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Jim Crow modernism / edited by Adam McKible, Robert Jackson, Keith Clark.

Oxford Scholarship Online: Literature Available online

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Format:
Book
Contributor:
McKible, Adam, editor.
Jackson, Robert, 1971 December 17- editor.
Clark, Keith, 1963- editor.
Language:
English
Subjects (All):
African Americans--Intellectual life--20th century.
African Americans.
American literature--African American authors--History and criticism.
American literature.
Arts and society--United States--History--20th century.
Arts and society.
Modernism (Aesthetics)--United States.
Modernism (Aesthetics).
Modernism (Literature)--United States.
Modernism (Literature).
Racism and the arts--United States--History--20th century.
Racism and the arts.
African Americans--Intellectual life.
Arts and society--History.
United States.
Genre:
Electronic books.
Physical Description:
1 online resource : illustrations.
Place of Publication:
New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2026]
Summary:
The 'problem of the twentieth century' was one of the most important factors in the development of American modernism. W.E.B. Du Bois, of course, identified that problem as 'the colour line' a phrase for the broad array of laws and practices that promulgated legal segregation, cultural separation, and racial antagonism in the US from the end of Reconstruction through the Civil Rights era. A more familiar name, borrowed from the popular tradition of blackface minstrelsy, personified this elusive but ever-present racial regime: Jim Crow. Taking as its starting point the contemporaneity of the Jim Crow era and the modernist era in art and culture, this text explores how these phenomena informed one another, and how artists and thinkers on both sides of the colour line worked in and against the 'separate but equal' landscape and the organizing logic of Jim Crow.
Contents:
Cover
Jim Crow Modernism
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Introduction Adam McKible, Robert Jackson, and Keith Clark
Jim Crow Consciousness
Garden Cloisters and Other Futures
Jim Crow Spaces
Erasing Jim Crow
PART I: Spaces and Networks
1: Shanties, Brick Office Buildings, Theaters, Drug Stores, Restaurants, and Cabarets: The Urban Black Geography of U. S. Modernism
2: The Whiteness of Bones: T. S. Eliot in Death Valley, St. Louis
Separation in St. Louis
Forgetting Jim Crow in "Ash-Wednesday"
"Ol Man River": Remembering Jim Crow in "The Dry Salvages"
3: Bad Boys Make Good Roads: Incarceration and Infrastructure in the US South
4: 135th Street and Lenox v. Rastus Jones: Spring 3100 and Modernist Representations of Blackness within the NYPD
5: Jim Crow and the Modern American Subject
6: Modernist Studies and the Redlining of African American Poetry
PART II: Genres, Traditions, Discourses
7: "Traditions of the People": The Racial Habits of Charles W. Chesnutt and T. S. Eliot
Eliot's Southern Stance
Chesnutt's Pragmatism: Collective Habit and Social Change
8: The Bildungsroman in Jim Crow Modernism
9: Cloistered Gardens: Jane Crow's Ecofeminist Poetics
Anne Spencer's Botanical Poetics
Solarium Workshops and Urban Refuge
10: Playing a Color Line: Satirizing the Harlem Renaissance
To the Manor Born
11: Alice Dunbar-Nelson and the Movies, 1921
An American Crime
The Burden of Race
12: A Picture of Modern Black Life: The Musical Specialty in Sound-Era Race Films
PART III: Bodies, Ethnicities, Performances
13: Prophecy and the Veil: The Intertextuality of W. E. B. Du Bois and Sui Sin Far
14: Isamu Noguchi's Handcrafted Citizenship: The Modernist Art and Politics of Japanese America in the Incarceration
Contingent Citizenship under Jim Crow
Crafting for a "Middle People"
No Place for Belonging
Conclusion
15: The Maternal Bodies of Jim Crow Modernism: Black and White Women and Literary Procreation
16: Black Humor in the Jim Crow Era: Gwendolyn Bennett's "Funny" Endings
17: Connecticut Goddam: Queer Crow Masculinity and Sexuality in Ann Petry's "Has Anybody Seen Miss Dora Dean?"
Connecticut Goddam: Ann Petry's Dixified New England
"That Was a Funny Thing to Say": Que(e)rying Jim Crow Modernism
PART IV: Imperialism, Colonialism, Globalism
18: A Moveable Beast: Jim Crow in the City of Lights
Constructing Americaness in Paris
A Moveable Beast: Constructing Blackness in Paris
Jim Crow and the Milieu of the Lost Generation
19: Critical Compression and Black Transnational Periodicals: Reading Racism at the Scale of the World
Notes:
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Description based on online resource and publisher information; title from PDF title page (viewed on July 1, 2026).
Other Format:
Print version: Jim Crow modernism.
ISBN:
9780197699720
0197699723
9780197699706
0197699707
OCLC:
1570330307
Publisher Number:
CIPO000344445
Access Restriction:
Restricted for use by site license

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