Knowra Nella Larsen Nella Larsen Nella Larsen (1891–1964) was an American novelist and librarian associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Her novels Quicksand and Passing explore race, gender, identity, and belonging.
Passing : Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel follows two childhood friends whose lives diverge around racial passing. This novel makes racial passing and its personal costs central to Larsen’s fiction.
Racial identity : A person’s identification with a racial group, shaped by ancestry, social categories, and lived experience. Her characters confront racial identity as both personal experience and social judgment.
Jessie Redmon Fauset : An American editor, novelist, and poet who helped shape the literary culture of the Harlem Renaissance. As literary editor of The Crisis, Fauset helped create an outlet for Black writers of Larsen’s generation.
Harlem : A Manhattan neighborhood that became a major center of Black life and culture in the early twentieth century. Larsen lived and worked in Harlem during the period that shaped her best-known fiction.
Quicksand : Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel follows Helga Crane, a mixed-race woman searching for belonging across different communities. Larsen’s first novel traces the alienation and constrained choices that recur in her work.
Gender roles : Social expectations about behavior and responsibilities associated with gender. Larsen portrays women negotiating expectations that restrict their choices and self-expression.
Alain Locke : An American philosopher and editor associated with the Harlem Renaissance and the idea of the New Negro. Locke’s advocacy of Black cultural expression framed debates surrounding Larsen’s literary moment.
Copenhagen : The capital of Denmark and a major city in Larsen’s early life through her Danish mother’s family. Her childhood connections to Copenhagen informed the transnational background reflected in her fiction.
Harlem Renaissance : A flourishing of Black literature, art, and thought centered in Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s. Larsen published her major novels amid this movement’s debates about Black art and identity.
Intersectionality : A framework for examining how overlapping systems of power shape people’s experiences. Her fiction links the effects of race, gender, and class rather than treating them separately.
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