Access Provided by University Of Maryland @ College Park at 06/11/11 7:04PM GMT

Queering Helga Crane 254

f
MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 57, number 2, Summer 2011. Copyright for the Purdue Research
Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.
QUEERING HELGA CRANE:
BLACK NATIVISM IN NELLA
LARSEN'S QUICKSAND
Keguro Macharia
Readers were so sure they knew the story Larsen was telling
they misread the story she actually told.
-Cheryl A. Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance
In his recent study, In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of
the Color Line, George Hutchinson points out that Larsen's parents
were immigrants to the United States, her mother a white Dane and
her father a black West Indian. Shortly after her birth, her father left
her mother, who subsequently married a fellow Danish immigrant.
Larsen was raised as a biracial child in a white household. She had
no living-or present-black relatives. Furthermore, Larsen's foun-
dational experiences of racialization took place amid labor struggles
between white European (mostly Danish) immigrants and black
southern migrants in Chicago. Hutchinson challenges us to consider
how Larsen's unique experiences of racialization, at the intersection
between practices and discourses of immigration and migration,
formed a crucial background for the semiautobiographical Quicksand.
Quicksand's protagonist, Helga Crane, travels within and without
the US borders, from South to North and from the US to Denmark,
replicating many of Larsen's own travels. Helga Crane is born in
Chicago, educated at a "school for Negroes" (26), briefy works at
Naxos in the South (a hctionalized Tuskegee), and spends extended
Macharia 255
periods of time in New York City and Denmark, hnally ending up in
rural Alabama. In fact, Helga's travels are so similar to Larsen's that
critics and biographers routinely supplement Larsen's life with details
from the novel, and vice-versa.
1
This biocritical strategy has led to
psycho-social assessments of the now sutured Larsen-Crane that
efface how Larsen uses the hgure of Helga to comment on contem-
porary issues. In particular, Larsen's negative refections on black
normativity, which I detail below, have been taken as evidence of
self-hatred. In this article, I bracket psycho-social assessments and
foreground Helga's hgurative role to make explicit Larsen's structural
critiques of African American culture and politics.
Through Helga's travels, Larsen explores how practices of be-
longing are formed at the intersection of race and place. She high-
lights and lambastes a distinct black nativism that formed a crucial,
albeit understudied, element of African American cultural and political
discourse.
2
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Af-
rican Americans appropriated and redeployed the (frequently racist)
discourses of nativism to claim what Langston Hughes describes as a
place "at the table" ("I, Too" 46). At the turn of the twentieth century,
nativist discourse not only policed racial boundaries but also legislated
forms of intimate practices, often adjudicating between "good" and
"bad" forms of heterosexuality and, in the process, suturing racial and
sexual normativity. Through the peripatetic hgure of Helga, Larsen
satirizes the nativist presumptions that continually produce Helga as
a queer hgure: strange, sexually anomalous, and racially suspect.
3
Larsen questions the normative prescriptions embedded in black
nativism that privilege genealogical origin, gender normativity, and
eugenic reproduction as markers of authentic black identity. As Hazel
Carby pointed out in an important intervention into African American
studies, Larsen questions the South's privileged status as the geo-
historical location that grounds African American identity (174-75).
I extend Carby's argument by examining how black nativism sutures
race and place through hetero-reproduction. By focusing, hrst, on
Helga's lack of appropriate genealogical predecessors and then on her
own multiple births, I argue that black nativist logic weds authentic
identity to appropriate hetero-reproduction. However, not all forms of
hetero-reproduction have the same value, and I distinguish between
those that secure black hetero-futurity, a nativist- and eugenics-
infected project, and those that do not. In my reading of Quicksand,
I foreground the ideological construction of black hetero-futurity: it
privileges specihc class conhgurations based on nativist genealogies
and eugenic potential.
By reading Quicksand as a novel centrally concerned about
the problem of black nativism and its relationship to hetero-futurity,
Queering Helga Crane 256
I expand on the valuable feminist scholarship that has focused on
Larsen's critiques of racism and sexism (Thornton, Wall, and Carby).
At the same time, I reorient criticism that has tended to focus on
Helga Crane as a failed, psychically damaged character, one who
is neurotic (Bone) or narcissistic (Johnson). Helga doesn't simply
fail; she fails to cohere as a normative subject as dehned through
nativist guidelines. Instead of attributing Helga's failures to psychic
lack, social ineptitude, or individual caprice, I suggest that they help
us to understand the normative construction of race and sexuality
during the early decades of the twentieth century, and in ongoing,
contemporary critical assessments.
"A lack somewhere" and Black Nativism
As Helga prepares to leave the southern teaching institution,
Naxos, she refects that she failed to ht in because of "A lack some-
where" (11). Critics have traditionally read this admission of "lack"
in sociopolitical and psychoanalytic terms. In early critical assess-
ments, Barbara Christian and Houston Baker argued that Helga lacks
a sufhciently developed political sense and pride in blackness. Other
critics, most notably Barbara Johnson and Claudia Tate, have traced
the psychoanalytic implications of the term lack, focusing in particular
on Helga's fractured relationship with her biological father, an absent
"Negro" man. Whereas both groups of critics have focused on the
term "lack," I argue that the term "somewhere" is equally important,
for it directs us to the important relationships among race, place,
and lineage, key components of contemporary nativism. Through the
hgure of Helga Crane, Larsen critiques the South as the privileged
site of black nativism while also pointing to the impact of nativist
thinking among the New Negroes in New York.
Nativism has traditionally been dehned negatively, as anti-
immigrant sentiment and action. In his classic study, Strangers in the
Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860-1925, John Higham dehnes
nativism as "intense opposition to an internal minority on the ground
of its foreign (i.e., 'un-American') connections" (4). In US history,
nativist activists have frequently supported anti-immigration laws,
ranging from the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to the Immigration
Act of 1924. Nativist discourse, however, is not only restricted to
anti-immigrant sentiments and legislation, but it also helps to dehne
normative citizenship. Although it is unlikely that African Americans
were afhliated with any ofhcial anti-immigration movements, many of
which were also racist, they debated the meaning of anti-immigrant
initiatives, taking such initiatives as opportunities to assert their own
nativist claims for national belonging. Anti-immigrant sentiments
Macharia 257
provided a background against, and language with, which African
Americans could dehne themselves as native citizens.
In his 1897 speech, "The Conservation of Races," W. E. B. Du
Bois succinctly claimed, "We are Americans, not only by birth and
by citizenship, but by our political ideals, our language, our religion"
(181). Given African Americans' contested citizenship during this
period, famously described by Rayford Logan as the "nadir" of race
relations (52), Du Bois's claims for cultural and national belonging
tried to unsettle the bond between citizenship and whiteness. At the
same time, Du Bois's conceptual frames of belonging-birth, citizen-
ship, politics, language, and religion-derive from nativist frameworks.
Implicitly, Du Bois differentiates native-born blacks, "the hrst fruits
of this new nation" (181), from the immigrant threat.
4
More explicitly
than Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, in his famous speech at the
Atlanta Exposition that put him in the national spotlight, encour-
aged white business leaders to favor native-born blacks: "To those
of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth
and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were
I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race, 'Cast down
your bucket where you are'" (139). As David Hellwig demonstrates
in "The Afro-American and the Immigrant," leading hgures such as
Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells similarly expressed reservations
about the impact of white immigration on black economic prospects
in the South and North (55, 56).
As it developed from the antebellum period through the end of
the 1920s, black nativism was driven primarily by economic consider-
ations and only secondarily by sociopolitical factors. Unlike traditional
"white" nativism, which had been driven by anti-Catholic sentiment,
black nativism focused on economic competition and political rights.
5

During the antebellum period, nearly hve million Europeans moved
to the United States. While the majority of skilled immigrants posed
no competition, as blacks were ineligible for professional positions,
unskilled laborers competed with blacks for jobs in northern cities. To
take only one statistic, in 1830, blacks had dominated the job market
in New York. By 1850, Irish servants outnumbered the entire black
population by 10 to 1 (Rubin 199). At the same time, black lead-
ers were frustrated that immigrants were granted citizenship rights
without proving themselves. Native-born blacks, an 1837 editorial
in the Weekly Advocate claimed, were "the children of the soil" (qtd.
in Rubin 201). In contrast, European immigrants, raged the black
abolitionist Robert Purvis in an 1860 editorial, "can't speak your
language and don't respect your laws" and should not be privileged
over "native-born Americans who have tilled your soil in times of
war" (qtd. in Rubin 201).
Queering Helga Crane 258
While black leaders worried about losing jobs to immigrants,
they were also ambivalent about anti-immigrant initiatives, especially
the postreconstruction laws that targeted specihc ethnic groups.
From the late nineteenth century through the mid-1920s, immi-
grants of Asian descent were particular targets of anti-immigration
laws. For instance, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act restricted new
immigration by Chinese laborers, the California Alien Land Laws of
1913 and 1920 barred Japanese immigrants from owning or leasing
land (Higgs 205), and the 1924 Immigration Act effectively ended
all Asian immigration (Ngai 87).
6
On the one hand, as Hellwig dem-
onstrates, black leaders opposed the racist treatment meted out to
Asians ("Afro-American Reactions" 93). On the other hand, as Arnold
Shankman argues, a number of blacks believed that Asians were an
economic threat and ("Black on Yellow" 4), unlike native-born blacks,
could not be assimilated into American life ("Asiatic Ogre" 582). In
her recent study of the nineteenth-century black press, Helen Jun
demonstrates how "Orientalist discourses of Asian cultural difference
ambiguously facilitated the assimilation of black Americans to ideolo-
gies of political modernity and consolidated black identihcation as
U.S. national subjects" (1048). What Jun terms "black Orientalism"
was an indispensable component of black nativism. However, black
nativism was not restricted to Eastern Europeans and Asians. In fact,
it extended to black West Indians who, according to a 1923 article in
the Messenger, were part of the nation's "immigrant indigestion" (qtd.
in Hellwig, "Black Leaders" 117). If native-born blacks, by contrast,
had not been digested and assimilated into the national body, at least
they were not as unpalatable.
Nativism provided a conceptual framework through which Afri-
can Americans could dehne their relationship to the United States. In
particular, they expressed their relationship to the nation in organic
terms, creating a metonymic relationship between land and identity.
The "children of the soil" were also "the hrst fruits of the nation." In
an apt phrase, Barbara Foley dubs these attempts to ground identity
in place "metonymic nationalism" (160). Metonymy, she argues, is
"especially useful [in] communicating connections and relations that
have an 'always already' quality to them: one re-cognizes the em-
beddedness of one thing in another" (161). What Foley terms "soil-
ness" (80), a term that suggestively carries the (humiliating) notion
of being soiled, was deployed by African Americans as a claim for
belonging. Already bound to the land (itself a metonym for nation),
indeed, already soiled by the land, a claim that drew on their roles
within agricultural economies as well as the ideological and social
privations caused by racism, African Americans had not only earned
a place at the table, but were also the very foundation on which the
Macharia 259
table could stand. The use of soilness, then, was not merely a politi-
cal strategy that asserted national belonging within an interracial
context, but, more crucially, a means of distinguishing black claims
for belonging, one that established a divide between native-born and
immigrant blacks.
These organic metaphors had at least two important effects.
One, they privileged the South, the place of the "soil," as the au-
thentic New World origin of African Americans. Even authors and
activists from the North, including Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson,
and Jean Toomer, depict the South as the privileged site of ancestral
belonging. As a corollary, black women's bodies are identihed with the
South. Women's bodies become the soil from which children spring.
For instance, Toomer constantly compares women's bodies to the
natural world. Karintha's skin is "like dusk on the eastern horizon";
she is "as innocently lovely as a November cotton fower" (3). In
"Carma," Toomer writes, "the fragrance of farmyards is the fragrance
of [Carma]" (12). In Cane, as Barbara Christian points out, women are
identihed with land (56). Men tend to be migratory. Women remain
rooted. To classify Cane as nativist would be a gross misreading.
However, it should be understood as having nativist implications: it
roots blackness in the South and appoints black women as guardians
of the race.
7
When Helga says she lacks "social background" (Larsen
12), she is staking a historical claim about contemporary construc-
tions of blackness.
Given that nativism positions women as guardians of the race,
it is appropriate that the hrst nativist hgure we encounter in Quick-
sand is Miss MacGooden, a dormitory matron at Naxos. Described as
"lean and desiccated," "humorless, prim, ugly, with a face like dried
leather," Miss MacGooden prides herself on "being a 'lady' from one
of the best families-an uncle had been a congressman in the period
of the Reconstruction." As evidence of her ladyness, Miss MacGooden
disdains marriage as she must avoid "things in the matrimonial state
that [are] of necessity entirely too repulsive for a lady of delicate and
sensitive nature to submit to" (16). As a dormitory matron, though,
she still fulhlls her nativist role in perpetuating the generations,
especially by instructing her young female charges how to behave.
Although she may not be able to fulhll her biological genealogical func-
tion, Miss MacGooden fully participates in ideological reproduction.
In describing her as "desiccated" with a "face like leather," Larsen
parodies nativist claims about lineage. Miss MacGooden's blood is so
old it has lost superfuous moisture, leaving behind a desiccated shell.
Miss MacGooden's distaste for heterosexual sex suggests the
ambivalent origin of black nativist claims. Many such claims were
based on revised ideas about the relationship between white masters
Queering Helga Crane 260
and black women. The circumstances of conception, rape, and con-
cubinage were subsumed by the "fact" of distinguished white blood.
In his 1940 autobiography, The Big Sea, Hughes notes of the Wash-
ington, DC, black bourgeoisie, "One of the things that amused me in
Washington, though, was that with all their conventional-mindedness,
a number of the families in the best colored society made proud boast
of being directly descended from the leading Southern white fami-
lies, 'on the colored side'-which, of course, meant the illegitimate
side. One prominent Negro family tree went straight back to George
Washington and his various slave mistresses" (208). Here, Hughes
points to the fantasy that undergirds genealogical claims. George
Washington never had any children with his wife, and it is unlikely
that he did so with any slaves (Amory). While we might read Hughes
as having erred, claiming the wrong president, it might be more pro-
ductive to view this "error" as part of the strategic fabrication entailed
in genealogical projects. Within the fantasy realm of genealogical
entitlement, any person deemed worthy to be a biological ancestor
may be co-opted, regardless of biology or history. Hughes points out
that nativism, and the genealogy on which it depends, strategically
erases a history of violence against black women. Viewed against
this background, Miss MacGooden's distaste for sex is rooted in the
historical violence associated with interracial sex in the South.
As opposed to Miss MacGooden's dried, leathery skin, Helga
has "skin like yellow satin" (6). While the simile provides a frame of
reference, it also distances signiher from signihed. The distance sug-
gested by "like" is further enhanced by the use of the referent "satin,"
a material that is glossy on one side and dull on the other. One side
is not "like" the other. This early use of the simile anticipates an on-
going theme in the novel: Helga always approaches but never quite
achieves a state of perfect belonging. Helga's distinctiveness is more
apparent when we consider that the other two characters described
as "yellow" are the "lemon-colored" Mrs. Hayes-Rore (38), and the
"rattish-yellow" Reverend Pleasant Green (119). In both instances,
color is associated with natural objects, fruits and rodents, as op-
posed to manufactured satin. Additionally, the absence of "like" or
"as" enhances the notion that Mrs. Hayes-Rore and Reverend Green
come by their color more naturally and inhabit it more comfortably.
Despite their class distance, the two hgures are structurally linked by
their color and their hngernails: Mrs. Hayes-Rore has "dirty hnger-
nails" (38) while Reverend Green's hngernails are "always rimmed
with black" (122). Unlike the more "fastidious" Helga, these two
characters are soiled, "children of the soil."
In contrast, Helga's yellow color invokes and defers her right to
belong. Yellow brings to mind what Charles Chesnutt terms the "dusty
Macharia 261
record of our ancestry" (54), a nativist heritage captured by yellowed,
family records. While yellow lays claim to the privilege of genealogy,
this claim is complicated by contemporaneous discourses around the
designation yellow. Within nativist discourse of the period, yellow was
associated with Asians.
8
Helga's color associates her with one of the
most despised group of immigrants at that time in US history; it also
suggests that she may be unable to assimilate, or, in the language
of Naxos, to be "naturalized" (11) into her surroundings. As critics
have noted, Helga's yellow color, enhanced by her "vivid green and
gold negligee" and framed by a room with a "blue Chinese carpet"
(5), marks her as exotic within the novel. These "orientalist motifs"
(137 n.1) reframe the contemporary African American designation
"high yellow" by refracting it through anti-immigrant, specihcally
anti-Asian, discourses. Helga's desire for, and pleasure in, oriental
objects distinguishes her from the children of the soil, and embeds
her within immigrant discourse.
The connection to immigration is made more explicit when,
in response to Robert Anderson's claim that she has "an elusive
something . . . dignity and breeding," Helga describes herself as the
illegitimate child of a gambler and a white immigrant (24). Although
she later describes her father as a Negro, she does not ascribe any
particular national origin to him. Both parents are depicted as being
of the same "kind": Karen Nilssen was "in love with life, with love,
with passion, dreaming, and risking all in one blind surrender" (26).
Like Helga's father, her mother was a gambler. Indeed, Larsen sug-
gests that immigration and gambling may be similarly speculative
and uncertain. Prior to the 1924 Immigration Act, immigration status
was determined at the port of entry, not in home countries. Potential
immigrants could be turned away when they reached US immigration
(Parker 738). In a real sense, pre-1924 immigration was a gamble.
As opposed to the careful, measured sense of nativist breeding, the
coupling of a gambler and immigrant is based on caprice and change,
and breaks all the laws of nativist, genealogical selection.
In Quicksand, illegitimacy is as much a legal as it is an ideological
condition. Although Helga tells Robert it is unclear that her parents
were married, she later refers to her mother's "second marriage
. . . to a man of her own race" (26), implying that the gambler and
immigrant were married. However, within nativist codes, which un-
derstand race as family, the hrst marriage is illegitimate. It is telling
that Helga claims she was born in a Chicago slum, for such locations
were part of what historian Kevin Mumford terms interzones-places
of sexual mixing among different races. In such zones, Mumford ex-
plains, white women who were seen with black men were assumed
to be prostitutes and those who married black men were assumed
Queering Helga Crane 262
to be insane (114). Larsen presents a version of being soiled that
challenges the metonymic claims of soilness and belonging. It is not
simply the ideological illegitimacy of her parents' relationship that is
at stake here, but the geographical and historical specihcity of their
intimacies as well: a white immigrant and a black gambler living in
an urban, northern slum represent a combination that cannot be as-
similated into either white or black nativist paradigms.
Family is similarly a primarily ideological unit. In Quicksand,
Helga repeatedly points out she has no family (12, 41), but this
claim is juxtaposed against lists of relatives. We learn, for instance,
that she has "numerous cousins, aunts, and . . . uncles" (10), and
she stays with her mother's sister when she travels to Denmark.
However, within the distinctly nativist logic of identity, Helga has no
family. Helga learns this lesson when, in attempting to visit her uncle,
Peter Nilssen, she runs, instead, into his new wife who recoils, "And
please remember that my husband is not your uncle. No indeed! Why,
that, that would make me your aunt! He's not-" (31). This scene
exemplihes what Walter Benn Michaels describes as 1920s nativist
modernism, a period when the family became the "essential form
of nativist identity" (11). As he explains, identity claims in nativist
modernism are simultaneously demands for racial afhliation: were the
new Mrs. Nilssen to accept Helga as a niece, she would compromise
her own racial standing. Proximity bridges the ostensible distance
between (blood) hliation and (social) afhliation, with blackness func-
tioning as contagion.
9
"No, forever!"
Larsen not only questions nativism's genealogical claims, its
privileging of certain kinds of blood, but also the notion of metonymic
nationalism, the spatial and temporal bond between race and place
that guarantees racial belonging. Larsen employs spatial and tem-
poral disruption to sever the "organic" bond between race and place.
Take, for example, Quicksand's opening epigraph from Hughes's
1926 "Cross": "My old man died in a hne big house. / My ma died
in a shack. / I wonder where I'm gonna die, / Being neither white
nor black?" For Quicksand, the key line in this epigraph is "I wonder
where I'm gonna die." The speaker wonders where, not when, privi-
leging place, or more precisely its lack, as a crucial factor of racial
identity. Hughes's speaker imagines racial identity to be bound to
place, whether dehned as a "hne big house" or a "shack." Not only
does the epigraph link race to place, but it also identihes a nativ-
ist logic of belonging that binds race to place through what Judith
Halberstam terms "generational time." As she explains, generational
Macharia 263
time "connects the family to the historical past of the nation, and
glances ahead to connect the family to the future of both familial and
national stability" (5). By referencing the parents' deaths, Hughes's
speaker gestures toward the historical past. However, instead of
looking toward the future, ensuring the continuation of generational
time, the speaker kills and suspends time: the father and mother are
dead and the speaker can only wonder.
Like Hughes's speaker, Helga spends most of her time wonder-
ing. As the novel opens, she sits "alone in her room," which is "in
soft gloom" (5). The rhyme plays off the epigraph from Hughes, as
it translates "house" and "shack" into "room," and transforms the
seeming opposition and reconciliation between "white" and "black"
into "gloom." "Gloom" does double duty, describing the quality of light
and an affective state. In keeping with the epigraph, Larsen sets a
funereal scene. This opening is further enhanced by one of the hrst
instances where Helga does nothing but wonder:
The minutes gathered into hours, but still she sat motion-
less, a disdainful smile or an angry frown passing now
and then across her face. Somewhere in the room a little
clock ticked time away. Somewhere outside, a whippoor-
will wailed. Evening died. A sweet smell of early Southern
fowers rushed in on a newly-risen breeze which suddenly
parted the thin silk curtains at the opened windows. A slen-
der, frail glass case fell from the sill with a tingling crash,
but Helga Crane did not shift her position. And the night
grew cooler and cooler. (7)
Helga sits in suspended animation, alternating between smiles and
frowns, as time clusters ("The minutes gathered into hours") and
dies. According to legend, the whippoorwill can sense a soul leaving
and captures it as it fees. Time, understood as minutes and hours,
evening and night, measured by clocks and the movement of wind,
dies: it loses its soul and begins to grow "cooler and cooler." Helga,
who seems to occupy time but, seemingly, does not participate in
it, acts like a mourner at a wake: motionless, unmoving, paying re-
spect by imitating the dead. This early scene poses a question that
recurs throughout Quicksand: what might it mean to kill time? What
might it mean to make time "cold" or, as in Miss MacGooden's case,
to understand time not only as desiccating but also as desiccated?
In presenting seemingly unproductive bodies, Miss MacGooden's and
Helga's, marked as dry and corpse-like, Larsen reverses the fecund
bodies imagined by Toomer. Women are no longer "soil," and, as
such, no longer bound to the logic of black nativism.
We can understand Helga's geographical moves and her constant
sense of not being at home as part of Larsen's critique of nativist
Queering Helga Crane 264
time. Helga moves to different places, but never to a home. Her
stay in Chicago, her birthplace, takes place in just two short chap-
ters and opens with the declaration that she has "no home here"
(30). When she does settle, at Anne Grey's house, for example, her
happiness doesn't last: "Somewhere, within her, in a deep recess,
crouched discontent. She began to lose conhdence in the fullness of
her life, the glow began to fade from her conception of it. As the days
multiplied, her need of something, something vaguely familiar, but
which she could not put a name to and hold for dehnite examination,
became almost intolerable" (50). In this passage, Helga falls out of
sync with time. As in the opening scene, time does not simply pass;
instead, Helga experiences it as accumulating, gathering, clustering.
As it does so, she loses the ability to dehne place, object, and need.
Her language becomes indehnite: she wants "something, something
vaguely familiar," but something she cannot "put a name to" and,
perhaps more frustrating, something she cannot "hold for dehnite
examination." Unlike in nativist time, where the logic of narrative
is bound to genealogical claims and narratives-James Vayle, for
example, is from a "hrst family"-Helga keeps falling in and out of
time, caught in a time that speeds up and slows down, that gathers
and releases, leaving her "restless."
Helga's constantly thwarted affairs and marriages can similarly
be seen as ways of disrupting genealogical time. Were Helga to marry
James, she would be absorbed into a "hrst family," granted a place in
the family tree. Indeed, Helga hrst gets engaged to James because
she "wanted social background, but-she had not imagined that it
could be so stuffy" (12). Instead of picturing herself as yet another
branch on the ever-expanding family tree, Helga understands fam-
ily and social background as a suffocating room (perhaps in "soft
gloom"). As numerous critics have noted, images of suffocation and
asphyxiation run throughout Quicksand.
10
These images are especially
present when Helga approaches or is ensconced in a domestic setting,
when place threatens to turn into home, especially through marriage
or an affair. She leaves New York for Copenhagen, for instance, when
Robert reenters her life and she returns from Copenhagen to New
York shortly after turning down Axel Olsen's proposal. Her fights
from Naxos, New York, and Copenhagen thwart the genealogical
claims of marriage. While Robert, unlike James, may not be from a
"hrst family," he is a race leader, principal of a distinguished school
in the South, and is certainly eligible enough to marry the equally
distinguished Anne.
Even when she does marry and reproduce, Helga continues to
resist the demands of generational time. While recovering from her
fourth birth, she contemplates formulating a plan to "escape from
the oppression, the degradation" of life. The narrative continues,
Macharia 265
It was so easy and so pleasant to think about freedom and
cities, about clothes and books, about the sweet mingled
smell of Houbigan and cigarettes in softly lighted rooms
hlled with inconsequential chatter and laughter and sophis-
ticated tuneless music. It was so hard to think out a feasible
way of retrieving all these agreeable, desired things. Just
then. Later. When she got up. By and by. She must rest.
Sleep. Then, afterwards, she could work out some arrange-
ments. So she dozed and dreamed in snatches of sleeping
and waking, letting time run on. Away. (136)
Time is deferred indehnitely in the progression, "Just then. Later.
When she got up. By and by." The immediacy of "Just then" is pulled
into the generality of "Later." "When she got up" dilates into "By and
by." These last two temporal frames shift between an earthly and
spiritual frame. "When she got up. By and by" invokes a spiritual tra-
dition that promises peace and understanding in the afterlife. These
moments of suspended and dilated time are a recurring feature of
the novel.
Helga's spatial movements and experiences of suspended time
enact her hrst spoken declaration, "No, forever!" (7). Lacking a clearly
dehned target, this declaration articulates a persistent state of mind
rather than directed social or political critique. Indeed, it seems to
mark Helga's ethos, a continual puncturing of her social world and
possibilities. "No, forever!" might indeed be the phrase that best
articulates what is most perverse about Helga and her choices, a
perversion described as a "peculiar characteristic trait, cold, slowly
accumulated unreason in which all values were distorted or else
ceased to exist" (8). We might read this declaration, and Helga's life,
as queer in Lee Edelman's sense:
Not a lifestyle, not a viable identity, queerness offers no
way of being, no impulse toward social contestation and
change, no promise of a future more just. It names, instead,
and always as hgure, the resistance of the social to itself,
a resistance that the discourse of futurism, linked as it is
both to reason and law, must appropriate either as liberal
reform or consign to the space of the monstrous, the un-
thinkable, the perverse. ("Post-Partum" 182)
Edelman offers a contested vision that refuses to see queerness in
redemptive terms. For Edelman, queerness lies "outside the consen-
sus by which all politics conhrms the absolute value of reproductive
futurism" (No Future 3). The queer, Edelman continues, "comes to
hgure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, inter-
nal, to the social, to every social structure or form" (4). The queer's
Queering Helga Crane 266
"resistance," however, is always ambivalent. After all, Helga mar-
ries and reproduces, and so it seems presumptuous to name these
acts as "queer." Indeed, critics have often read the novel's end as a
conservative capitulation to heteronormativity. With Edelman, I am
not suggesting that queer hgures stand outside of normative struc-
tures; instead, I am interested in how queer hgures "disturb" these
structures ("Post-Partum" 183). Edelman's critique of futurity offers
an invaluable way to frame Larsen's critique of black nativism; simul-
taneously, attending to black nativism adds historical specihcity and
depth to Edelman's theory.
11
In its genealogical guise, black nativism
distinguishes between what counts as "reproductive futurism" and
what does not. It distinguishes between the forms of biological and
social reproduction that have a future and those that do not.
At this point, I should distinguish between the two ways in which
I am using the term queer to add quiddity to the following discus-
sion. On the one hand, I employ what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick terms
a "paranoid" reading strategy to trace how the creation and produc-
tion of racial, gendered, and sexual normativity always produces a
domain of non-normative subjects. Black nativism names a histori-
cal structure that engenders normativity and, in Quicksand, queers
Helga. On the other hand, I am suggesting that Quicksand offers an
ongoing lesson on what Edelman describes as "ethical" queerness:
"queerness attains its ethical value insofar as it . . . [accepts] its
hgural status as resistance to the viability of the social" (No Future
3). It is this aspect of Quicksand that has troubled critics since its
publication: Helga accedes to the negativity of the social.
For instance, in an exasperated 1928 review in the short-lived
journal Harlem, Wallace Thurman thunders:
the author seems to be wandering around lost, as lost as her
leading character who ends up doing such an unexpected
and unexplainable thing that I was forced to re-read the
book, wondering, if in my eagerness to reach the end, I
had perhaps skipped a hundred pages or so . . . for the
most part all Helga ever does is run away from certain
situations and straddle the fence; so consistently, in fact,
that when she does fall on the dark side the reader has lost
all interest and sympathy, nor can he believe that such a
thing has really happened. (220)
Thurman's critique of Helga's vacillations reveals an ideological in-
vestment in what Edelman terms hetero-futurity. At root, Thurman
complains that Helga refuses to settle into stable, settled, middle-
class heterosexuality either with James or Axel; she refuses to use
the privileges of phenotype to secure a hetero-future.
Macharia 267
Importantly, it is not the prospect of the future that irks Larsen
so much as it is how hetero-futurity is embedded within nativist para-
digms. We see this most clearly when Helga runs into James in New
York. James insists that it is the racial duty of the "very few Negroes
of the better class" to "have children": "We're the ones who must have
children if the race is to get anywhere." To this, Helga responds, "Well,
I for one don't intend to contribute any to the cause" (104). We can
read her marriage to Reverend Green and her subsequent pregnan-
cies as implicit critiques of James's nativist impulses. Ironically, her
children do not stand for the future of "the race." It is precisely their
abject status from racial politics that marks Helga's pregnancies as
queer endeavors. Her relationship to motherhood offers a critique
of hetero-futurity as a class-based project with links to past nativist
claims and ongoing eugenic implications.
Rank Weeds
Helga's marriage to Reverend Green represents a perverse
reaction to nativist claims about breeding, claims based on the new
technology of eugenics. During the 1910s and 1920s, as Daylanne
English explains, black intellectuals including Du Bois, E. Franklin
Frazier, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, were drawn to the possibilities of
eugenics as a means to uplift the race. Although African American
leaders did not endorse biological sterilization, they believed the
race could be improved by cultural means. White nativists such as
Madison Grant favored biological and social eugenics, objecting to
the "wretched refuse" that Emma Lazarus tried to welcome. Eu-
genic measures could be used to exclude dysgenic immigrants while
improving native stock. As Grant put it succinctly in his 1916 The
Passing of the Great Race, "Man has the choice of two methods of
race improvement. He can breed from the best or he can eliminate
the worst by segregation or sterilization" (51-52).
However, nativist desires for pure bloodlines and restrictive
breeding programs were threatened by women's desires. According
to Grant, "women of the better classes" had a "perverse predisposi-
tion to mismate" (22). Grant, who had been trained as a naturalist,
was drawing from Darwin's troubling theory of sexual selection. As
Alys Weinbaum explains, Darwin suggested that women chose their
sexual partners and, as a result, were responsible for human racial
diversity (156, 157). According to Weinbaum this controversial idea
circulated widely in Europe and America during the late nineteenth
century, only to be discarded. However, it seems to have enjoyed a
resurgence in the 1910s and 1920s due, in part, to women's activ-
ism. Women's perverse desires threatened "the race."
Queering Helga Crane 268
In choosing to marry Reverend Green, Helga makes a dysgenic
choice that refuses to fulhll nativism's eugenic demand. While the
South may have served as a privileged source of ancestry, grounding
political and social claims, the rural South was considered dysgenic.
In a 1925 article "Eugenics and the Race Problem," Frazier argued
that a biological form of eugenics seemed impractical for blacks,
emphasizing, "the Negro problem is essentially a problem of social
adjustment" (91). But while Frazier challenges a biological form of
eugenics, he advocates a social form of control. "[T]he Negro in
marrying," he argues, "should have due regard for his offspring by
not mating with stocks that show signs of feeblemindedness and the
grosser abnormal physical traits which follow the Mendelian principle.
Likewise, of course, he should seek healthy consorts" (91-92). Fra-
zier's ostensible distinction between "stocks" and "consorts" relies
on a notion of genealogical history. The Negro, gendered male, is
implicitly enjoined to verify a potential mate's biological history, to
understand a woman's "stock" before he considers mating with her.
Individual men marry "stock," family histories, hence the impor-
tance of Miss MacGooden's and James's genealogical histories. This
emphasis on marrying stock also explains Helga's anxieties that she
has "no family connections."
However, as English explains, a class-based eugenic project aug-
mented the potential mates offered by nativist genealogies. Education
and appearance could compensate for lack of background. In his role
as editor for the Crisis, Du Bois promoted a eugenic idea of race. In
a 1922 article he writes, The Negro "hnds himself surrounded in the
modern world by men who have been bred for brains, for efhciency,
for beauty. He is beginning carefully to train and breed for the same
purposes in varying proportions" (qtd. in English 48). "Brains," "ef-
hciency," and "beauty" were favorable traits that could supplement
nativist bloodlines. In order to advocate proper breeding, and to
encourage middle-class families to participate, Crisis ran an annual
baby contest from 1910 to the early 1930s. Families were encour-
aged to send in photographs of their babies. According to English,
this issue was one of the most popular, and these photographs were
understood to be metonyms for the healthy black nation, evidence
of eugenic living and guarantees of futurity.
Frazier's class-based eugenics is especially harsh regarding the
rural South. While in the urban North it is unlikely that the "best men-
tally endowed Negroes" will "debase their intellectual inheritance by
mating with feebleminded persons," the South has no such controls.
Indeed, "The whole social system in the South favors the propagation
of the least socially desirable . . . among the Negroes" (92). Frazier's
arguments about the South indicate its awkward status in nativist
Macharia 269
claims. On the one hand, it was ostensibly the signiher of authentic-
ity. On the other hand, especially among urban, middle-class blacks,
the material location occupied a distinct time of its own, divorced
from the forward-looking, eugenic-driven nativism of the New Negro.
If, blood will tell (following nativist and eugenic logic), Helga's
marriage to Reverend Green seems a natural, even inevitable, albeit
perverse choice. Her marriage, much like her parents', is a gamble,
detached from the eugenic expectations of class and phenotype.
She knows nothing about Reverend Green. Unlike James of the "hrst
family" or Robert with the solid reputation or Axel the famous artist,
Reverend Green comes without any bona hdes. Ironically, the mar-
riage between the "satin yellow" Helga and the "rattish yellow" Green
satishes the phenotype requirements of a eugenically based nativism.
Yet phenotype lies, for Helga's satin appearance represents a glossy
surface and a dull back and Green's rattish yellow appearance identi-
hes him as dysgenic according to nativist logic. Certainly, his status
as a rural Southerner marks him as dysgenic within Frazier's scheme.
This distinction between external appearance and internal con-
stitution is made explicit in Larsen's description of Helga's intimate
life and births: "night came at the end of every day. Emotional, pal-
pitating, amorous, all that was living in her sprang like rank weeds
at the tingling thought of the night, with a vitality so strong that it
devoured all shoots of reason" (123). Given the importance of similes
in Quicksand, it is telling that Larsen compares all that is "living in"
Helga to "rank weeds," for if within nativist logic women are fertile
soil, charged with propagating the race, they are presumed to be
weed free. Strikingly, this passage confates desire and reproductive
potential, invoking stereotypes of black women's hypersexuality
without critiquing them. Indeed, this passage gives lie to Robert's
earlier certainty that he can tell "good" stock. Similarly, it challenges
Du Bois's assertion that beauty, brains, and efhciency are evidence
of good stock.
Helga's children, like her, give lie to their heritage. On the one
hand, their rapid births, three within twenty months (124), support
nativist assertions about breeding among dysgenic populations. In
The Rising Tide of Color, Lothrop Stoddard claimed the "negro" was
the "quickest of breeders" (90) and in The Passing of the Great Race
Grant complained that the "lower classes" were breeding more rap-
idly than "the most valuable classes" (47). On the other hand, her
children resemble those prized in Crisis. Her sons, for example, are
"great, healthy twin boys, whose lovely bodies" are "like rare hgures
carved out of amber, and in whose sleepy and mysterious black eyes
all that was puzzling, evasive, and aloof in life seemed to hnd expres-
sion" (124). Although produced by ostensibly dysgenic parents, the
children are so perfect as to resemble modernist sculptures.
Queering Helga Crane 270
In unsettling the bond between appearance and eugenics, dys-
genics and aesthetics, Quicksand offers an important commentary
on black engagement with nativism. Larsen shows how constructions
of race and gender queer subjects who do not ht within specihc pa-
rameters. Ironically, some of the most infuential interpretations of
Quicksand have marked Helga as neurotic (Bone), narcissistic (John-
son), and caught in an Oedipal lack (Tate), implicitly endorsing the
very models of racial and gender normativity that Larsen critiques.
Helga's sexual problems have been attributed to her distance from
the land and her lack of proper ancestry. Unlike Toomer's sexual fe-
male characters who are rooted in the soil, Helga lacks appropriate
desire. Not rooted in the "ancestral" South, Helga registers as queer
within the novel and in critical discussions.
Ties of Race
Given Larsen's critique of nativism, how are we to understand
Helga's declaration, when in Copenhagen, that she is "homesick
. . . for Negroes" (94)? On her return to New York, she is swept up
by "a wild surge of gladness" that she is "surrounded by hundreds,
thousands, of dark-eyed, brown folk," understanding, "These were
her people." She muses,
Strange that she had never truly valued this kinship until
distance had shown her its worth. How absurd she had
been to think that another country, other people, would
liberate her from the ties which bound her forever to these
mysterious, these terrible, these fascinating, these lovable,
dark hordes. Ties that were of the spirit. Ties not only su-
perhcially entangled with mere outline of features or color
of skin. Deeper. Much deeper than either of these. (97)
Larsen implodes nativist alignments in this passage. Whereas in na-
tivist logic kinship is knowable and restricted (Miss MacGooden has
an uncle; James belongs to one of the hrst families), Helga claims
kinship with the "mysterious" "dark hordes." Reclaiming a primal
mode of belonging, and here it is telling that she uses the language
of primitivism-"mysterious," "terrible," and "fascinating"-Helga
asserts her place in this collective racial portrait. In using primitivist
tropes, Larsen continues to accede to negativity, deploying rather
than contesting racial stereotypes. Primitivism's strategies of aggre-
gation, creating undifferentiated collectivities, provide her with a tool
to contest the exclusive logics of nativism and eugenics.
Macharia 271
This moment replicates Helga's return to Chicago from Naxos-
Chicago where she has "no home" (30). Rejected by her uncle's wife,
she plunges into "the crowd":
Helga found herself wondering who they were, what they
did, and of what they thought. What was passing behind
those dark molds of fesh? . . . Yet, as she stepped out in
the moving multi-colored crowd, there came to her a queer
feeling of enthusiasm, as if she were tasting some agree-
able, exotic food-sweetbreads, smothered with truffes
and mushrooms-perhaps. And, oddly enough, she felt,
too, that she had come home. (33)
It is precisely the crowd's unknowability that allows for kinship, the
absence of genealogical demands. Helga dehnes home by her abil-
ity to blend into a crowd of strangers. She feels most secure when
dis-embedded from racial institutions such as Naxos.
By advocating "Ties of the spirit" that transcend "outline of
features or color of skin," Larsen challenges the nativist obsession
with features and skin color, anticipating Thurman's The Blacker the
Berry (1929) and George Schuyler's Black No More (1931). Indeed,
critics such as Amritjit Singh and Christian, who have chastised Larsen
for privileging mulatta heroines, have misrecognized representation
for advocacy. As opposed to a nativist sense of being at home, of
belonging, or of security due to color or ancestry, Larsen privileges a
paradoxical sense of belonging as loss: part of an anonymous, mov-
ing crowd, one can only assert momentary presence. Any ongoing
connection between place and identity is fractured, replaced by a
contingent sense of place and race. Instead of being grounded, one
is suspended in quicksand.
12
Quicksand demonstrates how black nativism queers subjects
who do not ht within specihc racial parameters. Ironically, critics have
continued to queer Helga and Larsen by chastising them for, on the
one hand, not having enough race pride, and, on the other, for be-
ing psychically undeveloped. The two arguments are not unrelated,
for if Helga and Larsen were psychically "mature," they would have
appropriate relationships to race, gender, and sexuality. If Helga and
Larsen were psychically mature, they would be able to sustain normal,
heterosexual relationships. Such arguments suture racial and sexual
normativity, and, as Quicksand demonstrates, anchor both of them
to specihc locations, creating an exclusionary logic of black nativism.
Queering Helga Crane 272
Notes
I am grateful to Siobhan Somerville, Jed Esty, and Melissa Girard for
their help with this essay.
1. In her early, important feminist assessment of the novel, Hortense
Thornton claims that Helga's father is "West Indian" (286), a claim
that is true of the biographical Larsen, but found nowhere in Quick-
sand. Similarly, in her biography of Larsen, Thadious Davis draws
extensively on Quicksand to supplement Larsen's archivally thin life
history. Barbara Johnson has drawn attention to this problem and
cautions us "not to equate [Larsen's] novels with her psyche" (264).
2. I take the term "black nativism" from the historians Jay Rubin and
David J. Hellwig ("Black Leaders" 114).
3. While indebted to studies by Deborah McDowell, Judith Butler, and
Laura Doyle that have examined the important thematic of lesbian
eroticism in Larsen's hction, this essay does not explore same-sex
erotics in Larsen.
4. Kwame Anthony Appiah contends that this essay represents an early
stage in Du Bois's thinking, when he was still embedded within ra-
cialist paradigms. More recently, Wilson Jeremiah Moses has claimed
that Du Bois was paying homage to his mentor, Alexander Crummell,
while simultaneously repudiating Booker T. Washington. Ostensibly,
the Du Bois of this essay is not yet the cosmopolitan intellectual who
will advocate postracial thinking. While I cannot resolve the place of
this speech within Du Bois's intellectual trajectory in this article, I
would argue that sustained attention to his intimate politics ruptures
ostensible oppositions between racialist and postracial, nationalist
and internationalist.
5. This is not to say that religion was not a factor in black nativism.
Arnold Shankman writes that blacks tended to be evangelical Prot-
estants and were critical of the unfamiliar religious customs of im-
migrant groups, ranging from the Chinese and Japanese to Mexicans,
Italians, and Jews (Ambivalent Friends iii).
6. The 1924 Immigration Act, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act,
established immigration quotas based on national origins and was
particularly targeted toward limiting Japanese immigration. Accord-
ing to Mae M. Ngai, the Immigration Act of 1924 created the group
"Asian," wedding disparate regions and ethnicities, a move that
enabled Congress to restrict immigrations from multiple geographic
regions in Asia (70-71, 87).
7. Even Toomer's claim that he was recording a world that was disap-
pearing has nativist implications, insofar as nativism understands
itself to be perpetually threatened by racial extinction.
8. For instance, in The Rising Tide of Color, Lothrop Stoddard devoted
a chapter to the "Far East," which he termed "Yellow Man's Land."
Macharia 273
9. Edward Said distinguishes between hliation and afhliation in The
World, the Text, and the Critic. Afhliation is "a kind of compensa-
tory order" (19) through which individuals create "social bonds" that
"substitute for those ties that connect members of the same family
across generations" (17).
10. For Bone, these images of asphyxiation are "at bottom projections of
Negro self-hatred" (103). Christian argues that Helga is "trapped by
her own sensuality" (62). Wall, building on Thornton's work, ascribes
these images of suffocation to the combined forces of racism and
sexism (113).
11. During an MLA forum on Edelman's work, panelists debated the
relationship between what Robert Caserio described as "structural
claims about the unconscious" and "empirical claims about culture"
(820). For more on this relationship, see Tim Dean's contribution to
the forum.
12. Recent scientihc research has shown that human bodies do not
actually sink in quicksand. Instead, they foat, remain suspended,
and eventually are forced to the surface by the sand's density. Mary
Esteve points out this aspect of the novel.
Works Cited
Amory, John K. "George Washington's Infertility: Why Was the Father
of Our Nation Never a Father?" Fertility and Sterility 81.3 (2004):
495-99.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. "The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the
Illusion of Race." Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 21-37.
Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven: Yale UP, 1958.
Butler, Judith. "Passing, Queering: Nella Larsen's Psychoanalytic Chal-
lenge." Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis,
Feminism. Ed. Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen.
Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. 266-84.
Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-
American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.
Caserio, Robert K. "The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory." PMLA 121.3
(2006): 819-21.
Chesnutt, Charles. The House Behind the Cedars. New York: Penguin,
1993.
Christian, Barbara. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradi-
tion, 1892-1976. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1980.
Davis, Thadious M. Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance:
A Woman's Life Unveiled. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1994.
Dean, Tim. "The Antisocial Homosexual." PMLA 121.3 (2006): 826-28.
Doyle, Laura. "Transnationalism at Our Backs: A Long View of Larsen,
Woolf, and Queer Racial Subjectivity in Atlantic Modernism." Mod-
ernism/Modernity 13.3 (2006): 531-59.
Queering Helga Crane 274
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Norton, 1999.
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham:
Duke UP, 2004.
. "Post-Partum." Narrative 10.2 (2002): 181-85.
English, Daylanne. Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modern-
ism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina
P, 2004.
Esteve, Mary. "Nella Larsen's 'Moving Mosaic': Harlem, Crowds, and Ano-
nymity." American Literary History 9.2 (1997): 268-86.
Foley, Barbara. Specters of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the
New Negro. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2003.
Frazier, E. Franklin. "Eugenics and the Race Problem." Crisis 31.2 (1925):
91-92.
Grant, Madison. The Passing of the Great Race: Or the Racial Basis of
European History. New York: Scribner's, 1932.
Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies,
Subcultural Lives. New York: New York UP, 2005.
Hellwig, David. "The Afro-American and the Immigrant, 1880-1930: A
Study of Black Social Thought." Diss. Syracuse U, 1973.
. "Afro-American Reactions to the Japanese and Anti-Japanese
Movement, 1906-1924." Phylon 38.1 (1977): 93-104.
. "Black Leaders and United States Immigration Policy, 1917-1929."
The Journal of Negro History 66.2 (1981): 110-27.
Higgs, Robert. "Landless by Law: Japanese Immigrants in California Ag-
riculture to 1941." Economic History 38.1 (1978): 205-25.
Higham John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism
1860-1925. New York: Atheneum, 1981.
Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea. New York: Hill, 1940.
. "I, Too." The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Ed. Arnold
Rampersad. New York: Vintage, 1995. 46.
Hutchinson, George. In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color
Line. Cambridge: Belknap P, 2006.
Johnson, Barbara. "The Quicksands of the Self: Nella Larsen and Heinz
Kohut." Female Subjects in Black and Write: Race, Psychoanalysis,
Feminism. Ed. Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen.
Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. 252-65.
Jun, Helen H. "Black Orientalism: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Race
and U.S. Citizenship." American Quarterly 58.4 (2006): 1047-66.
Larsen, Nella. Quicksand. 1928. Ed. Thadious M. Davis. New York: Pen-
guin, 2002.
Logan, Rayford W. The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes
to Woodrow Wilson. New York: Collier, 1965.
McDowell, Deborah. "'That Nameless . . . Shameless Impulse': Sexuality
in Nella Larsen's Quicksand and Passing." Black Feminist Criticism
and Critical Theory. Ed. Joe Weixlmann and Houston A. Baker, Jr.
Greenwood, FL: Penkevill, 1988. 139-67.
Michaels, Walter Benn. Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism.
Durham: Duke UP, 1995.
Moses, Wilson J. "W. E. B. Du Bois's 'The Conservation of Races' and Its
Context: Idealism, Conservatism and Hero Worship." The Massa-
chusetts Review 34.2 (1993): 275-94.
Macharia 275
Mumford, Kevin. Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New
York in the Early Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia UP, 1997.
Ngai, Mae M. "The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law."
Journal of American History 86.1 (1999): 67-92.
Parker, Warner A. "The Quota Provisions of the Immigration Act of 1924."
The American Journal of International Law 18.4 (1924): 737-54.
Rubin, Jay. "Black Nativism: The European Immigrant in Negro Thought,
1830-1860." Phylon 39.3 (1978): 193-202.
Said, Edward W. The World, the Text, and the Critic. New York: Vintage,
1983.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or,
You're so Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You."
Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performance. Durham: Duke
UP, 2003. 123-51.
Shankman, Arnold. Ambivalent Friends: Afro-Americans View the Im-
migrant. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1982.
. "'Asiatic Ogre' or 'Desirable Citizen'? The Image of Japanese
Americans in the Afro-American Press, 1867-1933." Pacihc Histori-
cal Review 46.4 (1977): 582.
. "Black on Yellow: Afro-Americans View Chinese-Americans,
1850-1935." Phylon 39.1 (1978): 1-17.
Stoddard, Lothrop. The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Suprem-
acy. New York: Scribner, 1921.
Thornton, Hortense. "Sexism as Quagmire: Nella Larsen's Quicksand."
College Language Association Journal 16 (1973): 285-301.
Thurman, Wallace. "High, Low, Past, and Present: Review of The Walls
of Jericho, Quicksand, and Adventures of an African Slaver." The
Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: A Harlem Renaissance
Reader. Ed. Amritjit Singh and Daniel M. Scott III. New Brunswick:
Rutgers UP, 2003. 218-21.
Toomer, Jean. Cane. New York: Norton, 1988.
Wall, Cheryl A. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana
UP, 1995.
Washington, Booker T. Up From Slavery. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.
Weinbaum, Alys. Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and
Nation in Transatlantic Modern Thought. Durham: Duke UP, 2004.