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African American modernists' works appropriated literary traditions as they sought to combat the lingering effects of postslavery in the United States, including systematic segregation, everyday violence such as widespread lynchings, and the racist hierarchies embedded within U.S. English. This chapter addresses wide‐ranging debates among African American intellectuals over the status of vernacular linguistic forms in literature. These public conversations produced diverse opinions on whether dialectical literary idioms could be recuperated and reappropriated by African American writers. As we know today, vernacular forms were revitalized, but this chapter focuses on two authors who sought to evade the absolutism of the “standard”/vernacular binary in favor of narratives that actively deessentialized the relations between language and race. Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen pursued complex visions of interracial modernism, and the linguistic strategies of their novels pose the question of what the literary idioms of internationalist, antiracist, multidialectical African American culture would be. Toomer's Cane and Larsen's Passing and “Sanctuary” portray modern African American languages as flexible, inventional, and antiessentialist forms of code switching.

This concluding chapter argues for the inclusion of the works of writer Nella Larsen into the canon of philosophical aesthetics. Larsen explored art's vexed relation to politics, female desire, and racial/sexual violence, as such exploration exceeds the available means of language and thus cannot propagate explicit political or philosophical ends. What Larsen's experimental modernism transforms is the originary, violent division within language itself between malediction and benediction, curse and promise, the founding exclusion and inclusion, bodily damage and abstract racist laws. It is these binaries that establish the borders of the racist polis and its excluded outside. By opposing the curse of racism, Larsen's experimental black modernism transforms the performative violence of discourse in order to reclaim the foreclosed possibilities of inauguration—the conditions of a black female renaissance as such.

Reviewing the critical reception and scholarship on Nella Larsen’s Passing, the chapter documents the historical and contemporary appeal of the “passing plot” in US fiction, along with the social phenomenon of race passing. Like the slave narrative, the passing novel is structured by border crossings and functions as a form of social critique. And while, like many modernist texts, Passing focuses on the theme of identity, Larsen rewrites essentialist notions of identity with the postmodernist concept of performative identity. The chapter proposes that Larsen, in effect, narratively theorizes the postmodern debate around essentialism vs. constructionism, challenging the idea of innate racial difference while embracing an ideology of racial uniqueness. Juxtaposing central characters Clare, who embodies textual performance, and Irene, who embodies readerly performance, the chapter demonstrates how these miscegenous figures represent “a crisis of representation.” Larsen’s achievement, it concludes, lies in her reductio ad absurdum refutation of the essentialist position.

This chapter analyses Nella Larsen's Quicksand, an early twentieth-century novella that offers a contested reading of racial otherness and transatlantic exoticism. It explains that the novella's narrative encourages a bleeding between spaces and identities as it describes the peripatetic life of the character of Helga Crane, who believes that she was born out of wedlock, and this early uncertainty over identity markers is repeated in a variety of ways throughout the plot. The chapter suggests that the five middle chapters of Quicksand provide a central focal point for exploring the problematics of location within the Atlantic world and discusses Helga's decision to abandon her dream of shuttling across the transatlantic space in order to mire herself in that which she has always avoided: maternity and poverty.

This chapter examines the representation of the mulatta figure in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s The Chinaberry Tree (1931) and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) as a hybrid of stereotyped womanhood. It considers how the two novels depict the overdetermination of things black in Harlem as empowering and limiting, profitable, and exploitative for African Americans in general and black women in particular. It argues that Fauset and Larsen offer a powerful critique of the belief that empowerment would follow from representations of African Americans like those offered by Frances Harper and Pauline Hopkins. It also shows how Fauset and Larsen parody their audiences’ expectations based on packaged “blackness” and stereotypes of the mulatta, as well as their use the mulatta figure to explore womanhood and race as constructs whose fixity is threatened by characters who cross those lines separating class, racial, and gender identities. The chapter concludes by discussing how The Chinaberry Tree and Quicksand address ideals of white womanhood and the mulatta as a polysemic model of African American women’s lived experience.

This chapter examines the notion of context by comparing William Faulkner’s novel Light in August (1932) with Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), and argues that the two authors have more in common than one might assume. More specifically, it considers how reading Faulkner alongside Larsen may help to resituate the former’s “Southern” writing about race in wider national and transnational contexts. The chapter also discusses a notion of intertextuality that leans on Roland Barthes’ reading of every text as “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.” It suggests that both novels interrogate racial ideology in America, particularly the “one drop rule” that originated in the South, and furthermore, looks at the characters’ adoption of an understanding of racial identity that defines them as “black.”

History and literature have been known to ascribe a blanket of sameness in the study of black communities and their issues. The chapter approaches the concept of dissimilarity within communities of colored folk, specifically among its women, which focus on differences pertaining to social status, color, race, and gender. The chapter presents the reader with three novels of Afro-American female authors and their exploration of colored female “otherness” in their works. The novels of Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing, are tackled first, with her treatment and reinvention of the mulatto with influences from 19th-century literature from both black and white authors. Toni Morrison's Sula also examines the concept of difference, but without the mulatto figure highlighted in the previous books discussed. The three literary works reveal that differences in these Afro-American sub-societies are rooted deeply in sexuality and community building.

This chapter examines Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun (1929) and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) within the framework of the debate over the meaning of race. It shows how the two novels’ mulatta characters pass selectively as white and black, instead of mediating between whiteness and blackness, in order to engage in a performative that challenges American notions of race as a natural closed category. It also discusses the interimplications of race, gender, class, and sexuality through the characters’ acts of passing and argues that Fauset and Larsen were engaged with debates over “authentic blackness” within the Harlem Renaissance.

This chapter features the most shocking treatment of God and religion. It focuses on Nella Larsen's Quicksand, which likens and compares a community of believers to a band of gang rapists. On the surface, such a view of theists is not too terribly offensive because there has been tradition of treating God as rapist such as in Jeremiah wherein Yahweh not only seduces but also rapes the unwilling prophet. Such a view of God as a rapist has inspired writers such as John Donne, Therese of Lisieux, and Teresa of Avila to use this rape trope to highlight their rebellious natures and God's need to use violence to enforce compliance. This chapter addresses the issue of knowledge of a person's fundamental nature and deepest desires. For the believer, the union with God is the primary objective of life. When the rebellious individuals say no to God, they are acting against their human nature. Believers, therefore, interpret no as really saying yes, a rationale that makes them believe in the imposition of their belief on infidels as just. The atheists meanwhile, who believe in the non-existence of God, believe that the believer's rapelike behaviour is a futile attempt to bring the apostate back into the group and a justification for impunity against the infidel. In Larsen's Quicksand, the conversion of the main character occurred during a prayer meeting, a metaphorical gang rape that trained Helga to accept on faith that humans have a distinct nature and that preachers have epistemological access to that nature, and when challenged or questioned, the believers can enforce belief in sophisticated ways. Helga becomes a militant atheist who discovers the violent psychology that believers use to entrap people into their system and the God concept used to violate African Americans.

This chapter reads Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand as part of a vibrant debate within the Harlem Renaissance over the aesthetics of realism and the politics of representation. Critical attention to the novel’s secular critique of essentialisms has overlooked its insistence on the intersection of queerness and ecstatically embodied religion, a convergence that forces us to reexamine the potential that Quicksand invests in both spiritual and sexual forms of conversion. For the novel repeatedly links queer sexuality not to birth (as in contemporary “born this way” discourse) but instead, ambivalently, to rebirth. Even as it attends carefully to more repressive forms of sexual and spiritual administration, Quicksand traces a “queer sort of satisfaction,” a fugitive collectivity emerging from moments of ecstatic abandon. In turn, the novel treats ecstasy (and particularly Pentecostalism’s kinetically embodied forms of spiritual practice) as a suggestively queer nexus of sexual and religious modes of performance. Offering a timely reconsideration of Quicksand’s ostensible secularism, this chapter argues that to read its ecstatic episodes is to discover a more complex account of the ways in which the demands of race, class, sexuality, and religion might be borne or borne out by being performatively born again.

This chapter illustrates how Nella Larsen's novel, Quicksand (1928), uses figurations of the Orient to explore Helga Crane's biracial, gendered, and transnational identity. The chinoiserie in the novel gives Helga Crane an alluring, if ultimately deceptive, model for subjecthood that decouples her black female body from its history of sexual, economic, and racial oppression. Her orientalism represents a search for safety from racial, sexual, and gendered prerogatives. Quicksand differentiates the racism that Helga encounters in Denmark from what she experiences in the United States; but by setting a substantial portion of the novel in Europe, Larsen highlights the connection between the local and global in projects of racial oppression. Helga's inability to escape racist economies suggests that any solution that does not recognize the transnational effects of race will be inadequate for dismantling the hierarchies of West over East.

In her chapter on parties in works of Harlem Renaissance writers, ‘The Interracial Party of Modernist Primitivism and the Black “After-Party”’, Natalie Margo Crawford describes the scene in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) in which Helga Crane dances, then regrets the dance and tells herself she is not a ‘jungle creature’. In Crawford’s argument, Larsen depicts ‘non-self-conscious dance as a higher state of consciousness that allows the black dancer to not think about the antiblack racism that makes the “jungle creature” such a demeaning position’. Exploring works by Larsen, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, Helene Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Anita Scott Coleman and Marita Bonner, Crawford rethinks the dance of modernist primitivism as a ‘difficult space’ in which a certain ‘controlled abandon’ was achieved by African American modernists, who did not fully internalise the ‘jungle creature’ ideology.

This chapter focuses on American novels written during the Harlem Renaissance, a period of unprecedented artistic production spanning the early 1920s and the mid-1930s. Also known as the Negro Renaissance, the Harlem Renaissance coincided with the New Negro Movement in which art and culture became the primary medium for black writers, artists, and intellectuals to counter racism and to advocate social and political change. The chapter explores how Harlem Renaissance novels offered representations of black people using new technologies such as photography, film, and recordings. It also considers the Harlem Renaissance novel's depictions of sex and sexuality, along with the genres with which Harlem Renaissance writers experimented, including science fiction and detective fiction. Finally, the chapter looks at a number of Harlem Renaissance novels, including Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven (1926), Rudolph Fisher's The Conjure-Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem (1932), Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), W.E.B. Du Bois's Dark Princess (1928), Wallace Thurman's Infants of the Spring (1932), and Countee Cullen's One Way to Heaven (1932).

Some scholars argue that racial passing began in the mid- to late nineteenth century, reached its pinnacle in the early twentieth century, and then abated by the 1930s. This chapter substantiates, however, that as a word and a behavior, passing has a longer and more extensive chronology. By providing a broad historical overview of racial-passing texts, the chapter argues that the most radical ones play on the multivalent possibilities of this behavior, using passing as a mirror, as a sort of “dirty” glass that is held up to the reader. Instead of clarifying the meaning of whiteness or blackness, some of these texts ultimately confuse a stable reading of the meaning of race, revealing dialectical tensions that exist at the heart of identity categories themselves.