Black Cosmofeminism: Commodity, Sexuality, and the Transnational Mixed-Race Subject in Nella Larsen's Quicksand

Abstract

Abstract: Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) demonstrates a situated form of Black cosmofeminism to capture the difficult process through which a deviant mixed-race heroine negotiates her place in the Black community. At core, Black cosmofeminism interrogates oppressive racial and sexual politics enacted in domestic, local, and national spheres to envision a more inclusive cosmopolitan US Black community open to sexually, racially, and nationally "impure" subjects. However, far from advocating the erasure of local identities, such a reimagining of the domestic Black community as cosmofeminist instead foregrounds group identification and communal bonding developed in response to transnational displacement and discrimination. Working in tandem with consumer cosmopolitanism, Black cosmofeminism places the African American woman consumer center stage and traces how her desire, body, and identity are not only constructed alongside globally circulated commodities but also made localized and resistant to the global commodification and sexualization of Black and mixed-raced women.