Speculative Spectators: Side-Eyeing Western Empiricism from Nella Larsen to Raven Leilani

Black women writers have innovated the figure of the “speculative spectator,” a thoughtful watcher whose gazes generate degrees of critique and self-knowledge within constraint. While speculation in literature often signifies a departure from reality, here it signifies an interrogation of Western claims about reality, truth, and subjectivity that have undergirded empiricist visual observation since the Italian High Renaissance. This article turns to Nella Larsen as an early and significant visual theorist who employs fiction to theorize seeing during the Harlem Renaissance as a period of amplified visibility for Black people in the United States. I establish Larsen's Quicksand (1928) and its protagonist Helga Crane as the originators of the figure of the speculative spectator, arguing that this figure provides an early template for contemporary reimaginings of encounters between portrait artist and object of portraiture in Black women's literature. From Nella Larsen's Helga in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s to Raven Leilani's Edie in what Kaitlyn Greenidge calls the “publishing renaissance” of the 2020s, speculative spectators side-eye the anti-Black and misogynist assumptions conditioning the portraiture encounter as part of a broader pursuit of desire and self-definition. They interrogate structures of racialized and gendered legibility during periods of significant Black cultural production, when the terms of Western empiricist knowledge tend to resurface through the historiographical label of “renaissances.” Asserting Black women's range of inventive thought across a century through practices of visual observation, speculative spectators open up critical space at the limits of a Western theoretical tradition that defines inventive knowledge producers as not-Black and not-woman.