{"id":45046,"date":"2016-01-11T01:56:47","date_gmt":"2016-01-11T01:56:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=45046"},"modified":"2016-01-11T01:56:47","modified_gmt":"2016-01-11T01:56:47","slug":"quicksand-and-passing-nella-larsen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=45046","title":{"rendered":"Quicksand and Passing \u2013 Nella Larsen"},"content":{"rendered":"

Quicksand<\/strong> and <\/strong><\/em>Passing<\/strong> \u2013 Nella Larsen<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Writes of Woman: Reviews of books by female writers<\/a>
\n2015-11-24<\/p>\n

Naomi Frisby<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Quicksand<\/a><\/em> and Passing<\/em><\/a> are two novellas packaged together and reissued by Serpent\u2019s Tale in the UK<\/a>. They both share the key theme of being a woman of colour in America early in the twentieth century but the two pieces explore ideas around this in different ways.<\/p>\n

Helga Crane is twenty-three and a teacher at Naxos, \u2018the finest school for Negroes anywhere in the country\u2019. Helga\u2019s out of favour at the school and urgently wishes to leave despite her engagement to a colleague. Her fianc\u00e9 has \u2018naturalized\u2019, fitting into the school and its values. Helga, however, \u2018\u2026could neither conform, nor be happy in her unconformity\u2019. She\u2019s failed to impress his family too:<\/p>\n

Negro society, she had learned, was as complicated and as rigid in its ramifications as the highest strata of white society. If you couldn\u2019t prove your ancestry and connections, you were tolerated, but you didn\u2019t \u201cbelong\u201d. You could be queer, or even attractive, or bad, or brilliant, or even love beauty and such nonsense if you were a Rankin, or a Leslie, or a Scoville; in other words, if you had a family. But if you were just plain Helga Crane, of whom nobody has ever heard, it was presumptuous of you to be anything but inconspicuous and conformable…<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Quicksand and Passing \u2013 Nella Larsen The Writes of Woman: Reviews of books by female writers 2015-11-24 Naomi Frisby Quicksand and Passing are two novellas packaged together and reissued by Serpent\u2019s Tale in the UK. They both share the key theme of being a woman of colour in America early in the twentieth century but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,1196,8,6462,20],"tags":[22580,87,22582,22581],"class_list":["post-45046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-naomi-frisby","tag-nella-larsen","tag-the-writes-of-woman","tag-the-writes-of-woman-reviews-of-books-by-female-writers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45046"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45047,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45046\/revisions\/45047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}