Nella Larsen by Passing Page A

realm of essentialist being for Clare’s continued existence; she possesses no ontological claim in the world of essentialized modernity.

Notes
    1. See James de Jongh’s
Vicious Modernism
(Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
    2. Werner Sollors,
Neither Black Nor White Yet Both
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 247–48.
    3. Rita Felski,
The Gender of Modernity
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 13.
    4. Arthur Davis, for instance, speculates that “the present-day reader may wonder at this morbid concern . . . with the passing theme” (
From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900–1960
[Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974], 6). This sentiment is shared by Amritjit Singh, Hoyt Fuller, and other earlier critics of the genre.
    5. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Crisis (1929); also cited in Hoyt Fuller’s Introduction, Nella Larsen,
Passing
(New York: Collier Books, 1971), 13.
    6. According to Gayle Wald, the “postpassing” narratives “[articulate] collective values of pride in the ‘Negro’ identity and [challenge] the social and economic pressures that promote passing as an ‘alternative’ to racial segregation.” Gayle Wald, Crossing the Color Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S.
Literature and Culture
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 119.
    7. See Claudia Tate, “Nella Larsen’s
Passing:
A Problem of Interpretation,”
Black American Literary Forum
(Winter 1980), 146.
    8. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Crisis (1928); also cited in Hiroko Sato, “Under the Harlem Shadow: A Study of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen,” in
Harlem Renaissance Remembered: Essays,
Arna Bontemps, ed. (New York: Dodd, Mead, & Co., 1972).
    9. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Crisis ( July 1929), 234; also cited in Fuller.
    10. Robert Bone,
The Negro Novel in America
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958; revised 1965), 102.
    11. Fuller, 18.
    12. Sato, 88, 89.
    13. Nathan Irvin Huggins,
Harlem Renaissance
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 157, 159.
    14. David Levering Lewis,
When Harlem Was in Vogue
(New York: Knopf, 1981; Oxford University Press, 1989), 231.
    15. George Hutchinson, “Subject to Disappearance: Interracial Identity in Nella Larsen’s
Quicksand,
” in Genevieve Fabre and Michel Feith,
Temples for Tomorrow: Looking Back at the Harlem
Renaissance
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
    16. Cheryl A. Wall,
Women of the Harlem Renaissance
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 132.
    17. See Charles R. Larson,
Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer & Nella
Larsen
(Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993), 86, and Thadious M. Davis,
Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance:A Woman’s Life Unveiled
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994). Arthur Davis describes Larsen’s first novel as “a moving story,” although “not as good a novel as Quicksand,” 97. Critic Bernard Bell regards Quicksand as “structurally . . . the better of [Larsen’s] two novels” (
The Afro-AmericanNovel and Its Tradition
[Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1987], 110). And although questioning the grounds of earlier evaluations of
Passing,
Mary Mabel Youman does not “quarrel with the overall [critical] judgment” that ranks Larsen’s second novel “inferior” to her first.
    18. Gayle Wald aptly deploys this term.
    19. This is the second version of William Wells Brown’s
Clotel, or,
the President’s Daughter
(1853), which is currently regarded as the first novel published by an African American.
    20. See David Kirkpatrick’s account, “On Long-Lost Pages, a Female Slave’s Voice” (
The New York Times,
Nov. 11, 2001), which provides the account of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s remarkable “discovery” of this volume.
    21. Werner Sollors speculates that “[t]he first American instances