“A QUEER INDEFINITE WAY”: Richard Bruce Nugent, Nella Larsen, and New Negro Indeterminacy

The Harlem Renaissance, or the New Negro Movement, of the 1920s and 1930s has become a significant site for examining Black same-sex desire and gender non-conformity. The critical community has begun to appreciate how the New Negro is also often the “Queer” Negro. However, it is not only non-normative expressions of desire that make possible this assessment. Throughout the work of the period, there is a sustained questioning of the normative structures of desire that shape Black subjectivity as well as the assumed parameters of this re-defined identity space. At the precise moment that there is a declaration of the New Negro, there are anxieties about the means for articulating Black embodiment. This chapter uses the paradigms of Black queer studies and Queer of Color Critique (QOCC) to explore the cautious embracing of the trope of the New Negro in Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” (1926) and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928). The QOCC perspective illuminates how Nugent and Larsen show how gender ideologies undergird the articulation of the New Negro and how ideological critique is a defining component of Black modernism.