U.S. empire depends upon the logics of sexual normativity for their natural-seemingness. As an epistemological project, US empire shapes our understanding of what sexuality means. This chapter offers that the history of American literature and empire reveal how sexuality is inherently political, that desire is itself part of the political world; its contours are filtered through the relations of race and power that operate in the public sphere. There is a lot we don’t know about sexuality: it is too amorphous a collection of acts, desires, fantasies, and ideas to claim dominion over. What we know, however, is that US empire’s remapping of power relations, norms, identities, and territory operates with and through the desires we hold to be most intimate, and that American literary study is key to better understanding the sexual scope of empire’s reach.

This chapter frames the collaboration between Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso in the making of the 1906 portrait of Stein as a struggle over the modernist representation of the face. Having started the portrait with the sitter in front of him, Picasso famously erased Stein’s likeness and subsequently replaced it with a mask. Stein self-styled herself as an author and celebrity using Picasso’s portrait as a prop – as if it were a photograph. In turn, Stein’s literary portraits of Picasso attest to a desire for a radical erasure of the face, from memory and representation alike. The face nonetheless returns in the invocation of the proper name Picasso and through the intermedial dimensions of Stein’s portraiture writing. The chapter concludes by revisiting Nella Larsen’s use of the mask, specifically as the mask of whiteness, in her novel Passing (1929), a re-writing of Stein and Picasso’s experimentation with the racial dynamics of the mask.

It is exactly because literary language relies on the stylistic possibilities afforded by indirection that queer literary studies established such strong connections between indirection and the representation of queer content. It’s not only that queer content had to be reframed to be socially acceptable and publishable, though that certainly was an element. Rather, indirection itself tended to be a hallmark of both the literariness and the queerness of literary writing. This chapter examines some key examples of textual repression, latency, and queer sublimation in a range of texts by Charles Brockden Brown, Edward Prime-Stevenson, Henry James, Nella Larsen, Lillian Hellman, and James Purdy. Alongside those readings it animates an investigation of textual content by tracing key theorists of these literary strategies, most significantly Barbara Johnson and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The chapter demonstrates how these quite particular questions, related to historical shifts in the representation of queer content, quickly settle into more general discipline-specific areas of enquiry.

Rebecca Hall’s 2021 film adaptation of Nella Larsen’s famed Harlem Renaissance novel, Passing (1929), indexes the relevance of interracial passing today. We explore Hall’s film to explain the contemporary appeal of Larsen’s narrative. Larsen’s Passing licenses interpretive possibilities that transcend its immediate moment, even as it seeks to criticize specific historical realities of modern intersectional identity. Hall’s neo-passing narrative of 1920s Black femininity employs cinema to highlight the enduring immobility of the color line and the erotic and social risk of crossing it.

We assess Hall’s adaptation of the two-protagonist structure as it personalizes Larsen’s depiction of racial liminality; consider Hall’s use of cinematography to adapt Larsen’s rhetorical sleight of hand regarding US racial discourses; and discuss the homoerotics of passing in both works. We then contemplate Hall’s casting choices. The final section takes up the conclusion of the two works. Hall resolves some of Larsen’s famous ambiguity, but poignantly showcases the essential instability of the gendered, racialized body in US literature and culture across a century.

The essay focuses on the uses and significance of the trope of passing, as both theme and literary strategy, in African American fiction from the 19th to the 21st century. Passing as a theme pushed the boundaries of arbitrary, but operative, racial dichotomies, while passing as a literary strategy enabled radical experimentation with novelistic conventions. African American writers revised the tragic mulatta and mulatto characters by articulating a black-centered racial imaginary that infused the trope of passing with profound political and literary relevance. Deploying the high visibility of all-but-white characters as a screen to introduce new figures in American literature, they advanced a far from monolithic understanding of blackness that foregrounded its intraracial diversification and intersection with gender and class. African American writers adopted the trope of passing in order to expose the sociopolitical construction of “race,” unsettle prevailing racial epistemologies of blackness, popularize a more complex racial imaginary, and teach self-consciously critical modes of reading literature and, by extension, reality. Through a diachronic approach, the essay shows how the trope of passing was repurposed in different literary-historical periods and how it retains its relevance as a malleable literary strategy of cultural and political intervention.

Angela Watkins argues that although Quicksand is a well-studied novel, more attention should be paid to Nella Larsen’s depiction of education and educational institutions. Analyzing the objectives, rules, and regulations of historically Black colleges during the early twentieth century, the chapter examines Larsen’s critique of the conformity instilled in HBCU students. By drawing upon biographies of Nella Larsen, the chapter reveals how Larsen’s own problematic experiences at Fisk and Tuskegee shaped her fictionalization of Black southern institutions and the broader examination of ideologies of racial uplift.

Young’s “African American Magazine Modernism” argues that it is important to recognize the extent to which African American writers and artists appeared in a wide range of magazines in the 1920s. This chapter examines moments of cross-cultural interaction, including such examples as the pieces of Jean Toomer’s Cane distributed across race-conscious, avant-garde, and regional magazines (1922-23); Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” in the pacifist-socialist journal The World Tomorrow (1928); and the infamous case of Nella Larsen’s “Sanctuary” in Century Magazine (1930). Reading African American modernism across these disparate bibliographical environments yields not an easily coherent picture but what John Bryant terms the “muddy materiality” of textual history.

For many of Harlem’s New Negro writers, friendships with whites provided invaluable access to publishers, patrons, financial opportunities, and social power. Yet these interracial relationships also required artists to navigate whites’ racially limited expectations about black identity, expression, and behavior. Jean Toomer’s friendship with Waldo Frank, for example, led to an aesthetically productive but racially problematic collaboration. Frank and Toomer provided each other with practical and emotional support as they developed their 1923 novels, Toomer’s Cane and Frank’s Holiday, and the creative implications of their racial difference are complex, particularly because Frank delivered Cane’s manuscript to Horace Liveright, and he advocated for its publication. Likewise, Carl Van Vechten’s friendship with Nella Larsen offered the latter a sense of community and practical support as she wrote Quicksand and Passing, novels whose publication Van Vechten also encouraged with his friend Alfred A. Knopf. New Negro writers navigated the power dynamics of these friendships with skill, nuance, and resilience.