Nella Larsen Reconsidered
The Trouble with Desire inQuicksandandPassing
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5134841 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rafael Walker (California University of Pennsylvania, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 41 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 165-192 |
| Publication date | 2016-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0163-755X • E-ISSN: 1946-3170 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/melus/mlv083 |
| OpenAlex | W2289739367 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 25 |
This paper challenges the pervasive tendency to treat Larsen’s work as explorations of black women’s lives and examines the distinctly biracial perspective that her fiction attempts to elaborate. I argue that her novels employ narratives of frustrated desire in order to show the impossibility of the racially liminal subject in a society that thinks in black and white. In developing this argument, the essay explains the aesthetic and theoretical implications that ensue from taking this biracial perspective seriously. For instance, it shows how each novel mobilizes a distinct ontology of biracial identity—biraciality as synthesis in one case ( Quicksand [1928]) and biraciality as oscillation in the other ( Passing [1929]). In its discussion of the aesthetics of Larsen’s fiction, the essay demonstrates how this shift in racial perspective enables us to reassess her endings, which vexed critics in her day and continue to vex readers in ours (including the scholar arguably most responsible for Larsen’s current prominence, Deborah E. McDowell). Aware that aversion to the essentialist “tragic mulatta” trope has been one of the primary impediments to concentrating on biraciality in Larsen’s work, I offer ways of understanding Larsen’s focus on biraciality as more—rather than less—subversive of American racial ideology than previous studies suggest.
Aesthetics · Ambivalence · Argument (complex analysis) · Art · Essentialism · Identity (music) · Ideology · Impossibility · Liminality · Literature · Narrative · Perspective (graphical) · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Trope (literature) · American and British Literature Analysis · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society
Just looking
Ugly Feelings
Reconstructing Womanhood
Queering Helga Crane
Quicksand and Passing
Women of the Harlem Renaissance
Neither Black Nor White Yet Both
The Gender of Modernity
Passing and the Fictions of Identity
The best people”
Deauthenticating Community
That Unreasonable Restless Feeling
Nella Larsen's Passing
Neither Fish, Flesh, nor Fowl
Racial Etiquette
Racial Etiquette
Clare Kendry's "True" Colors
Bodies That Matter
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,67 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2024 (2) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |