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 introductory chapter provides historical context for situating key developments in African American literature and culture at the turn into the twentieth century. In particular, this chapter examines the major shifts that happened in the immediate decade following the Plessy v. Ferguson decision to legalize racial segregation, showing how African American writers, artists, athletes, and intellectuals advocated for civil and political rights, even as they turned inward to strengthen and fortify the infrastructures of their own communities. Illuminating reasons why this decade still remains largely underappreciated in African American literary history, this chapter argues for attention to geography, genre, and publication circumstance, as inflected through questions of gender, sexuality, class, and the politics of race and representation, to bring to light new ways of reading these critical years at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The turn of the century saw a massive effort to establish the category of “negro” authorship, centering African Americans not just as writing subjects but also as deeply involved in the project of building the infrastructure to recognize the existence of a long, dynamic, and expansive tradition of “Negro” literature. This chapter shows how, through their work in bibliography, familiar figures such as Daniel Murray, W. E. B. Du Bois, and later Dorothy Porter established the existence of an African American literature and sought to organize and categorize it to include a range of works that documented a “blackness” understood beyond “the Negro problem.” This chapter illustrates the constructed nature of categories such as “Negro literature” or “African American author,” while also bringing attention to the role of African Americans in imagining the possibilities of a much broader category of literature that would get constricted and delimited in subsequent iterations, reminding us that definitions of African American literature were not “inevitable” and that there was a moment at turn of the century when African American literary workers were imagining much broader possibilities.