By James Smethurst
ISBN-10: 0807834637
ISBN-13: 9780807834633
ISBN-10: 0807871850
ISBN-13: 9780807871850
The interval among 1880 and 1918, on the finish of which Jim Crow was once firmly validated and the good Migration of African american citizens was once good lower than method, used to be now not the nadir for black tradition, James Smethurst finds, yet in its place a time of profound reaction from African American intellectuals. The African American Roots of Modernism explores how the Jim Crow procedure brought on major creative and highbrow responses from African American writers, deeply marking the beginnings of literary modernism and, eventually, notions of yankee modernity.In making a choice on the Jim Crow interval with the arrival of modernity, Smethurst upsets the generic evaluation of the Harlem Renaissance because the first nationally major black arts circulation, displaying how artists reacted to Jim Crow with migration narratives, poetry concerning the black adventure, black functionality of pop culture kinds, and extra. Smethurst introduces a complete solid of characters, together with understudied figures akin to William Stanley Braithwaite and Fenton Johnson, and extra wide-spread authors equivalent to Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and James Weldon Johnson. through contemplating the legacy of writers and artists energetic among the top of Reconstruction and the increase of the Harlem Renaissance, Smethurst illuminates their impression at the black and white U.S. modernists who undefined.
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Additional resources for The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture)
Sample text
Modernism from the verse of T. S. Eliot to Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts. Chapter 2 traces the development of the trope of the black Civil War soldier, particularly those members of the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth who led the assault on Battery Wagner during the Civil War (a unit prominently memorialized in the twentieth century by the 1989 movie Glory and revived as part of the Massachusetts National Guard by Governor Deval Patrick in 2009). The trope was used by black writers, most notably and successfully Paul Laurence Dunbar, to engage both the Reconstruction answer and the Jim Crow answer to the question of how the modern United States, especially the New South, would be ordered.
INTRODUCTION | 19 The poetry invoking the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth and the black Civil War soldiers is something of a departure from the much-discussed narratives of literacy and freedom. Tropes of freedom and literacy often appear in these poems. But generally, as in Dunbar’s early work, there is a transcending of both categories: it is citizenship that these soldiers have earned with their blood, not simply freedom (which quite a few could be said to have possessed as they were already legally “free” in many, if not most, cases), and it is manhood, not literacy, which they have attained through sacrifice in the cause of a divinely sanctioned civic duty.
Similarly, they are clearly not opposed to literacy (they are poems, after all) but are implicitly opposed to a concept of “literacy” that might serve as a bar to African American citizenship—as such a concept did in fact. The symbolic geography of these poems bridged that of the slave narratives and the early black migration narratives. If the protagonists of the slave narratives ascended North to freedom, the soldiers of the Fifty-fourth “returned” to the South (though many were seeing it for the first time) heroically and, ultimately, triumphantly.
The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture) by James Smethurst
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