Modernism and the Middle Passage /
Modernism with its emphasis on the "new" combined with the racist views of many of its innovators has rarely, if ever, been acknowledged as confronting the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade. Even much of the scholarship focused on Black authors from the period focus on their writing on th...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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New York :
Columbia University Press,
[2025].
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| Series: | Modernist latitudes.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | Modernism with its emphasis on the "new" combined with the racist views of many of its innovators has rarely, if ever, been acknowledged as confronting the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade. Even much of the scholarship focused on Black authors from the period focus on their writing on the urban experience. In Modernism and the Middle Passage, Laura Winkiel examines how a range of modernist writers drew on the history of Atlantic trade slavery to critique and open new ways of thinking about the legacy of colonialism and Western ideas of the individual. Black writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and Claude McKay took inspiration from the ecology of the ocean and African animism to rethink and challenge Western constructions and philosophies of the self. Meanwhile, white women writers, such as Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys, while limited in their critique of racism, viewed the history of the slave trade as part of an imperial system that oppressed women and queerness. In analyzing the works of these writers as well as some of their contemporary interlocutors including Marlon James, Zadie Smith and Jamaica Kincaid, Winkiel discusses authors' engagement with the explosion of public misogyny and sexual violence aimed at British and US women agitating for citizenship, the mass mutilations during the First World War, the increased racist and gendered violence of anti-Blackness, antisemitism and other forms of bigotry. Beyond finding metaphors and historical references to the slave trade in modernist literary texts, Winkiel emphasizes modernist fiction's speculative elements, the creative unleashing of new, utopian possibilities, as a constructive project concerned with building new spaces and establishing new relationalities. |
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| Physical Description: | xii, 301 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780231217248 0231217242 9780231217255 0231217250 |