Portraits of the New Negro Woman

Cherene Sherrard-Johnson is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she teaches nineteenth and twentieth-century American and African-American literature, cultural studies, and feminist theory.

This beautifully written book locates artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance squarely within Modernism and puts women at the center of this project . . . the scholarship is impeccable and the work as a whole is brilliantly organized. - Maureen E. Honey (editor of Shadowed Dreams: Women's Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance) This beautifully written book locates artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance squarely within Modernism and puts women at the center of this project . . . the scholarship is impeccable and the work as a whole is brilliantly organized. - Maureen E. Honey (editor of Shadowed Dreams: Women's Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance) Provocative and intriguing. This is a particularly rich book. Sherrard-Johnson moves deftly through literary and visual sources and offers fascinating and detailed readings of each. It offers a provocative methodology as well; the conversational structure enables scholars and students alike to challenge the confines of literary and visual study, as it enables a discussion of a shared and ambiguous grammar of race, gender, and sexuality that transcends medium. (Legacy)

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsPrefaceIntroduction: The Iconography of the MulattaChapter 1. "A Plea for Color": Nella Larsen's Textual Tableaux​Chapter 2. Jessie Fauset's New Negro Woman Artist and the Passing Market​Chapter 3. "Black Beauty Betrayed": The Modernist Mulaata in Black and White​Chapter 4. The Geography of the Mulatta in Jean Toomer's Cane​Chapter 5. Redressing the New Negro WomanNotesBibliographyIndex