Description: This book examines groundbreaking works by three African American women whose writings expose the economic, political, and social factors that sustained race violence in post-Reconstruction United States. Their works demonstrate that fixed representations -- of race, gender, and class -- are a prerequisite of tolerated interracial and intraracial violence. Ida B. Wells-Barnett's works challenge the "lynching narrative" that preceded physical lynchings in the late nineteenth century, and they reveal that this violence depended upon the personal and political silence of all women. Angelina Weld Grimke's short stories critique class-based strategies of Negro advancement as they expand conventional conceptions of race violence beyond physical torture. Nella Larsen's novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) explore the problems of cultural fixity and its contribution to black women's intellectual confinement. These writers' examination of the potential violence of fixed representations informs later acts of cultural expression as well as future liberation struggles.

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