rdf-syntax-grammar
mods:
  schema location: http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
  title info:
    title: Modernism and the Middle Passage
  name:
    name part: Winkiel, Laura A.
    role:
      role term: creator
    role:
      role term: author.
  type of resource: text
  genre: bibliography
  origin info:
    place:
      place term: nyu
    date issued: 2025
    copyright date: 2025
    issuance: monographic
  language:
    language term: eng
  physical description:
    form: print
    extent: xii, 301 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
  abstract: 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 Beyond finding metaphors and historical references to the slave trade in modernist literary texts, Winkiel emphasizes modernist fiction's speculative elements, the creative unleashing of new, utopian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.
  note: Laura Winkiel.
  note: Includes bibliographical references and index.
  subject:
    topic: Literature, Modern
    temporal: 20th century
    topic: History and criticism
  subject:
    topic: Literature
    topic: Black authors
    topic: History and criticism
  subject:
    topic: American literature
    topic: African American authors
    topic: History and criticism
  subject:
    topic: Slavery in literature
  subject:
    topic: Other (Philosophy) in literature
  subject:
    topic: Modernism (Literature)
  classification: PN771 .W585 2025
  classification: 809.9112
  related item:
    title info:
      title: Modernist latitudes
  identifier: 9780231217248
  identifier: 0231217242
  identifier: 9780231217255
  identifier: 0231217250
  identifier: 9780231561631
  identifier: 2025011706
  record info:
    record content source: DLC
    record creation date: 250514
    record change date: 20251015143403.3
    record identifier: in00005665603