Race in the Modernism/modernity Archives: The Harlem Renaissance and Beyond

We are pleased to be able to share here a selection of articles on race and modernism from past print issues of Modernism/modernity. Reflecting the history of the journal, many of these focus on the Harlem Renaissance, but we’ve also included articles on the Caribbean and Brazil as well as a more broadly comparative treatment of race, Simon Gikandi’s classic “Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference,” and a pair of pieces on the comparatively later works of Gordon Parks and Richard Wright.

These articles are now open access and will remain available through Print Plus. We hope that this sample will inspire new scholarship and encourage those with Project Muse access to further explore the history of the journal and the work of these important scholars. More importantly, though, we would like to encourage everyone to share widely, particularly with those who might not ordinarily have access to Project Muse—for example, secondary school teachers or general interest readers—who may be especially interested in the some of the overview pieces and the bibliography connected to the set of “Questionnaire Responses.”

Finally, we mean this as clear signal to our readers and contributors that this is an aspect of the journal’s past that will be more prominent and more robust in the future.

The coeditors would like to express their gratitude to Johns Hopkins University Press for allowing such a substantial amount of material to be made open access.

“In Conversation: The Harlem Renaissance and the New Modernist Studies”
Adam McKible and Suzanne W. Churchill

“Questionnaire Responses” with Bibliography
Houston A. Baker, Emily Bernard, Anne E. Carroll, Barbara Foley, Maureen Honey, George Hutchinson, William J. Maxwell, Venetria K. Patton, Kathleen Pfeiffer, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, James Smethurst, Michael Soto, Cary D. Wintz

“The New Harlem Renaissance Studies”
David Chinitz

“The Disinterested and Fine: New Negro Renaissance Poetry and the Racial Formation of Modernist Studies”
Michael Bibby

“Race Literature, Modernism, and Normal Literature: James Weldon Johnson’s Groundwork for an African American Literary Renaissance, 1912–20”
Michael Nowlin

“The City Shining on a Hill, or by a Lake: (Re)Thinking Modern Americanness, (Re)Writing the American Lynch Narrative, and Ida B. Wells”
Cyraina Johnson-Roullier

“‘My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience’: Afro-Modernist Critiques of Eugenics and Medical Segregation”
Jess Waggoner

“‘The best people’: The Making of the Black Bourgeoisie in Writings of the Negro Renaissance”
Pamela L. Caughie

“‘New Negro’” v. ‘Niggeratti’: Defining and Defiling the Black Messiah”
Steven Pinkerton

“Amiable with Big Teeth: The Case of Claude McKay’s Last Novel”
Jean-Christophe Cloutier

“Unlike Many Others: Exceptional White Characters in Harlem Renaissance Fiction”
Emily Bernard

“Passing as Modernism”
Pamela L. Caughie

“Finding Haiti, Finding History in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God”
Patricia Stuelke

“Provincializing Harlem: The “Negro Metropolis” as Northern Frontier of a Connected Caribbean”
Lara Putnam

“Three Glad Races: Primitivism and Ethnicity in Brazilian Modernist Literature”
Kenneth David Jackson

“The Colors of Zion: Black, Jewish, and Irish Nationalisms at the Turn of the Century”
George Bornstein

“Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference”
Simon Gikandi

“Harlem in Furs: Race and Fashion in the Photography of Gordon Parks”
Jesús Costantino

“Juneteenth: A Novel” (review)
Kenneth W. Warren