The Gold Standard of Racial Identity in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing

Abstract

Gold? yellow, glittering, precious gold?... Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair, Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant. --Shakespeare, Timon of Athens 4.3 He's got a five-dollar gold piece for a stickpin and he got a ten- dollar gold piece on his watch chain and his mouf is jes' crammed full of gold teethes. Sho wisht it wuz mine. --Zora Neale Hurston, Gilded Six-Bits (1014) In 1920s, many black writers established African American identity as one of most significant issues to be addressed in post-World War I period. Figures as diverse as W E. B. Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph, Marcus Garvey, Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, and Jesse Fauset sought to define a black identity that had appeared on scene. They claimed that this New belonged to a modern generation of black shaped by great events of teens and twenties, from Great Migration North, World War I, industrialism, urbanism, and nationalist liberation movements to growth of internationalism following Bolshevik Revolution. To be sure, black writers and activists were often at odds over just who New was. Garvey, for example, championed what he saw as African character of New Negro, while Randolph welcomed arrival of a left-leaning, working-class New Negro. More often than not, however, definitions of New asserted that black belonged to a unique race of human beings whose ancestry imparted a distinctive and invaluable racial identity and culture. The New Negro, it was claimed, had thrown off yoke of racial prejudice that equated blackness with barbarism and was proud of his or her race and heritage. Many writers also believed that New Negro's racial revaluation would help to produce a friendly revaluation of black by white America. Writers heralded arrival of New as beginning of a phase of American history in which production of black culture would assist African in winning respect long overdue in US and abroad. At heart of New discourses of 1920s lies a crucial contradiction, one with important implications for discussions of black identity today. Writers claimed that New was shaped by modernity yet retained in some way a racial essence or character that preceded modernity. The New was as old as Africa but as contemporary as a jazz club in urban Harlem; his racial was as ancient as Hughes's dusky rivers (Voices 155) yet as modern as Garvey's Black Star Line ships ready to take black diasporic masses back home to Africa. The New had the instinctive gift of folk spirit (Locke, Youth 51), which did not preclude his evolution into a type of ... a city Negro (Johnson 285). In a word, new black identity also retained a good amount of an old, premodern racial self. Granted, not all Renaissance writers asserted that New was both premodern and modern. Exceptions stand out, such black socialists who, for a time, rejected racial categories out of hand, and George Schuyler, who called New Renaissance Negro-Art Hokum for claiming that black are a distinct race somehow unaffected by the same economic and social forces that mold actions and thoughts of white Americans (1173). (1) But taken as a whole, New discourses are caught between two poles: a notion of a premodern racial identity whose origins lie in ancient Africa and a concept of a modern self not exclusive to black Americans. A number of current literary studies of New have all but laid to rest racial essentialism predicated on concepts of a universal black soul or blood transmuted generationally. These critiques show how such essentialism reproduces fallacious premises integral to scientific racism dating back to period of slavery as well as to antiracist writers who problematically borrowed from these pseudoscientific discourses to argue against racism. …