For most of her career, the novelist Danzy Senna has maintained a cagey relationship to the politics of representation. Her debut novel, Caucasia—a sweeping bildungsroman about a mixed-race girl teetering on the color line—thrust her into the spotlight and inaugurated her as an official biracial spokesperson. “I remember thinking, If you are being heralded for writing triumphant and positive representations of mixed-race characters, how do you ever write another book?” Senna said in a 2017 interview with New York magazine. She responded with Symptomatic, an acerbic workplace thriller about an older biracial woman’s obsession with a younger mixed-race colleague. Senna’s sophomore offering signaled that her work would be unmoored from the expectations of “positive representation” or the tropes of the tragic mulatto. When these themes did appear in her work, Senna wrapped them in comedy and her signature sardonic wit. Her books, rejecting rubric, would be read on their own terms.
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