Problems in Literary Study: Black Modernisms

A foundational moment in the history of European modernism in the twentieth century was the discovery of the world of Black others and the use of Blackness as a mechanism for maintaining and sustaining a new style of art. At about the same time, Black writers and artists adopted modernism as the aesthetic that would represent Black subjectivity in a world defined by racial violence. This course has two aims: to explore how black writers and artists in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean responded to high modernism's exoticism and to explore how they adopted and transformed the aesthetic ideology of global modernism.