Modernism and Race

Modernism and Race PDF Author: Len Platt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139500252
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
The 'transnational' turn has transformed modernist studies, challenging Western authority over modernism and positioning race and racial theories at the very centre of how we now understand modern literature. Modernism and Race examines relationships between racial typologies and literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing on fin de siécle versions of anthropology, sociology, political science, linguistics and biology. Collectively, these essays interrogate the anxieties and desires that are expressed in, or projected onto, racialized figures. They include new outlines of how the critical field has developed, revaluations of canonical modernist figures like James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford and Wyndham Lewis, and accounts of writers often positioned at the margins of modernism, such as Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay and the Holocaust writers Solomon Perel and Gisella Perl. This collection by leading scholars of modernism will make an important contribution to a growing field.

Modernism and Race

Modernism and Race PDF Author: Len Platt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139500252
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Get Book Here

Book Description
The 'transnational' turn has transformed modernist studies, challenging Western authority over modernism and positioning race and racial theories at the very centre of how we now understand modern literature. Modernism and Race examines relationships between racial typologies and literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing on fin de siécle versions of anthropology, sociology, political science, linguistics and biology. Collectively, these essays interrogate the anxieties and desires that are expressed in, or projected onto, racialized figures. They include new outlines of how the critical field has developed, revaluations of canonical modernist figures like James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford and Wyndham Lewis, and accounts of writers often positioned at the margins of modernism, such as Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay and the Holocaust writers Solomon Perel and Gisella Perl. This collection by leading scholars of modernism will make an important contribution to a growing field.

Race and the Modernist Imagination

Race and the Modernist Imagination PDF Author: Urmila Seshagiri
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801448218
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
In addition to her readings of a fascinating array of works---The Picture of Dorian Gray, Heart of Darkness --

Geomodernisms

Geomodernisms PDF Author: Laura Doyle
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253217783
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Modernism as a global phenomenon is the focus of the essays gathered in this book. The term "geomodernisms" indicates their subjects' continuity with and divergence from commonly understood notions of modernism. The contributors consider modernism as it was expressed in the non-Western world; the contradictions at the heart of modernization (in revolutionary and nationalist settings, and with respect to race and nativism); and modernism's imagined geographies, "pyschogeographies" of distance and desire as viewed by the subaltern, the caste-bound, the racially mixed, the gender-determined.

Making Race

Making Race PDF Author: Jacqueline Francis
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295804335
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Malvin Gray Johnson, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Max Weber were three New York City artists whose work was popularly assigned to the category of "racial art" in the interwar years of the twentieth century. The term was widely used by critics and the public at the time, and was an unexamined, unquestioned category for the work of non-whites (such as Johnson, an African American), non-Westerners (such as Kuniyoshi, a Japanese-born American), and ethnicized non-Christians (such as Weber, a Russian-born Jewish American). The discourse on racial art is a troubling chapter in the history of early American modernism that has not, until now, been sufficiently documented. Jacqueline Francis juxtaposes the work of these three artists in order to consider their understanding of the category and their stylistic responses to the expectations created by it, in the process revealing much about the nature of modernist art practices. Most American audiences in the interwar period disapproved of figural abstraction and held modernist painting in contempt, yet the critics who first expressed appreciation for Johnson, Kuniyoshi, and Weber praised their bright palettes and energetic pictures--and expected to find the residue of the minority artist's heritage in the work itself. Francis explores the flowering of racial art rhetoric in criticism and history published in the 1920s and 1930s, and analyzes its underlying presence in contemporary discussions of artists of color. Making Race is a history of a past phenomenon which has ramifications for the present.

Anti-Imperialist Modernism

Anti-Imperialist Modernism PDF Author: Benjamin Balthaser
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472902555
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Anti-Imperialist Modernism excavates how U.S. cross-border, multi-ethnic anti-imperialist movements at mid-century shaped what we understand as cultural modernism and the historical period of the Great Depression. The book demonstrates how U.S. multiethnic cultural movements, located in political parties, small journals, labor unions, and struggles for racial liberation, helped construct a common sense of international solidarity that critiqued ideas of nationalism and essentialized racial identity. The book thus moves beyond accounts that have tended to view the pre-war “Popular Front” through tropes of national belonging or an abandonment of the cosmopolitanism of previous decades. Impressive archival research brings to light the ways in which a transnational vision of modernism and modernity was fashioned through anti-colonial networks of North/South solidarity. Chapters examine farmworker photographers in California’s central valley, a Nez Perce intellectual traveling to the Soviet Union, imaginations of the Haitian Revolution, the memory of the U.S.–Mexico War, and U.S. radical writers traveling to Cuba. The last chapter examines how the Cold War foreclosed these movements within a nationalist framework, when activists and intellectuals had to suppress the transnational nature of their movements, often rewriting the cultural past to conform to a patriotic narrative of national belonging.

Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body

Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body PDF Author: Kristina Wilson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691213496
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
The first investigation of how race and gender shaped the presentation and marketing of Modernist decor in postwar America In the world of interior design, mid-century Modernism has left an indelible mark still seen and felt today in countless open-concept floor plans and spare, geometric furnishings. Yet despite our continued fascination, we rarely consider how this iconic design sensibility was marketed to the diverse audiences of its era. Examining advice manuals, advertisements in Life and Ebony, furniture, art, and more, Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body offers a powerful new look at how codes of race, gender, and identity influenced—and were influenced by—Modern design and shaped its presentation to consumers. Taking us to the booming suburban landscape of postwar America, Kristina Wilson demonstrates that the ideals defined by popular Modernist furnishings were far from neutral or race-blind. Advertisers offered this aesthetic to White audiences as a solution for keeping dirt and outsiders at bay, an approach that reinforced middle-class White privilege. By contrast, media arenas such as Ebony magazine presented African American readers with an image of Modernism as a style of comfort, security, and social confidence. Wilson shows how etiquette and home decorating manuals served to control women by associating them with the domestic sphere, and she considers how furniture by George Nelson and Charles and Ray Eames, as well as smaller-scale decorative accessories, empowered some users, even while constraining others. A striking counter-narrative to conventional histories of design, Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body unveils fresh perspectives on one of the most distinctive movements in American visual culture.

Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism

Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism PDF Author: Greg Forter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139501240
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
American modernist writers' engagement with changing ideas of gender and race often took the form of a struggle against increasingly inflexible categories. Greg Forter interprets modernism as an effort to mourn a form of white manhood that fused the 'masculine' with the 'feminine'. He argues that modernists were engaged in a poignant yet deeply conflicted effort to hold on to socially 'feminine' and racially marked aspects of identity, qualities that the new social order encouraged them to disparage. Examining works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and Willa Cather, Forter shows how these writers shared an ambivalence toward the feminine and an unease over existing racial categories that made it difficult for them to work through the loss of the masculinity they mourned. Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism offers a bold reading of canonical modernism in the United States.

Modernity in Black and White

Modernity in Black and White PDF Author: Rafael Cardoso
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108612016
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Modernity in Black and White provides a groundbreaking account of modern art and modernism in Brazil. Departing from previous accounts, mostly restricted to the elite arenas of literature, fine art and architecture, the book situates cultural debates within the wider currents of Brazilian life. From the rise of the first favelas, in the 1890s and 1900s, to the creation of samba and modern carnival, over the 1910s and 1920s, and tracking the expansion of mass media and graphic design, into the 1930s and 1940s, it foregrounds aspects of urban popular culture that have been systematically overlooked. Against this backdrop, Cardoso provides a radical re-reading of Antropofagia and other modernist currents, locating them within a broader field of cultural modernization. Combining extensive research with close readings of a range of visual cultural production, the volume brings to light a vast archive of art and images, all but unknown outside Brazil.

Race, Nationalism and the State in British and American Modernism

Race, Nationalism and the State in British and American Modernism PDF Author: Patricia E. Chu
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139461125
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 8

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Book Description
Twentieth-century authors were profoundly influenced by changes in the way nations and states governed their citizens. The development of state administrative technologies allowed Western states to identify, track and regulate their populations in unprecedented ways. Patricia E. Chu argues that innovations of form and style developed by Anglo-American modernist writers chart anxieties about personal freedom in the face of increasing governmental controls. Chu examines a diverse set of texts and films, including works by T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Zora Neale Hurston and others, to explore how modernists perceived their work and their identities in relation to state power. Additionally, she sheds light on modernists' ideas about race, colonialism and the postcolonial, as race came increasingly to be seen as a political and governmental construct. This book offers a powerful critique of key themes for scholars of modernism, American literature and twentieth-century literature.

Creative Composites

Creative Composites PDF Author: Lauren Kroiz
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520272498
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
“Creative Composites provides an intelligent, rigorous account of several under-examined figures who gathered around the photographer Alfred Stieglitz and played important roles in the first American avant-garde. Drawing on rich archival sources, Lauren Kroiz revisits the cultural debates of the period and constructs an intricate and convincing comparative analysis of the role that gender, race and ethnicity, and cultural nationalism played in the construction of American modernism. This important historical and interpretive text represents a much-needed contribution not only to the history of American art but also to American social and cultural history.”—Marcia Brennan, author of Curating Consciousness: Mysticism and the Modern Museum “Describing the associations between immigrant critics and artists enmeshed in the New York art world in the early twentieth century, Kroiz skillfully demonstrates that American modernism reached beyond its European influences and was a deeply hybrid enterprise with multiple, global, and overlapping roots. Kroiz is sure-footed when seriously addressing works of art and marvelous at working through the issues around the ethnic identities of many of the key figures. Illuminating a crucial and oft-overlooked aspect of the history of American modernism—this peripatetic and shifting multiculturalism—Creative Composites is a timely, deeply researched text that highlights the wealth of mixed ancestry in our cultural heritage.”—Jessica May, author of American Modern: Documentary Photography by Abbott, Evans, and Bourke-White