Rebecca Hall’s 2021 film adaptation of Nella Larsen’s famed Harlem Renaissance novel, Passing (1929), indexes the relevance of interracial passing today. We explore Hall’s film to explain the contemporary appeal of Larsen’s narrative. Larsen’s Passing licenses interpretive possibilities that transcend its immediate moment, even as it seeks to criticize specific historical realities of modern intersectional identity. Hall’s neo-passing narrative of 1920s Black femininity employs cinema to highlight the enduring immobility of the color line and the erotic and social risk of crossing it.

We assess Hall’s adaptation of the two-protagonist structure as it personalizes Larsen’s depiction of racial liminality; consider Hall’s use of cinematography to adapt Larsen’s rhetorical sleight of hand regarding US racial discourses; and discuss the homoerotics of passing in both works. We then contemplate Hall’s casting choices. The final section takes up the conclusion of the two works. Hall resolves some of Larsen’s famous ambiguity, but poignantly showcases the essential instability of the gendered, racialized body in US literature and culture across a century.

Focusing on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this chapter traces some of the aesthetic choices that Black writers have made in order to demonstrate the essay’s capacious formal dimensions for imagining and practicing freedom. Rather than think of freedom as a destination, African American essayists have revised and restructured the form in ways that allow them to document how freedom is practiced continually. In the essays of writers as varied as Anna Julia Cooper, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Amiri Baraka, John Edgar Wideman, Ta-Nahesi Coates, and Ross Gay, reflections on joy, justice, life as art, and self-care unfold freely. From defiance to mournfulness, from exuberance to acrimony, this chapter explores the various moods and modes of Black essayistic writing, identifying certain tendencies that belong to the genealogy of Black writing in the United States.

This chapter analyzes the rich essayistic activity of the Harlem Renaissance (1919–1940). Through the visual arts, music, and literature, many African Americans responded to the changing national and international dynamics of the 1920s as an opportunity to leverage their creative arts and redefine their place within the nation. Poetry and fiction were the literary genres African Americans increasingly employed for these efforts. More ubiquitous was their frequent complement: the essay. Writers like Gwendolyn Bennett, Benjamin Brawley, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, and Eulalie Spence infused the essay with this ethos and positioned it as an equally important genre for chronicling the period. Indeed, it was through the essay that readers in the United States and in other parts of the world encountered rhetorical styles reflecting the racial pride and determination of the “New Negro.” Essays from the period detailing the array of forces and ideas shaping African American life – including migration, racial violence, civil rights, and Pan-Africanism – constitute dynamic narratives combining history, opinion, and critical redress.

This chapter begins with the little magazines of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and ends with contemporary online literary magazines, highlighting the radical changes that have taken place as print yielded to digital culture. Motivated by the contrarian personalities of their founding editors against commercial tastes, small-circulation periodicals prioritized aesthetic experimentation and established themselves as an avant-garde force in the arts. During the twentieth century, literary magazines would become institutionalized and relinquish their financial and intellectual independence. Their avant-garde status, once represented by a collectively upheld editorial persona, would become overshadowed by individual cults of personality around popular writers. Magazines’ social programs would become watered down, and instead writers would make themselves into social actors. The arrival of New Journalism in the 1960s and ’70s radically changed long-form journalism, rendering it more literary. The chapter ends with the contemporary literary magazine ecosystem, showing that what magazines have lost in materiality, they have gained in generic hybridity and global access.

If so much of American poetry from the early twentieth century onward looks to revitalize the genre’s forms and conventions by mining from the national vernacular, then jazz has been both a model for that process and a source of expressive inspiration. This essay looks at the range of American poetic responses to jazz, from the early modernist efforts of poets such as Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Vachel Lindsay, to more contemporary figures like Nathaniel Mackey, Morgan Parker, and Kevin Young. In observing the long shadow that the music has cast on poetic experimentation, this survey also observes variations in identity and perspective and maps the reciprocal relationship between different jazz styles and modern poetics, including the tension between song lyrics and lyric poetry. Ultimately, this essay reveals through a wealth of examples the comprehensive heterogeneity of jazz poetry despite these writers’ shared starting points.

Margaret Bonds’s upbringing and education inculcated in her a profound sense of pride in her racial and familial heritage and an equally profound sense of obligation to “go farther” than those who came before her in using her art for the betterment of the lives of others. Moving from her youth through her years as a struggling musician in New York and Los Angeles during the Depression and World War II, through her ascendance to national and international fame, this chapter traces the development of these themes in her personal philosophy and compositional work over the period ca. 1939–63 in works including the incidental music to Shakespeare in Harlem, The Ballad of the Brown King, and Simon Bore the Cross, leading to their coalescence in The Montgomery Variations (1963–64). The Variations thus emerges as the summit of Bonds’s works centered on the theme of racial justice up to that point.

The Great Migration, which began in the late nineteenth century and witnessed the movement of more than six million Black folk from the agrarian US South to the urban North between 1919 and 1970, and the flourishing of “Black Renaissances” in Harlem, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and other Northern urban centers were the essential soil in which are rooted not only the two works that are the subject of this book, but also the lives and careers of Margaret Bonds, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes. This chapter explores the roles of those two large societal seizings of freedom for the poor and oppressed as the context for Margaret Bonds’s career and the source of her career-long commitment to using her art to uplift what she in 1942 called “our oppressed Race” and work for global equality.

This chapter explores how the African American novel imagined a better world, experimented with form, and reflected the artistic and cultural sophistication of Black people in the twentieth century. It argues that understanding the twentieth-century African American novel in the context of various overlapping liberation movements helps us organize our thinking about the ways in which writers used long fiction to explore the social, political, ideological, and historical realities that informed the time period in which they were writing. Focusing on African American fiction produced within and around several Black liberation movements and historical interregnums – i.e., Post-Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement (BAM), and the post-BAM Toni Morrison era – the chapter examines the nuances and complexities of novelists who used the novel as form to reflect and inspire shared visions of a liberated future.

This chapter begins by claiming that in comparison to its British and French contemporaries, American modernism does not contain a lot of obviously queer texts. That is, American modernism does not represent homosexuality explicitly very often. There are exceptions, of course – Gertrude Stein’s Q.E.D., Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade,” and Charles Henri Ford and Park Tyler’s The Young and the Evil offer three such examples, but same-sex relations are not central subjects in the way that they are in contemporaneous texts such as Marcel Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah, André Gide’s Miracle of the Rose, or Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. This chapter aims to explain this peculiarity and thus to provide a theory of queer American modernism itself by examining two key sites of its production: namely, the Provincetown Theater and the Harlem Renaissance.

Geomodernism insists that we cannot theorize modernist art within a national frame, emphasizing embeddedness and interconnection over isolation. Doing so requires reckoning with how questions of race and citizenship, migration and war, empire and revolution change our assessment of the aesthetics and politics of modernism. I begin with a call for a clearer sense of the relations among geomodernisms, global modernisms, and postcoloniality to suggest that US modernist studies could subtend geomodernist emphasis on place further by harnessing the insights of ethnic and postcolonial studies more fully. The global can neither be assumed as inert fact or impossible aspiration. Drawing on Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death (1926), I argue for a more robust focus on decolonial practice, on border as method, and on the ongoing racial violence of a settler state to highlight the unresolved presence of US empire and extraction in the hemisphere alongside submerged histories of labor migration.

The Machine Age helped usher in the literary experiments of modernism in a very practical sense by increasing international travel and correspondence exponentially in the early twentieth century. This chapter explores the idea of “being American” in Europe by charting the two-way traffic of modernists and avant-gardes across the Atlantic. Drawing on a diverse range of vanguardists (including Djuna Barnes, Gwendolyn Bennett, Bob and Rose Brown, Hart Crane, H. D., T. S. Eliot, James T. Farrell, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Robert McAlmon, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Jean Toomer, and William Carlos Williams), it examines how motifs of technology, popular culture, and racial difference were often read through the lens of American exceptionalism. In both expatriate forums (such as Broom, transition, and various literary salons) and “homegrown” projects (including Contact, Fire!!, and Others magazines), these writers harnessed the nervous energies of the Machine Age to complicate and proliferate, rather than consolidate, modernist canons and formations.

Introductory chapter for book that centers the work, labor, and effort of artists to script and share African American experiences on stage from the nineteenth century to the present day. It provides an overview of the major movements and moments in Black theatre, beginning with sorrow songs in the era of legal captivity to twenty-first-century stagings.

Soyica Diggs Colbert explores the dramas of the Harlem Renaissance, which were usually nurtured in Washington, DC, to reveal how dramatists such as Angelina Weld Grimké, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Willis Richardson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Marita Bonner, among others, created dramas that asserted the “value” of African American life. Writing during a period when not only the lynchings of Black men and women were common but also rarely punished, these artists’ assertion of Black respectability demanded a reassessment and, indeed, a revaluation of Blackness.

This chapter details the literary history of short fiction written in English by African Americans from 1853 through 1934. Beginning in the antebellum era during the age of reform and continuing through the Postbellum–Pre-Harlem era before concluding with the Harlem Renaissance or New Negro Movement, this article traces the aims and goals of activists, artists, and reformers such as Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, Nella Larsen, Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes, contextualizing and contrasting their efforts to revise and critique the reductive depictions of African American life perceived within the dominant literary trends of their respective times.

The 1980s was a decade in which African American literary production was starting to get the long overdue attention it deserved, but also a decade in which African American artists were emboldened to explore new territory, mainstream recognition be damned.The juxtaposition of James Baldwin’s funeral in 1987 and Trey Ellis’s essay “The New Black Aesthetic” in 1989 represent not a mere passing of the torch from the old guard to the avant-garde.Rather, the old guard was flourishing, and younger artists were also getting attention on new frontiers.In an unprecedented way, the 1980s marked an era when Black writers were sought out and recognized, to the point that their work dominated the critical conversation.This was especially true of Black women writers such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Rita Dove who enjoyed a readership unlike anything they had ever seen before.

Black literature of the 1980s grew in conjunction with the multifaceted cultural phenomenon known as Hip-Hop. A key aspect of this growth was the subversion of Eurocentric rules and expectations. This mindset connected to deep African American traditions on multiple levels. First, in rejecting the general belief that art should be made in accordance with Eurocentric aesthetic principles, Hip-Hop took its place in a long line of African American literary and artistic forms that took that position either as an explicitly political statement, as a reflection of respect toward African American audiences, or as some combination.Second, Hip-Hop also questioned specific tenets of Eurocentric art, such as the idea that written literature was more sophisticated than oral literature, or that linear development was inherently superior to cyclical forms. Third, Hip-Hop developed aesthetic and pragmatic strategies for making art outside of a Eurocentric framework. Fourth, Hip-Hop drew upon Afro-Diasporic conceptual frameworks and traditions as the foundation of those strategies. Finally, it used artistic debates around all of these questions as part of the art itself.