This chapter reconsiders modernism as a cultural movement from below generated by the rise of a new left-wing, working-class, and radical gathering of writers inspired by world events from the Russian Revolution to the surge of trade unionism. The chapter puts into conversation scholarship on radical American writing with writings on African American and feminist modernisms. The chapter considers what was unique about the form and content of modernist experiment by writers with openly progressive and radical political commitments.

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.

This essay examines the conditions of African American modernism in the twenty-first century. How does a new black modernism differ from an earlier black modernist period commonly associated with the New Negro Movement of the 1920s? Moving briefly from Richard Bruce Nugent’s 1926 short story, “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” to two significant portrayals of a new black modernism by the visual artist Glenn Ligon and the poet Claudia Rankine, the essay considers how Ligon’s text-based paintings and Rankine’s poetry in Citizen play with the dynamic of image and text that has been so productive for black modernism. In particular, Rankine’s use of Ligon’s text-based paintings in Citizen helps the poet depict the subtle, subjective shift that occurs when difference, however defined, “enters the American landscape.”