Smith and Hattery explore the outcome of building prisons in rural, economically depressed communities, staffing them with white people who live in and around these communities, filling them with Black and brown bodies from urban areas and then designing the structure of solitary confinement units such that the most private, intimate daily bodily functions take place in very public ways. Hattery and Earl Smith present 'Way Down in the Hole: Race, Intimacy and the Reproduction of Racial Ideologies in Solitary Confinement'īased on hundreds of hours of observation in solitary confinement units and interviews with both those who are incarcerated and those who work in solitary confinement, Way Down in the Hole: Race, Intimacy and the Reproduction of Racial Ideologies in Solitary Confinement, uncovers the ways in which specific structures of solitary confinement, including the close and intimate contact between the incarcerated and the correctional officer, serve as a petri dish that fuels the production and reproduction of white racial resentment. She is temporarily ‘rescued’ by a white uncle who sends her to school, and she eventually secures a job teaching in the prestigious, but to her stifling black school, Naxos, which is dedicated to racial uplift.Angela J. Her mother marries a white man when Helga is a child and bears more children, the result of which is Helga's exclusion from family life. Helga's white Danish mother raised her in the US, after her black American father abandoned the family. Helga believes that she was born out of wedlock, and this early uncertainty over identity markers is repeated in a variety of ways throughout the plot.

Quicksand's narrative encourages a bleeding between spaces and identities as it limns the peripatetic life of Helga Crane.

Passing receives substantially more critical interest than Quicksand, perhaps because of its subject matter, which, through its title, overtly signals its interest in issues of occluded identity, or perhaps because Quicksand's conclusion points so resolutely to the negative, an ironic closure to a text that explores the problematics of racial uplift.

Published originally on its own, it is now available only in a volume with a second novella, Passing. Although it is a flawed text which relies on a series of coincidental encounters and more than a touch of melodrama, it is nevertheless a significant one in relation to questions of transnationalism and identity. Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) is an early twentieth-century novella that offers a contested reading of racial otherness and transatlantic exoticism.

Quicksand by Nella Larsen