Cane

Literary Modernism rose in the late 19th and 20th centuries and is characterized by a focus on individual, subjective experience while breaking away from traditional literary formats. Authors typically associated with this writing style include James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound. While Modernism is typically identified with white authors from the United States and Europe, Simon Gikandi argues in his essay “Race and the Modernist Aesthetic” that race was integral in developing such a transformative literary and aesthetic movement. He explains that “[i]t was in celebration of the mentality and body of what it considered to be its primitive other that [M]odernism reinvented its aesthetic strategies as one way of freeing itself from [...] the dogmatic authority of the nineteenth century” (Gikandi, Simon. “Race and the Modernist Aesthetic.” Writing and Race. Longman, 1997, p. 148). In other words, creatives looked to an exoticized African aesthetic as a way to introduce newness and otherness to their literary and artistic production. This appeared most obviously in abstractions of the Black female body that often excluded her interiority but overrepresented her physicality. Such representations appeared in Black and white Modernist literature alike.