Fetishizing Blackness in the Harlem Renaissance

This article argues that racial fetishism played an important but undertheorized role in much Black modernist literature, especially literature critical of the early twentieth-century politics of racial uplift. It reads two Harlem Renaissance texts, Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) and Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928), alongside Carl Van Vechten's controversially fetishistic novel Nigger Heaven (1926) in order to complicate received understandings of both Black agency and racial fetishism. More concretely, it suggests that Black modernist authors used the figure of the racial fetish to rethink Black agency not as an all-or-nothing phenomenon but as something more partial, compromised, and graduated.