origin of her name; and her queerness, and that of other characters, further destabilizes her relationship to time. I argue that Caucasia makes a case for queer black futurity as a prerequisite for a necessarily incomplete vision of a liberatory future.