ABSTRACT
The second part of Pragmatism and Poetic Agency discusses the link between pragmatism, race, and poetic agency. It concentrates on two female writers of the Harlem Renaissance: Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston. This chapter discusses Larsen’s female bildungsroman, Quicksand (1928). The protagonist of this novel is a black female intellectual, Helga Crane, who is also a dandy. The author’s primary focus is on the fact that Larsen’s text offers a rare portrait of a female black dandy. While strong poets and postmetaphysical redescribers such as Nietzsche and Rorty do not draw attention to the limitations of self-creation for nonwhite intellectuals, Quicksand demonstrates that a female black dandy’s attempt to achieve autonomy and develop her own idiosyncratic style and vocabulary has to confront seemingly insurmountable barriers. The chapter develops the argument that female black dandyism is a dissonant and hybrid practice, which, in an unpredictable manner, brings together sartorial performativity, poetic sensibility, aesthetic form, and politics. As such, female black dandyism, as a form of poetic agency, urges one to rethink and question the ideas of radical postmetaphysicians such as Nietzsche and Rorty. What this boils down to is that African-American creative agency in Larsen’s novel forces one to develop a different understanding of the immanence and contingency of creative praxis.
