"Modernism with its emphasis on the "new" combined with the racist views of many of its innovators has rarely, if ever, been acknowledged as confronting the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade. Even much of the scholarship focused on Black authors from the period focus on their writing on the urban experience. In Modernism and the Middle Passage, Laura Winkiel examines how a range of modernist writers drew on the history of Atlantic trade slavery to critique and open new ways of thinking about the legacy of colonialism and Western ideas of the individual. Black writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay took inspiration from the ecology of the ocean and African animism to rethink and challenge Western constructions and philosophies of the self. Meanwhile, white women writers, such as Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys, while limited in their critique of racism, viewed the history of the slave trade as part of an imperial system that oppressed women and queerness. In analyzing the works of these writers as well as some of their contemporary interlocutors including Marlon James, Zadie Smith, and Jamaica Kincaid, Winkiel discusses authors' engagement with the explosion of public misogyny and sexual violence aimed at British and US women agitating for citizenship; the mass mutilations during the First World War; the increased racist and gendered violence of anti-Blackness, antisemitism, and other forms of bigotry. Beyond finding metaphors and historical references to the slave trade in modernist literary texts, Winkiel emphasizes modernist fiction's speculative elements-the creative unleashing of new, utopian possibilities-as a constructive project concerned with building new spaces and establishing new relationalities"-- Provided by publisher.
This book reveals how modernists turned to the Middle Passageand, in so doing, upended Western ideas about time and space, race and gender, and the category of the human.
Modernism is typically thought of as focusing on the new and now, not looking backward at historical catastrophes. Yet in many surprising, often submerged ways, the transatlantic slave trade shaped the works of both Black and white writers. This book reveals how modernists turned to the Middle Passageand, in so doing, upended Western ideas about time and space, race and gender, and the category of the human.
Bringing together Afro-diasporic and Black studies scholarship, modernist aesthetics, and environmental studies, Laura Winkiel presents a new literary history of modernism from the perspective of the Atlantic and its role in slavery and colonization. She examines the works of African, Caribbean, British, and US writers including Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Rhys, Amos Tutuola, and Virginia Woolf, as well as later interlocutors such as Marlon James and Jamaica Kincaid. Paying particular attention to settings on shorelines, deltas, archipelagos, and the ocean, Winkiel argues that allusions to the slave trade make visible the exploitative structural relations between the metropolis and the colonies and between the liberal subject and its others. By turning to the ocean and its violent histories, this groundbreaking book rethinks the fraught relationship of modernism and race.
