Racial identifications are continually influenced by and constructed through one’s environment. Building on Jean Baudrillard’s “The Precession of Simulacra” and Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, this thesis argues that houses and clothing are the material objects that allow characters Birdie Lee from Danzy Senna’s Caucasia and Helga Crane from Nella Larsen’s Quicksand to construct their mixed race identities. Birdie Lee’s childhood home is the place where she develops a mixed race identity. When she leaves that home, she is forced to take on simulacra in order to pass for white. Without a stable childhood or adult home, Helga Crane’s wardrobe becomes the space where she unconsciously develops a mixed race identity. Her clothing choices allow her to simulate an entirely black identity that masks her mixed race heritage. Ultimately, the fates of Birdie and Helga are determined by whether or not they can occupy a space that is accepting of their mixed race identities. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2014. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Twentieth-century American literature incorporates interracial and biracial themes that bring to light the often unnamed and unrecognized biracial identities of many Americans. Unfortunately, despite the potential value for a deeper understanding of the construction of race, these themes have seldom been seriously considered in the context of reevaluating the nature of the system that creates racial labels and categories until the recent emergence of postmodern critical theories. This thesis examines the black-white interracial themes and biracial protagonists in Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) and Danzy Senna's Caucasia (1998) in order to explore the texts' representations of systems of hegemonic power that create racial labels and categories. I discuss the binary sociopolitical construction of race in the United States (blackwhite) and the complexity of biracial identities as a foundation for my examination of literary representations of biracial subjectivity, racial passing, primitive exoticism, and the intersections between race, class and gender. I conclude that a study of the interracial theme in literature is a dive into the chasm between margin and center, the enunciative split between the binary racial signifiers black and white. Therefore, representations of biracial subjectivity provide a unique vantage point for surveillance of the complexities of the human struggle to gain and maintain power.