Multiple border crossings make subjectivity a continuous construction for racialized people

Evidence

Like the borderlands, Senna’s novel clearly illustrates that multiple border crossings become the experience through which subjectivity is continuously made, unmade, and transformed. Birdie’s notions of elsewhereness lead us to border consciousness, or awareness by racialized ethnicities struggling to make sense of identity formations that correspond to the US internal lines along race. Birdie - a transient subject consistently unmasking and clearly reconstructing the meanings of white normativity by inhabiting that forbidden ideological as well as material space - proclaims: “I disappeared into America, the easiest place to get lost. Dropped off, without a name, without a record. With only the body I traveled in. And a memory of something lost” (Senna, 1988:1). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2488

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Danzy Senna’s Caucasia and the concept of elsewhereness — relates to passing and racial liminality — connects to: Borders generate new hierarchies of belonging shaped by immigration control — Luke de Noronha, The conviviality of the overpoliced,…, 31; Passage spaces like airports expose in-between racial identity to contradiction — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 79
• SEED: Angle: ‘disappearing into America’ as a literary trope for racialized self-erasure could anchor an essay on race and national belonging