Postscript

Abstract Reflecting on the work of the special issue “The Modernist Face in/as World Literature,” this essay contemplates the deflationary logic of reading the modernist face – and the modernist literary text – as acts of interpretation defeated by the very qualities of dynamism that induce them. It does so via an original account of the face in Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand and the widely circulated photographic portraits of Larsen made by James Latimer Allen and Carl Van Vechten in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Engaging the politics and effects of Larsen’s literary celebrity in her time and in the present, I argue that Larsen’s photographic faces, like the face of her protagonist Helga Crane in Quicksand , both activate and disrupt impulses toward racial differentiation and fetishization. The modernist face/text is thus framed as an object that refuses to grant the knowledge – narrative, ideological, or personal – it seems to proffer.