Summary Of The Novel 'New People' By Danzy Senna

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In Danzy Senna’s novel New People (2017), Maria’s story embodies the classic mulatto trope as she struggles to maintain her life. Despite being engaged, she becomes fixated with another man who seemingly looks to be everything she wants. Senna uses Maria’s experience to describe how the mulatto trope is still in effect in the eyes of a multiracial, using her existence as a canvas. The story, which is set in 1990s Brooklyn, follows Maria, a biracial woman engaged to her college boyfriend, Kahlil, as she grapples with her mixed identity and a growing obsession with a black poet that soon begins to make her life complicated and ruins a relationship she had treasured. The theme of the book echoes the words said by the famous poet W.E.B Du Bois, who famously …show more content…

The tragic mulatto trope has its origin traced back to 19th-century literary devices, which were used to explore the involvement of racial identity and how it stratified race in our society. One of the earliest uses of the trope would come from a French-American author named Victor Sejour in his story “The Mulatto”, which followed the story of a slave who in the pursuit of revenge for the acts his master committed against him eventually finds out he was his father when he decided to kill him out of anger and eventually putting an end to what he searched for the most based on his emotional urges made him a savage. However, in the context of New People (2017), the trope of a female is slightly altered with a female being portrayed as exceptionally beautiful, but inevitably still doomed like in the case of Maria. These characters are typically always depicted as sympathetic figures who struggle with their dual identities and often find themselves alienated from both their Black and white

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