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Fetishizing Blackness in the Harlem Renaissance.

  • Published In: Modernism/Modernity, 2024, v. 31, n. 1. P. 87 1 of 3

  • Database: Academic Search Ultimate 2 of 3

  • Authored By: Kindig, Patrick 3 of 3

Abstract

This article argues that racial fetishism played an important but undertheorized role in much Black modernist literature, especially literature critical of the early twentieth-century politics of racial uplift. It reads two Harlem Renaissance texts, Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) and Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928), alongside Carl Van Vechten's controversially fetishistic novel Nigger Heaven (1926) in order to complicate received understandings of both Black agency and racial fetishism. More concretely, it suggests that Black modernist authors used the figure of the racial fetish to rethink Black agency not as an all-or-nothing phenomenon but as something more partial, compromised, and graduated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Additional Information

  • Source:Modernism/Modernity. 2024/01, Vol. 31, Issue 1, p87
  • Document Type:Article
  • Subject Area:History
  • Publication Date:2024
  • ISSN:1071-6068
  • DOI:10.1353/mod.2024.a935446
  • Accession Number:179343072
  • Copyright Statement:Copyright of Modernism/Modernity is the property of Johns Hopkins University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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