Introduction

In her account of a Harlem jazz club in Quicksand, Nella Larsen presents the dancing African Americans in striking visual terms. She describes a sliding spectrum of colours, a ‘moving mosaic’, which is both imbued with possibility, as suggested by a dynamism that undercuts strict racial categorization, and fraught with the danger of self-obliteration (Larsen 1995, 60). Larsen’s use of collagelike imagery to highlight the complexity of race is by no means unique: this trope also features in the writings of Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, George Schuyler and Jean Toomer, to name only a few. Furthermore, a number of aesthetic statements from the Harlem Renaissance mark collage, or the juxtaposition of distinctive cultural pieces, as a significant form.1 The challenge for this study is to interpret the historical, aesthetic and political burdens of these recurring patterns.