Does the World Need a Great American Biracial Novel?

The hero of Danzy Senna’ new satire is trying, and failing, to write one.

- Tyler Austin Harper

Early on in Danzy Senna’s new novel, Colored Television, her biracial writer-professor protagonist, Jane, takes a meeting with Hampton Ford, a Black producer who is pivoting from network to prestige TV. Jane’s situation is less enviable. Up against a tenure deadline, she has a neurodivergent son, a daughter shunted from school to school, and a tuned-out abstract-painter husband at home— as well as a recently completed, 450-page second novel that has been unceremoniously rejected by her agent and her publisher. What’s more, home for the four of them is the latest in a succession of house-sitting gigs in unaffordable L.A. The family’s hopes for upward mobility have been pinned on Jane’s promotion to associate professor. No wonder, then, that she has resolved to seek her fortunes in the shadow of the nearby Hollywood sign.

Her husband, Lenny, calls her opus a “mulatto War and Peace,” and she has come to Hampton’s office desperate to somehow salvage the decade of work she’s put into it. She pitches him a biracial comedy that will defy the trope of the “tragic mulatto,” the stereotypical mixed-race character, common in 19th- and 20th-century literature, torn between white and Black worlds, unable to live happily in either. She goes on to explain to Hampton that mulattos, historically depicted as either “dangerously sexual” or “sad and mopey,” have in every case “been treated like a walking, talking predicament rather than an actual character.” Jane wants to create a show that makes audiences laugh, and in which bi-raciality is more than a woeful burden to overcome or bear with stoic resignation. “The Jackie Robinson of bi-racial comedies,” Hampton jokes after she describes her vision.