Jim Crow Modernism

The "problem of the twentieth century" was one of the most important factors in the development of American modernism. W. E. B. Du Bois, of course, identified that problem as "the color line" a phrase for the broad array of laws and practices that promulgated legal segregation, cultural separation, and racial antagonism in the US from the end of Reconstruction through the Civil Rights era. A more familiar name, borrowed from the popular tradition of blackface minstrelsy, personified this elusive but ever-present racial regime: Jim Crow. Taking as its starting point the contemporaneity of the Jim Crow era and the modernist era in art and culture, Jim Crow Modernism explores how these phenomena informed one another, and how artists and thinkers on both sides of the color line worked in and against the "separate but equal" landscape and the organizing logic of Jim Crow.

This collection of new essays by prominent scholars in several fields-from American literary studies to film, media, art history, politics, and performance-provides a broad and deep analysis of this vital aspect of modern cultural history. Contributors address well known modernist figures like T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, and Wallace Thurman, as well as many others, from the Jamaican-American writer Claude McKay to the Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi to the Afro-Latino writer Piri Thomas, whose peripatetic lives and careers initiated them into far-ranging traditions and contexts. At the same time, Jim Crow Modernism reaches well beyond the segregated US South to examine national and global spaces, networks, and migrations, from New York and Los Angeles to the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, and Asia.