Incognitos: Modern Slumming Narratives and the Unmaking of Sexual Identity

Abstract

Though the slumming narrative is a minor literary genre that typically uncovers and classifies urban racial-ethnic and sexual "perversions," "Incognitos" contends that some sexually suspect early-twentieth-century writers---white and Black---manipulated its form to avoid sexual exposure and to challenge developing constructions of sexuality in modern America. Through divergent styles, Progressive-era realists such as Jane Addams and Willa Cather, Afro-Modernist bohemians like Wallace Thurman and Richard Bruce Nugent, and transatlantic Anglo-American Modernists such as Carl Van Vechten and Djuna Barnes renovate a genre traditionally dedicated to sexual surveillance and categorization. Together these writers question the value of an identifiable homosexual identity and subculture while they simultaneously confirm and interrogate developing racial-ethnic identities, thereby illuminating how a minor genre has significant cultural ramifications for developing notions of visibility and invisibility in modern U.S. literary public spheres.