In response to increasing scholarly interest in the transnational dimensions of the Harlem Renaissance, this paper examines Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) as a probing critique of the limitations embedded within the pursuit of a transnational identity. By focusing on the protagonist Helga Crane’s experiences navigating both American and European spaces, I argue that Larsen interrogates the seductive yet ultimately unfulfilling ideal of fluid identity across borders. Helga’s journey, culminating in her return to the American South as the wife of a rural minister and mother of multiple children, poignantly encapsulates the restrictions of transnationalism, challenging the notion that racial and cultural hybridity can seamlessly transcend national boundaries.

Through Helga’s attempts to reconcile her African and Danish heritage, Larsen exposes the barriers to true belonging in both black and white communities, questioning the prevailing transnational aspirations of her time. The narrative reveals that racial and cultural affiliation often overrides any possibility of achieving an integrated transnational identity. Moreover, Quicksand subtly critiques the Harlem Renaissance’s optimistic embrace of transnational exchange, suggesting instead that such ideals may obscure the material and social realities that inhibit individuals from inhabiting multiple cultural spaces without compromise or conflict. Ultimately, this paper contends that Quicksand offers a prescient commentary on the promises and challenges of identity formation through transnationalism, underscoring how the pursuit of self-determination is constrained by racial, social, and geographic forces that fragment rather than integrate identity.

This paper examines the function of Oriental objects in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand as instruments of identity negotiation within a racially stratified world. Through the lens of Robin Kelley’s polyculturalism, it argues that Helga Crane’s aesthetic embrace of Chinese and other Asian artifacts constitutes a futile attempt to transcend the essentialized racial binaries that confine her. By curating an environment of exotic elegance, she seeks to refashion herself beyond the restrictive tropes of Black womanhood—desiring instead an identity imbued with the refinement, mystique, and historical depth often ascribed to the Orient in Western imagination. Yet, this aesthetic strategy, rather than liberating her, merely reinforces her status as an object of othering, exposing the limits of cultural appropriation as a means of self-definition.

Larsen’s novel simultaneously critiques the paradox of Western engagements with the Orient: while white characters collect and display Asian objects as markers of erudition and cosmopolitan taste, their underlying racial prejudices remain unshaken. Helga, too, unwittingly participates in this dynamic, instrumentalizing Oriental objects in her search for an alternative self, only to find that the structures of racial exclusion remain impermeable. Her tragedy thus reveals the hollowness of aesthetic hybridity within a system that fetishizes the exotic yet refuses to dismantle racial hierarchies. By interrogating Quicksand through a polycultural framework, this study underscores the novel’s prescient critique of ornamental diversity and its insistence on a more profound reckoning with cultural hybridity, racial identity, and the inescapable weight of historical legacies.

Dubbed the “Black Venus” of the “Roaring Twenties” and the Jazz Age, American-born black female performer Josephine Baker made her fame as an icon of black cultural production in Paris via the bold presentation of her racialized and sexualized bodily performances such as the banana dance. Although she never gained the equivalent reputation in the United States, Baker’s Parisian career allowed her to subvert Western ideals and stereotypes of Black womanhood by simultaneously embracing, exaggerating, and satirizing the exoticized tropes projected onto her as a Black woman performer. Her self-styled “raced femininity” utilized body, movement, and theatricality to challenge exoticizing narratives, performing the desired “exotic” and “erotic” on the variety stage under the colonial “othering” gaze while showcasing Black female creative autonomy and ingenuity in the context of black transnationalism. Through an analysis of her sensational performances in 1920s and 1930s Paris, this paper explores how Baker deployed her body and stagecraft to challenge racial and gender norms, using her transatlantic celebrity as a platform to critique and redefine conceptions of Black femininity. Positioning Baker’s transnational performances parallel to her peers, vaudeville blueswomen active in 1920s America, where she was denied, this paper contends that Baker’s embodied performance of race and gender in a European setting exemplifies how Black women in the early 20th century used transnational stages to carve out new spaces for agency and self-expression that transcended geographic and social boundaries. Through the strategical use of performance as a means to craft self-determined narratives, Josephine Baker’s transnational performances resonate as dynamic expressions of Black artistic agency, racial identity, and gendered self-fashioning.

The White-Snake Lady and Lamia are two highly responsive mythical and legendary images of metamorphosis and romantic love, but they display signifi- cant differences in their physical transformation and subjectivity construction. Both serpent bodies suffer the same physical and metaphorical dilemma of being de- famed as seductive and obscene. However, due to the White-Snake Lady’s physical transformation, she has achieved not only a human body, but also a human ethical consciousness and female subjectivity. By contrast, Lamia, with similar storylines and dramatic conflicts, fails in the pursuit of human identity with her never-sub- siding serpent obscenity. While the White-Snake Lady remains the protagonist of her legend, Lamia in her myth is at most a foil for the male figures representing rational power and temperance. The two legends of love, with highly similar plots, represent a fundamental difference in Eastern and Western perspectives toward love themes, with the Eastern myth focusing on doomed marriage and feudal ethical codes, and the Western version centering on such dualities as sensibility and ratio- nality, desire and restraint.