One of the most enduring questions in the history of the African diaspora, and especially the rise of black transnational modernism, concerns the relationship between politics and the arts. Whereas some scholars have considered the ways in which political activists have interacted with writers, musicians and visual artists, others have focused on the political meanings of different creative media.¹ In particular, the modernist vision of blackness has prompted many (often very heated) debates about how to portray blacks and black culture, and the politics of such representational choices.² Does an emphasis on positive characteristics of black life create a politically...

At the beginning of the twentieth century the first signs of African American culture in the form of dances – ragtime, the cakewalk, jazz, the Charleston – appeared in Europe as a new, original form of entertainment, and music craze, notably in the Parisian salons. At the time when avant-garde tendencies and a passion for primitivism were fuelling new artistic movements from cubism and Futurism to surrealism, it was only one term, ‘jazz’, that emerged to describe this experimental art and important cultural phenomenon. It characterised a broad range of imported and home-grown styles associated with American dance and music. Often perceived...

In most historical accounts of modernism the words ‘Féral Benga’ never appear. My first encounter with the name occurred several years ago while conducting preliminary research on the role of sculptural traditions and practices in African American art. Féral Benga: (Dance Figure) was the title given to a 1935 statue by the renowned African American sculptor James Richmond Barthé (1901–89) (Figure 3.1). I was under the impression that the title referenced a type or style of dance. I learned subsequently, however, that Féral Benga was not a dance but a person whose influence and importance to the story of...

Since the 1980s scholars have assessed Zora Neale Hurston’s major ethnographic texts, Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938), by defining the contours of her ‘anthropological imagination’,¹ charting her relationship with Boas’s school of anthropology, and examining her multiple subjectivities.² More specifically, Domina’s analysis of Mules and Men and Tell My Horse provides an insight into the autobiographical strand of the work in the context of the conflicting demands of an academic discipline, with its rules and regulations, and the more pragmatic expectations of the publishing world.³ With Tell My Horse, the geographical displacement effected to collect material...

Zora Neale Hurston begins her 1934 essay, ‘Characteristics of Negro Expression’, with an invocation of ‘drama’ – not of her own theatre pieces, but of the ‘drama’ of black linguistic practice:

Every phase of Negro life is highly dramatized. No matter how joyful or how sad the case there is sufficient poise for drama. Everything is acted out. Unconsciously for the most part of course. There is an impromptu ceremony always ready for every hour of life. No little moment passes unadorned.²

This brief and wholly unframed introduction to the drama of blackness is also littered, as is the quote on...

One of the most significant artists of Jamaica’s immediate post-independence period, Karl Parboosingh (1923–75), embodied in his work a new hybrid and transnational modernism that emerged in Jamaican art around independence. At a time when the island was transitioning from a colonial to a postcolonial society, Parboosingh navigated his way around the centres of an increasingly globalised art world, absorbing and appropriating the formal innovations of the avant-garde. His formative years in New York, Paris, London and Mexico made Parboosingh a master of stylistic code-switching. His oeuvre carries references to key European movements, especially the primitivism inherent in Fauvism...

So Black World War I veteran, Kenneth Harper, remembers in a haunting, no-holds-barred dramatisation of the horrors of combat in Walter White’s novel, The Fire in the Flint published in 1924.¹ As a locus of black Afromodernisms par excellence, World War I in general and noman’s-land in particular function as powerful and complex sites of modernist reimagining via aesthetic innovation and literary experimentation in the 1920s and 1930s. Black novelists, poets and dramatists working in and beyond Harlem – and not only including Walter White but also Claude McKay, May Miller, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Roscoe...

Angelina Weld Grimke, Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Mary Burrill, three black women educators and dramatists, stand at a critical moment of political and literary significance in black American dramatic theatre in the early twentieth century. As the Harlem Renaissance began, their plays appeared on urban and community stages, in opposition to a strategy of containment during and after World War I. In particular, their work confronted the social, moral and human consequences of lynching.

Black theatre in America emerged in the 1820s at the African Grove, a theatrical company founded and supported by a transatlantic class of black mariners in downtown...

In the wake of Paul Gilroy’s landmark study The Black Atlantic (1993), an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective has transformed conceptions of the New Negro renaissance, revealing a cultural movement that stretched from the US to the Caribbean, Cuba, Mexico and the Soviet Union.¹ Mapping the emergence of Paris as a transcultural capital of black modernism, Brent Hayes Edwards, Theresa Leininger-Miller and Tyler Stovall have examined the interplay between African American cultural expression, European fascination with African art and négritude.² Judging the impact of travel to the Soviet Union upon Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and Paul Robeson, Kate A. Baldwin...