This talk considers how Nella Larsen and James Joyce, modernist authors rarely put into conversation with one another, critiqued reigning ideologies of race and nationhood via complementary formal methods. Joyce’s work often offered a scathing critique of colonialism, but his ambivalence to the Celtic Revival—and the blind patriotism this encouraged—finds an analogue in Larsen’s relationship to the tenets of “racial uplift.” Her novel Quicksand (1928) is unafraid to query the terms of its legibility, with a heroine that responds to demands she be ‘representative’ by fleeing all available subject positions. Moments of textual equivocation and withholding—what I call a subversive blankness—refuse monolithic conceptions of race, place and gender, as they do in the final episode of Joyce’s Ulysses. By focusing on depictions of interiority and the built environment, this talk suggests that literary “Blackness” and “Irishness” have much to say to one another, and that this was particularly so in a historical moment which saw both groups dealing with disillusion and disenfranchisement, at times from the very places (Dublin, Harlem) that sustained their art.

Zoë Henry is a writer and doctoral candidate in English at Indiana University, where she researches global modernism and Black studies. Her dissertation-in-progress examines an interracial modernist archive of novels, poems and dances, arguing that women figures of the twentieth century negotiated new forms of urban and racial visibility by remaining ‘private in public,’ at once performing and withholding their inner workings across the liminal spaces of the metropolis. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Virginia Woolf Miscellany, Modernism/modernity Print Plus, and the edited collection Teaching Joyce in the 21st Century. She received her BA from Brown University, and her public-facing writing has been featured in venues such as Slate, HuffPost, Insider and CNBC.

 Twitter: @ZoeLaHenry

Website: www.zoelhenry.com