If, as W.E.B. Du Bois famously writes in The Souls of Black Folk “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line,” an attendant concern is the constitution of a modern black subject. During the long twentieth century, conceptions of blackness have shifted from those, like Du Bois, who view blackness and whiteness as ambivalently and violently imbricated toward a more liberatory vision of blackness that exists independently of hegemonic white models of subjectivity. However, the specter of modernity, its association with Western Enlightenment, and its progressivist impulses are often at odds with the epistemological rupture that these liberatroy visions require. This panel asks if blackness and modernity can coexist in the construction of a subject. How might a black subject understand herself in spite of the ideological, aesthetic, or political limitations of modernity? Conversely, does modernity offer some potential in representing the black subject?

The entanglement between Western modernity and the constitution of black subjectivity is a tension explored differently throughout African American studies, black diasporic studies, and studies of modernism and modernity. Black diasporic studies sees entanglement as a productive force that gives way to what Edouard Glissant calls creolization, or a blending of Western hegemonic forces and the uniquely Caribbean that resist, work through, and negotiate a linguistic, cultural, and political indebtedness to a colonial past. Both African American studies and modernist studies tend to emphasize the aesthetic properties of cultural production that might be considered “modern.” Modernist studies asserts the presence of black subjects in the work and the literary imaginary of artists typically associated with high modernism. In recent years, the field has expanded to seriously consider works by black writers and the diverse contributions from cultural movements like the Harlem Renaissance, the Chicago Black Renaissance, the Southern Renaissance, and the burgeoning field of Caribbean literature. African American literary studies takes a granular approach to these cultural movements, stemming from Houston Baker’s famous assertion in Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance that black modernism is a “blending of class and mass.” The inclusion of “mass” elevates cultural production like folklore and folk art, popular culture, visual culture, oral history, material arts, and music so that they are on par with more “traditional” forms of literary production. When these two forces collide black, as they do in the poetry of Sterling Brown, aesthetic modernity is born. Already recent scholarship has begun to put these disciplinary approaches in conversation with one another. My aim in convening this panel is to continue the productive practice of thinking about questions around the constitution and representation of the modern black subject in the twentieth century from a variety of perspectives.

The presidential theme of MLA 2020 offers a rich setting in which to raise such questions. The project of defining the human has deep ties to the process of subject formation, as both conversations have their roots in the discourse of Western Enlightenment. Just as black people were considered sub-human, they also existed only as objects against which white, male subjects could define themselves. Black exclusion from categories of subjecthood and the human persisted into the twentieth century. And while critics have advocated a reclamation of the non-human, many black artists struggle with a desire to engage with these existing models. This panel seeks to explore that desire and the ambivalent, uneven negotiations with these benchmarks of modernity to better understand how they are represented in literature.

In order to best represent the scope of approaches to the questions raised by this topic, I have invited panelists who work across the twentieth century and through a variety of disciplines. Dr. Colleen O’Brien reads Of One Blood, serialized between 1902 and 1903, both as an intertextual link to Joseph Conrad’s modernist novella Heart of Darkness, and as a space to construct a speculative and future-oriented form of blackness. In doing so, she examines both the historical context of the novel and the version of black modernity that it asserted at the time of its publication and also its trans-historical significance and applicability to current black studies and its place as an early instantiation of Afro-futurism. Like Dr. O’Brien, Dr. Helen Huang pays particular attention to the diasporic qualities of black modernity, analyzing Tropic Death a 1926 novel by the Caribbean writer Eric Walrond. She argues that Walrond’s construction of a multifaceted view of blackness challenges the homogenous and oppositional constructions of blackness asserted through high modernist literature. Dr. J. Vanessa Lyon’s paper takes up this process of othering and employs a 1952 work by Robert Rauschenberg called Untitled (Asheville Citizen) as a case study to better understand the extent to which people of color inhabit the imagination of white artists working in abstract modes. Dr. Lyon pays particular attention to Rauschenberg’s institutional connection with the progressive Black Mountain art school as well as the violent segregation of neighboring Asheville, which gives the work its name. She argues that the work represents the experience of segregation through abstraction. Although Dr. Lyon has a background in art history, she uses Toni Morrison’s groundbreaking critical work Playing in the Dark as a frame for her essay, emphasizing the “Africanist” presence running through the work of white modernist visual artists. If that frame emphasizes the manifestation of blackness in the white imaginary, then Dr. Majda Atieh’s paper considers what it might mean for blackness to be asserted independently of the stifling frame of modernity. She examines Toni Morrison’s 1998 novel Paradise and argues that the novel offers sites of black escape from the oppression of Western modernity, generating a new, more gender-inclusive model of black modernity. The architectural features of these sites of possibility are particularly significant, and Dr. Atieh is attuned to the liberatory potential of divergence from existing models of architecture that would link the narrative to power structures of the West. Each presenter will be given fifteen minutes to give their paper, leaving fifteen minutes for a discussion of the connections between their work.