Queering Helga Crane: Black Nativism in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand

Abstract

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.