Afromodernisms: Paris, Harlem, Haiti and the Avant-garde

This title makes a persuasive case for a black Atlantic literary renaissance and its impact on modernist studies. This study stretches and challenges current canonical configurations of modernism in two key ways: by considering the centrality of black artists, writers and intellectuals as key actors and core presences in the development of a modernist avant-garde; and by interrogating ‘blackness’ as an aesthetic and political category at critical moments during the twentieth century. This is the first book-length publication to explore the term ‘Afromodernisms’ and the first study to address together the cognate fields of modernism and the black Atlantic. It sets a new agenda for the study of blackness and modernism. It includes specially commissioned contribution from Tyler Stovall on Black Modernism and an Afterword from Demetrius Eudell on ‘What to the Negro is Modernism?’ It identifies key locations of modernism: Harlem, Paris, Haiti. It addresses the question of gender, often overlooked in black Atlantic scholarship.