Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins's Crossing B(l)ack: Mixed-Race Identity in Modern American Fiction and Culture offers a timely contribution to considerations of race in American literature and popular culture, pointing to characters and writers who cultivate a “black-sentient mixed-race identity” (3). Understanding what this means requires both engaging “the contradictory ways in which mixed race is understood in American society” and detailing “a black-sentient identity that claims blackness without neglecting the specific nuances that shape a biracial identity” (5). The book emphasizes a dilemma wherein embracing one grounding racial identity could be perceived as repudiating the other. “Black/white” mixed-race identity formation, as revealed by the characters under study, prioritizes the actions and thoughts of racial plurality over the constraints imposed by being in one or another racial category.

The first chapter introduces the book's fascinating subject briskly and thoroughly, working through a wide range of theoretical sources and events in US history that shape conversations about mixed-race people. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century attitudes attempted to dismiss “black/white” people as belonging to no race, a neither/nor depiction of biracial being advanced by tropes such as the “tragic mulatto” or sterile “mule.” In contrast to the “racial confusion … despair and inner turmoil” (20) seen in hackneyed interpretations of life as the tragic mulatto, Crossing B(l)ack highlights characters’ opportunities to exercise agency in creating how they understand themselves. Carefully considered, Dagbovie-Mullins intimates in her conclusion, these perspectives can lead to a broader reshaping of discourse about biracial people in the US.

In an excellent chapter on Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928), Dagbovie-Mullins demonstrates how protagonist Helga Crane develops her mixed-race black sentience by refusing to participate in the process of definition-by-rejection so often undertaken in thinking about race. Helga's is a much more affirmative approach; in contrast with the “formal calm” (Larsen quoted at 44) exhibited by her white mother, Helga embraces a biracial dynamism, one which complicates too-frequent interpretations of Quicksand's conclusion that position Helga as beaten down by the oppressions posed by marriage and motherhood.

Helga's continuous movement throughout the transatlantic world indicates an uncertainty about how biracial characters feel their sense of place. Crossing B(l)ack's next two chapters focus on four characters who continually produce their black-sentient mixed-race selfhood in the process of seeking out and creating their conditions of being at home. Lucinda Roy's Lady Moses (1998) and Danzy Senna's Caucasia (1998) feature fictional protagonists who “question racial categories while at the same time claiming a black consciousness” (53). Senna's Birdie Lee, like Helga Crane, returns as a frequent touchstone throughout Dagbovie-Mullins's overarching narrative: they could allow others’ perceptions to continually locate them as ethnically ambiguous or even white, but they nevertheless “privilege a black politics” (84) which also influences how James McBride and Rebecca Walker present themselves. Dagbovie-Mullins attends to the ways the personal past combines with public memory to produce felt “connections to blackness” (78). Their ongoing grappling with private selfhood in the context of public perceptions makes plain how characters can be both black and mixed-race. They exhibit a desire to be free of “race rules” but can nevertheless do so while remaining tied to black consciousness (92). The book's commitment to brevity, though laudable, may account for why it does not expand on its mention of Du Bois's “double consciousness” (87). Additionally, while focussing on Birdie Lee's connection to public memories of blackness, Crossing B(l)ack leaves room for discussions about Birdie's “Puritan” lineage, one which her mother denies her by fabricating a Jewish, not Protestant, background with which to pass for white. WASP whiteness in Caucasia's New England context feels ancient and arguably more essential to Americanness than it might be in Oakland, raising questions about how regional influences shape the contours of cultural memory.

Crossing B(l)ack maintains its lively pace through the last chapter and conclusion, analyzing Mariah Carey's and Halle Berry's public images. The American public's fascination with their beauty and sex appeal manifests a discomfort with race and identity; though the media would largely pigeonhole their personae (Dagbovie-Mullins avoids confusing image with identity) as “modern-day tragic mulatto” figures (116), they too remain both black and biracial. Complicating desires for regnant “race scripts,” these celebrities navigate the balance between changing self-perceptions within the more stubbornly fixed presumptions about race, continually exposing and unsettling a tendency to impose generalities on particular lives.

Crossing B(l)ack thus offers its notion of black-sentient mixed-race identity as a necessary and helpful corrective to the oversimplified dream that Barack Obama's presidency ushered in a “post-race” America. In delightfully clear prose, Dagbovie-Mullins deftly theorizes her positions without getting bogged down in jargon, providing a fresh and useful perspective on how to read the ongoing evolution of American biracial experiences in literature and culture.