By the early twentieth century, a handful of students of African descent were attending the Academia de San Alejandro. Some of them managed to continue their studies in Europe, frequently with fellowships from national and local institutions. The so-called sociedades de color – clubs and mutual aid societies organized by people of African descent – played key roles in procuring state support for these artists and their careers. By the late 1930s, a small but consolidated group of artists of African descent, including a few women, exhibited regularly in Havana. Several participated in international exhibitions as well. Yet many, indeed most, of these artists are barely remembered today. The rise of the artistic vanguardia (avant-garde) of the 1920s and 1930s depicted their works, which were executed in the academic language, as obsolete and mediocre. As in the early nineteenth century, what the vanguardia described as true – and certainly as new – art was produced mostly by white artists. This is ironic, for much avant-garde art constructed visions of national identity that were centered on Afro-Cuban cultural expressions, to the point that the movement is known as Afrocubanismo in Cuban arts and letters.

This chapter explores the rap debates of philosophical aesthetics, where early academic discourse on rap was at its most active. Rap aestheticians (led by Richard Shusterman) accentuated rap’s nature as an “art form”. The chapter examines the key issues within this debate, including the aesthetic experience of rap, flow (Mtume ya Salaam), the need for public support (and Herbert Grabes’ criticism of this position), and rap’s affinities with the Harlem Renaissance (Marvin Gladney). Rap’s engagement with other cultural practices, like driving and everyday culture, was discussed very early within philosophical aesthetics. Right from the beginning the debate was very international, with many of the authors coming from the Nordic Countries (Esa Sironen, Stefán Snaevarr, Martti Honkanen). It argues that there is still a lot to learn from aesthetic discussions on rap, and these philosophical debates are an interesting historical phenomenon, which rap scholars should know more about.

This chapter examines those moments in African American literature when voices lifted in song sing about money. In particular, it treats these moments as self-reflexive turns enacted in texts from the Harlem Renaissance through the Black Arts Movement, whereby the singing voice both rehearses the tropic interaction between monetary and racial formations commonplace in American literature and destabilizes the homology upon which it depends. The result is an epistemological prehistory to the Afropessimist insistence (or realization) that the libidinal economy of an anti-Black world is an economy without redemption.

Through analysis of the novels of racial passing by six early twentieth-century authors – William Faulkner, Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, Walter Francis White, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Fannie Hurst – this essay explores how whiteness as unmarked norm at once facilitates passing in modern America and complicates narrative representation of it, and how literary modernism informs the authors’ negotiations with the complication. In doing so, the essay focuses on the paradoxical operation of the passer’s “Black-passing-for-white” identity. For, while enabling plot development and dramatization in accordance with passing fiction’s genre conventions, this identity framework inevitably suppresses passing’s unmarked working by making it narratively visible to the reader. The essay demonstrates that the modernist attentiveness to subjectivity – applied to varying degrees of experimentation, from fragmented interior monologue to third-person limited narration – helps the novels to reenact the invisible passing as well as resist essentializing the Black-passing-for-white identity around which their stories revolve.

Rebecca Hall’s 2021 film adaptation of Nella Larsen’s famed Harlem Renaissance novel, Passing (1929), indexes the relevance of interracial passing today. We explore Hall’s film to explain the contemporary appeal of Larsen’s narrative. Larsen’s Passing licenses interpretive possibilities that transcend its immediate moment, even as it seeks to criticize specific historical realities of modern intersectional identity. Hall’s neo-passing narrative of 1920s Black femininity employs cinema to highlight the enduring immobility of the color line and the erotic and social risk of crossing it.

We assess Hall’s adaptation of the two-protagonist structure as it personalizes Larsen’s depiction of racial liminality; consider Hall’s use of cinematography to adapt Larsen’s rhetorical sleight of hand regarding US racial discourses; and discuss the homoerotics of passing in both works. We then contemplate Hall’s casting choices. The final section takes up the conclusion of the two works. Hall resolves some of Larsen’s famous ambiguity, but poignantly showcases the essential instability of the gendered, racialized body in US literature and culture across a century.

Focusing on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this chapter traces some of the aesthetic choices that Black writers have made in order to demonstrate the essay’s capacious formal dimensions for imagining and practicing freedom. Rather than think of freedom as a destination, African American essayists have revised and restructured the form in ways that allow them to document how freedom is practiced continually. In the essays of writers as varied as Anna Julia Cooper, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Amiri Baraka, John Edgar Wideman, Ta-Nahesi Coates, and Ross Gay, reflections on joy, justice, life as art, and self-care unfold freely. From defiance to mournfulness, from exuberance to acrimony, this chapter explores the various moods and modes of Black essayistic writing, identifying certain tendencies that belong to the genealogy of Black writing in the United States.

This chapter analyzes the rich essayistic activity of the Harlem Renaissance (1919–1940). Through the visual arts, music, and literature, many African Americans responded to the changing national and international dynamics of the 1920s as an opportunity to leverage their creative arts and redefine their place within the nation. Poetry and fiction were the literary genres African Americans increasingly employed for these efforts. More ubiquitous was their frequent complement: the essay. Writers like Gwendolyn Bennett, Benjamin Brawley, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, and Eulalie Spence infused the essay with this ethos and positioned it as an equally important genre for chronicling the period. Indeed, it was through the essay that readers in the United States and in other parts of the world encountered rhetorical styles reflecting the racial pride and determination of the “New Negro.” Essays from the period detailing the array of forces and ideas shaping African American life – including migration, racial violence, civil rights, and Pan-Africanism – constitute dynamic narratives combining history, opinion, and critical redress.

This chapter begins with the little magazines of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and ends with contemporary online literary magazines, highlighting the radical changes that have taken place as print yielded to digital culture. Motivated by the contrarian personalities of their founding editors against commercial tastes, small-circulation periodicals prioritized aesthetic experimentation and established themselves as an avant-garde force in the arts. During the twentieth century, literary magazines would become institutionalized and relinquish their financial and intellectual independence. Their avant-garde status, once represented by a collectively upheld editorial persona, would become overshadowed by individual cults of personality around popular writers. Magazines’ social programs would become watered down, and instead writers would make themselves into social actors. The arrival of New Journalism in the 1960s and ’70s radically changed long-form journalism, rendering it more literary. The chapter ends with the contemporary literary magazine ecosystem, showing that what magazines have lost in materiality, they have gained in generic hybridity and global access.

If so much of American poetry from the early twentieth century onward looks to revitalize the genre’s forms and conventions by mining from the national vernacular, then jazz has been both a model for that process and a source of expressive inspiration. This essay looks at the range of American poetic responses to jazz, from the early modernist efforts of poets such as Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Vachel Lindsay, to more contemporary figures like Nathaniel Mackey, Morgan Parker, and Kevin Young. In observing the long shadow that the music has cast on poetic experimentation, this survey also observes variations in identity and perspective and maps the reciprocal relationship between different jazz styles and modern poetics, including the tension between song lyrics and lyric poetry. Ultimately, this essay reveals through a wealth of examples the comprehensive heterogeneity of jazz poetry despite these writers’ shared starting points.

Margaret Bonds’s upbringing and education inculcated in her a profound sense of pride in her racial and familial heritage and an equally profound sense of obligation to “go farther” than those who came before her in using her art for the betterment of the lives of others. Moving from her youth through her years as a struggling musician in New York and Los Angeles during the Depression and World War II, through her ascendance to national and international fame, this chapter traces the development of these themes in her personal philosophy and compositional work over the period ca. 1939–63 in works including the incidental music to Shakespeare in Harlem, The Ballad of the Brown King, and Simon Bore the Cross, leading to their coalescence in The Montgomery Variations (1963–64). The Variations thus emerges as the summit of Bonds’s works centered on the theme of racial justice up to that point.

The Great Migration, which began in the late nineteenth century and witnessed the movement of more than six million Black folk from the agrarian US South to the urban North between 1919 and 1970, and the flourishing of “Black Renaissances” in Harlem, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and other Northern urban centers were the essential soil in which are rooted not only the two works that are the subject of this book, but also the lives and careers of Margaret Bonds, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes. This chapter explores the roles of those two large societal seizings of freedom for the poor and oppressed as the context for Margaret Bonds’s career and the source of her career-long commitment to using her art to uplift what she in 1942 called “our oppressed Race” and work for global equality.

This chapter explores how the African American novel imagined a better world, experimented with form, and reflected the artistic and cultural sophistication of Black people in the twentieth century. It argues that understanding the twentieth-century African American novel in the context of various overlapping liberation movements helps us organize our thinking about the ways in which writers used long fiction to explore the social, political, ideological, and historical realities that informed the time period in which they were writing. Focusing on African American fiction produced within and around several Black liberation movements and historical interregnums – i.e., Post-Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement (BAM), and the post-BAM Toni Morrison era – the chapter examines the nuances and complexities of novelists who used the novel as form to reflect and inspire shared visions of a liberated future.

This chapter begins by claiming that in comparison to its British and French contemporaries, American modernism does not contain a lot of obviously queer texts. That is, American modernism does not represent homosexuality explicitly very often. There are exceptions, of course – Gertrude Stein’s Q.E.D., Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade,” and Charles Henri Ford and Park Tyler’s The Young and the Evil offer three such examples, but same-sex relations are not central subjects in the way that they are in contemporaneous texts such as Marcel Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah, André Gide’s Miracle of the Rose, or Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. This chapter aims to explain this peculiarity and thus to provide a theory of queer American modernism itself by examining two key sites of its production: namely, the Provincetown Theater and the Harlem Renaissance.

Geomodernism insists that we cannot theorize modernist art within a national frame, emphasizing embeddedness and interconnection over isolation. Doing so requires reckoning with how questions of race and citizenship, migration and war, empire and revolution change our assessment of the aesthetics and politics of modernism. I begin with a call for a clearer sense of the relations among geomodernisms, global modernisms, and postcoloniality to suggest that US modernist studies could subtend geomodernist emphasis on place further by harnessing the insights of ethnic and postcolonial studies more fully. The global can neither be assumed as inert fact or impossible aspiration. Drawing on Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death (1926), I argue for a more robust focus on decolonial practice, on border as method, and on the ongoing racial violence of a settler state to highlight the unresolved presence of US empire and extraction in the hemisphere alongside submerged histories of labor migration.

The Machine Age helped usher in the literary experiments of modernism in a very practical sense by increasing international travel and correspondence exponentially in the early twentieth century. This chapter explores the idea of “being American” in Europe by charting the two-way traffic of modernists and avant-gardes across the Atlantic. Drawing on a diverse range of vanguardists (including Djuna Barnes, Gwendolyn Bennett, Bob and Rose Brown, Hart Crane, H. D., T. S. Eliot, James T. Farrell, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Robert McAlmon, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Jean Toomer, and William Carlos Williams), it examines how motifs of technology, popular culture, and racial difference were often read through the lens of American exceptionalism. In both expatriate forums (such as Broom, transition, and various literary salons) and “homegrown” projects (including Contact, Fire!!, and Others magazines), these writers harnessed the nervous energies of the Machine Age to complicate and proliferate, rather than consolidate, modernist canons and formations.

Introductory chapter for book that centers the work, labor, and effort of artists to script and share African American experiences on stage from the nineteenth century to the present day. It provides an overview of the major movements and moments in Black theatre, beginning with sorrow songs in the era of legal captivity to twenty-first-century stagings.

Soyica Diggs Colbert explores the dramas of the Harlem Renaissance, which were usually nurtured in Washington, DC, to reveal how dramatists such as Angelina Weld Grimké, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Willis Richardson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Marita Bonner, among others, created dramas that asserted the “value” of African American life. Writing during a period when not only the lynchings of Black men and women were common but also rarely punished, these artists’ assertion of Black respectability demanded a reassessment and, indeed, a revaluation of Blackness.