Race and New Modernisms

K. Merinda Simmons, James A. Crank

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350030411
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

From the Harlem and Southern Renaissances to postcolonial writing in the Caribbean, Race and New Modernisms introduces and critically explores key issues and debates on race and ethnicity in the study of transnational modernism today. Topics covered include: · Key terms and concepts in scholarly discussions of race and ethnicity
· European modernism and cultural appropriation
· Modernism, colonialism, and empire
· Southern and Harlem Renaissances
· Social movements and popular cultures in the modernist period Covering writers and artists such as Josephine Baker, W.E.B. Du Bois, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Marcus Garvey, Édouard Glissant, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Paul Robeson, the book considers the legacy of modernist discussions of race in twenty-first century movements such as Black Lives Matter.

1

Lost Languages: Expatriate Primitivism and European Modernity in Translation

In 1906, Pablo Picasso presented his friend and source of artistic inspiration, Gertrude Stein, with a portrait of her that he had painted. In a break from the aesthetic of previous portraits of women, Picasso painted Stein not in a provocative and sensual pose but rather seated in intense contemplation, a pose more suited to the intellectual weight of the woman he portrayed. More importantly, his representation of Stein’s face cast it as almost set in stone, a hulking and sharply defined mask that hearkened back to African and Iberian masks of femininity. For Picasso, the African mask represented a kind of “lost” aesthetic that had been replaced by the “progress” of civilization; by reconfiguring the work of African and Iberian artists, Picasso aimed to frame his aesthetic as a part of a would-be reclamation of what he suggested had been lost from so-called primitive cultures.

When Stein reciprocated her friend’s present seventeen years later, she provided her own portrait of the artist that drew on the same kind of primitivism that Picasso found so compelling in African art. The 1923 poem “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso,” is a classic example of Stein’s modernist aesthetic. In it, she uses the repetition of words and rhythms to offer an answer to Picasso’s imaginative reconfiguration of the African drumbeat, setting a tonal rhythm carried throughout the piece:

If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him.

Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it.

If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him would he like it would he like it if I told him.

Here, in her repletion of monosyllabic words that have equal emphasis, Stein translates the beats of a drum into lyrical poetry. The trisyllabic word “Napoleon” interrupts the beat-beat-beat of the single-syllable words that come before it but also creates its own kind of internal rhyme, for example, with “Napoleon” and “told him.” The effect of the poem not only replicates the consistency of the African drumbeat but also alludes to its deviation from and return to a singular rhythm. Stein’s influential borrowing from African instruments to create a modern aesthetic cannot be overstated: In the early twentieth century, there was no author more associated with the expatriate movement than Gertrude Stein, and her exchange of portraits with Picasso highlights the ways in which modern artists saw their projects as a reclamation and recreation of “lost” identities. The theme of loss itself was an important rhetorical marker for American expatriates who had migrated to Europe at the turn of the century. Stein called the artists emigrating from America to Europe “une génération perdue,” a lost generation. In his A Moveable Feast, expatriate author Ernest Hemingway recalled Stein’s comments about him and his writing: “‘That’s what you are. That’s what you all are,’ Miss Stein said. ‘All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation . . . .You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death’” (34–35). In framing the “lost generation’s” existential crisis as one of reclaiming what had been lost, Stein offered the solution of literary cubism based on an aesthetic of African culture; the appeal of turning to a non-Western cultural ethos for inspiration suggested to audiences and readers that modernism would reframe the value of art. The exchange of gifts between Picasso and Stein nicely demonstrates how expatriates identified race as a crucial integer to the evolution of modernism in Europe.

Histories of modernism tend to privilege Anglophone traditions, and thus they often emphasize European creative evolutions in arenas like music, art, and literature, and the resulting effects on a burgeoning aesthetic in the US scholarly conflations of a European model of modernism with the particular figure of the American expatriate or immigrant are so entrenched that the story frequently told before the new modernist turn relayed a tale of heroic passages by American writers and artists to sites like London and Paris. As critic Alfred Kazin notes in his book On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (1942), major figures of American modernism like Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald became synonymous with the “birth” of the literary movement in their post–First World War flight from America to Europe. A constructive discussion of “modernism,” then, involves an examination of the origin narratives on which the concept has traditionally relied and the paradigms of expatriation and an imagined Europe that have attended them.

The American expatriate was not, of course, a monolithic figure with a singular vision; however, the historical exodus of people out of America at the turn of the century became one of the more obvious features in tracing a history of modernism. Barbara Will describes expatriate exemplars as those who found their escape from “America [and] its emphasis on material production and consumption” as a way to exercise their “imagination and creativity” (110). The binary of America/Europe operationalized an idea of, on one hand, America’s singularity and conventional moralities and modes of art and, on the other hand, a European model of plurality and experimentation specifically centered around Western Europe in the 1920s. An exoticized fantasy of the continent suggested that only in Europe could the American intellectual and artist truly be able to grow and blossom under the auspices of a new dynamic of art-making. American intellectuals flocked to major European centers, which, in turn, established new hierarchies of mentorship among existing cohorts. More important, the dynamics of different artists from various backgrounds and nations interacting together fostered the very sense of plurality and diversity modernist artists came to celebrate in their works. Some of the most foundational literary examples of modernism deal with the notions of expatriation, “American imagination” and European art, and the gaps between the two worlds, for example, works like Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), James’s Daisy Miller (1879), and Stein’s The Making of Americans (1925). Indeed, the quintessential modernist hero remains the lone figure of the American expatriate who, in his configuration as a male-in-crisis, repudiates the values and aesthetic of his nation and finds his existential and intellectual home in the vast terrain of a shifting European ethos.

In the precarious scholarly quest to trace the beginning of a modernist aesthetic, though, critical obsession with the origin of the movement’s relationship to expatriation necessarily invites us to think about those writers’ and artists’ interests in race as a way of organizing their social worlds. To be sure, identifications of race were central components in American and European projects long before the turn of the twentieth century. Early twentieth-century American expatriate fashionings of Europe presented “race” (especially notions of blackness) as a tool for complicating and animating artistic endeavors. If cities like Baltimore (for Stein) or Chicago (for Wright) offered only conventional modalities for examining binaries of black/white, their European counterparts in Paris and London offered new avenues for exploring alternate possibilities through which race might open artistic avenues of exploration. The prominence of exchange among many races, ethnicities, and cultural identities was a hallmark of Western Europe in the early twentieth century; the promise of the artistic value presumed to reside inherently in racial otherness drew many Americans’ attention to Europe and led in no small part to their development as modern artists.

Modernism centered on play and (re)creation, and race became a crucial part of the modernist explosion of experimentation/play. As figures already interested in the dynamics of cultural exchange—having moved themselves from one societal context to another—expatriate modernist artists found in race a way to expand conventional avenues for their work. Because experimentation with form, voice, affect, experience, language, narrative, and character became central to modernist aesthetics, racial play—that is, variations and improvisations on a theme of racial otherness—operated as a central and foundational part of modernism. Just as Stein used the rhythm of the African drum in her portrait of Picasso, racial vernaculars would become central to expatriate modernist artists’ ideas about alienation, exile, fragment, and language itself.

But before exploring the story of how race became (and, indeed, had always been) central to early modernist artists’ conceptions of their art, we want to raise the following guiding questions.

Critical queries

Why is modernism often considered to have originated from a fundamentally deracinated (or white) perspective when its early central figures seemed so consumed with imagining race as a resource for their primary aesthetic concerns?

The critical praxis surrounding early modernist studies was anxiously crafting a canon that actively denied space to voices on the margins—women, people of color, and postcolonial writers and artists. Moreover, mid-century scholars of modernism firmly situated the sites of the movement in specific places—London, Paris, Harlem, and Amsterdam—that excluded non-Western and non-Eurocentric spaces and cultures from discussions surrounding a modernist agenda. When issues of race were raised in early critical discussions, the discourse surrounding them often had little to do with identity and agency and focused instead on the formal and aesthetic apparatuses that conceptions of racial otherness offered the (mostly white) writers and artists who made up the first canon of the field. In this chapter, we examine the development and consequences of this discursive focus. We further seek to press the stakes and implications of modernist definitions of race that would see “it” as something of a stable entity that can be described and represented.

How is the figure of the expatriate foundational to the origin narratives about modernism?

Though we should always remain suspicious of origin stories—especially for concepts as broad and complicated as “modernism”—thinking through why we consider the expatriate figure as a satisfying opening offers some important guiding questions and queries in complicating a conversation about modernism in our research and our classrooms. Moreover, fixation on race and racial (mis)representation seems to be fundamental to the very figure of the expatriate archetype we explore. Yet, frequently, these canonical writers are posited as being disinvested in race, beyond, perhaps, a superficial fascination with blackness. As the bulk of this chapter shows, however, modern authors of the early twentieth century were not just interested in black/white dynamics in America but central in creative configurations of different nations, people, cultures, societies, and races. As a movement, modernism was fueled by a series of conversations surrounding the opportunities offered by experimentation with form and structure through identifications of race, and with no figure was that experimentation more compelling, more foundational to the ethos of their work, than with the expatriate.

What formalist techniques animated expatriate modernist agendas, and how did those structures both enable a dominant conversation about experimentation and, simultaneously, elide the work of nonwhite authors and artists?

Following this section, and in each chapter, we present a series of “critical concepts” in bold that help to plot a trajectory for the argument that follows. For this chapter, we are especially interested in mapping out terms that allow our readers to follow critical formalist ideas that modernist artists employed to facilitate hybrid modes of aesthetic experimentation; expatriate work frequently married the traditions of both a Western and a non-Western culture in order to play with the gaps between models of articulation and aesthetics. Far from a singular concept or one guided by a sole paradigm of study, multiple configurations of race by expatriate and early modernist artists created a multivocal and elaborate story. We will discuss how those (structural or formalist) ideas helped to craft the rhetoric of modernism that we study today, and we will also explore how those ideas denied entry into modernist cohorts for those artists of color.

What were the political ramifications of modernist experimentation with race in the early decades of the twentieth century?

Many of the early modernist texts shared a romantic ideal of migration and expatriation; thus, modernism’s early works often investigate conceptions of an individual’s relationship to nationality and capitalist endeavors. Because the very notion of the “modern” frequently gets yoked together with narratives of democracy and emancipation, modernism and progressivism are presumed synonymous in that they supposedly describe upwardly moving trajectories in both literary and political realms. However, as Urmila Seshagiri notes, the very “emancipatory ideals of modernism,” such as “the sovereignty of the nation-state, the authority of natural science, the dominance of a free-market economy . . . became charged signifiers for atomizing, dehumanizing processes that would eventually fragment and alienate the very culture they promised to perfect” (10). Indeed, these foundational principles of modernism served as an engine for many exploitative and violent policies among nation-states. Occasionally, modernist scholars seek to articulate an ahistorical model of modernism that, in favor of aesthetic concerns, elides structural dynamics and politics present in artistic representation. Thus, we will discuss some ways in which race in the early twentieth century offered modernist authors opportunities to work through aesthetic concerns, but we are also invested in thinking through the i mplications of aesthetic choices in relation to the contemporaneous rise of dictatorships, nationalist discourse, racial segregations, and the Holocaust.

By answering these questions and offering some new ones, we hope to expand scholarly discussions about expatriate perspectives on race such that they include a more thorough consideration of how modernism evolved from a movement conceived as deracinated to one that was consumed by anxiety over/for/about race and racial representation. An examination of some key terms/tropes that help tell that story is a productive place to begin. Recalling Stein and Picasso’s exchange, our terms are all centered around the notion of language and loss. We begin with the concept of dialect, a specific way of speaking that becomes central to the expatriate artist’s conception of a new movement. Our interest in language leads to our second concept of translation, a term that asks us to think through issues of nation, culture, and exchange. And, finally, we end where we begin—with the expatriate author’s use of primitivism as the key concept of “loss” and, ironically, the crucial integer in evolving a new ethos of modernism.

Dialect

In attempting to reciprocate the gift of Picasso’s portrait, Stein turned to her own artistic tool: language. By careful repetition of certain words, Stein called attention to the power of cadence and rhythm, connecting to the same aesthetic of African art. “If I Told Him” becomes a poem in which Stein channels a different kind of vernacular and attempts to mirror a way of speaking that is decidedly breaking from the traditions of European or American poetry. Her portrait of Picasso, in many ways, positions a modernist agenda inside an African artistic form, and this mode of writing would be foundational to other expatriate authors who found artistic inspiration in her work.

In The Dialect of Modernism, Michael North argues that, far from being a corollaries to the work of expatriate modernist writers, race and racial awareness were intimately bound up with the work of modernism from its first iterations. North especially finds expatriate white writers’ interests in black voices to be key to the development of modernism: “Three of the accepted landmarks of literary modernism in English,” he argues, “depend on racial ventriloquism . . . linguistic mimicry and racial masquerade.” North concludes that the reliance on these structures of racial play is central to the evolution of modernism; indeed, they are “strategies without which modernism could not have arisen” (i).

North’s argument about the influence of racial awareness and its distribution by white modernist authors feels like a good starting point from which to explore the complex relationship race has to what we understand now as modernist aesthetics. In a part of his book he labels “The Dialect of the Expatriate,” North makes a case for the fundamental shift that modernism announces as stemming primarily from the experimentation of the expatriate authors in Europe as they began to play with representations of race in literary and visual art. Noting that Michael H. Levenson offers a somewhat conventional origin to the modernist genealogy with Conrad’s The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897), North asserts that the novel explores new expressive forms largely through the (speculative) question of how one imagines race: thus the work becomes, in his words, “prophetic of a modernism inc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction—Coming to Terms: Identifying Race and New Modernisms
• 1 Lost Languages: Expatriate Primitivism and European Modernity in Translation
• 2 The Birth of Many Nations: Imperial Modernisms in the Caribbean
• 3 Re-turning South (Again): Renaissances and Regionalism
• 4 The Art of Ideology: Black Aesthetics and Politics in Modernist Harlem
• 5 Selling Otherness: Racial Performance and Modernist Marketing
• Coda—Who’s the Matter?
• Works Cited
• Works Consulted
• Index
• Copyright