26 - Modernism, Personality, and the Racialized State

Summary

This chapter shows that political accounts of literature in the first half of the twentieth century are often distinguished by what theorists have called “anti-state phobia,” and thus have occluded productive similarities between the concepts of both “modernism” and “state.” By drawing upon poetry, fiction, drama, and theory by Carlos Bulosan, John Dos Passos, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Ezra Pound, and others, the chapter looks at ways in which state practices of domestic and international violence resonate with accounts of personality and impersonality. These accounts include the racially stratified, putative impersonality of states, and the demonstrably systematic attempts to render non-white persons politically invisible, if not extinct. The chapter concludes by calling for critics to reckon with the complexities of state and anti-state practices, as well as the unequal distribution of “personality” along racial lines that has distinguished both the history of the state and the history of modernism.