Title: From “Black/White” to Cosmopolitanism: A Study of Limits in Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun

Abstract: Jessie Fauset, an important guide to the Harlem Renaissance, should have been a landmark in the history of African-American literature, but has been overlooked long due to her sentimental Victorian style. Based on Angela’s experience of transgression, this article will analyze the multiple limits in Plum Bun, following the “disappearance” of racial limits, the reconstruction of cognitive limits and the generation of limits of identity, to explore the political and social value of the novel. Through the representation of Angela’s transgression, Fauset attempts to deny that transgression is a dichotomic choice of “rejecting the former and affirming the latter.” She regards Angela as a black as well as a member of the cultural and emotional community of humanity, which expresses her attempt to construct a new communal framework of cosmopolitanism.

Keywords: Plum Bun, Jessie Fauset, limits, cosmopolitism, Harlem Renaissance

Author: Dingying Wang, Ph.D. Candidate, School of Foreign Languages, Beihang University, Beijing, China.