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Traditionally, literary critics have turned to the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) to analyze literature from a social scientific (specifically an anthropological) perspective, but this chapter illustrates the greater suitability of sociobiology when considering the textual rendition of social dynamics within and between localized populations (or demes). Sociobiologists who agree with the concept of multilevel selection (MLS), the notion that is accepted throughout the following discussion, focus on societal processes and institutions, social constitutions and behavior, and individual intelligence and attendant ecologies to provide an altogether more scientific approach to the subject of demes than Lévi-Strauss affords.¹ As delineated by Nella Larsen (1891–1964) in Passing (1929), the social dynamics resulting from the mass migration of African Americans from the southern states to Harlem between World War I and the Depression offers a plentiful resource for consideration in this regard, enabling the critic to trace Larsen's exploration of the social and psychological projections associated with the group-bound habitation of localized space.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230391819_7

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