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Queering Helga Crane: Black Nativism in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand
- MFS Modern Fiction Studies
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 57, Number 2, Summer 2011
- pp. 254-275
- 10.1353/mfs.2011.0042
- Article
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Drawing from George Hutchinson’s recent revisionist biography of Nella Larsen and scholarship in the fields of immigration and queer studies, this article advances a new interpretation of Quicksand as a text that critiques racial and sexual normativity. I argue that Larsen identifies and critiques a distinct black nativism that, in the early decades of the twentieth century, sutured racial and sexual normativity, producing figures like Larsen as queer.