Book contents
- The Cambridge History of American Modernism
- The Cambridge History of American Modernism
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I Methodologies
- Part II Forms, Genre, and Media
- Part III Situating US Modernism
- 25 War
- 26 Modernism, Personality, and the Racialized State
- 27 Modernism of the Streets
- 28 Late Modernism
- 29 Transnational Circuits and Homemade Machines
- 30 The American Metropolis
- 31 Hemispheric Modernisms, Imperial Modernisms
- 32 Southern Modernism
- 33 Transpacific Modernism
- 34 Indigenous Modernism
- 35 Sketching the Terrain of African American Modernism
- 36 The New Woman and American Modernism
- 37 Celebrity and American Modernism
- Select Bibliography
- Index
35 - Sketching the Terrain of African American Modernism
from Part III - Situating US Modernism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 July 2023
- The Cambridge History of American Modernism
- The Cambridge History of American Modernism
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I Methodologies
- Part II Forms, Genre, and Media
- Part III Situating US Modernism
- 25 War
- 26 Modernism, Personality, and the Racialized State
- 27 Modernism of the Streets
- 28 Late Modernism
- 29 Transnational Circuits and Homemade Machines
- 30 The American Metropolis
- 31 Hemispheric Modernisms, Imperial Modernisms
- 32 Southern Modernism
- 33 Transpacific Modernism
- 34 Indigenous Modernism
- 35 Sketching the Terrain of African American Modernism
- 36 The New Woman and American Modernism
- 37 Celebrity and American Modernism
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter traces the evolution of the sketch or narrative fragment throughout the modernist era. Scholars of Black print culture have argued that the sketch is the predominant form of nineteenth-century Black writing. The unfinished quality of the sketch resonates with ongoing Black freedom struggles that persist from Reconstruction through the interwar period – temporal parameters that mark African American modernist writing. Through examination of authors from select flashpoints at the beginning, middle, and end of the era, this chapter illustrates how African American modernists transformed genres popularized during the late nineteenth century while gesturing toward the future. Turning to Jean Toomer’s Cane, one of the era’s most definitive Afro-modernist creations, I connect threads between the anti-lynching discourse featured in Frances E. W. Harper’s and Ida B. Well’s writings with Toomer’s genre-bending collection of poetry, prose, and dramatic sketches. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Gwendolyn Brooks’ novelette Maud Martha: a “late” modernist text.
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- Information
- The Cambridge History of American Modernism , pp. 591 - 608Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023