1. Recognizing the Futility of Establishing Fixed Meanings for These Terms, As Susan Stanford Friedman Points out in “Definiti

Notes CHAPTER 1 1. Recognizing the futility of establishing fixed meanings for these terms, as Susan Stanford Friedman points out in “Definitional Excursions,” in this work I will use “Modernism” with a capital M to denote the specific artis- tic movement in the early twentieth century often referred to as “high modernism” and now associated with writers such as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, H. D., William Carlos Williams, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Virginia Woolf. I will use a lower case m to refer to the broader issues of representation that this group raised but that others also addressed. Singal’s conception of modernism as a culture, “a constellation of related ideas, beliefs, values, and modes of perception” (7) in the early twentieth century, proves useful here. For a sampling of conventional definitions of Modernism, see also Bradbury and McFarlane; Ellmann and Feidelson; Eysteinsson; Susan Stanford Friedman; Kenner; Nicholls; Perloff; Raymond Williams. 2. Such revisionist critics include Baker, De Jongh, Douglas, North, Pavlic´, and Rampersad in African American studies; Benstock, Burke, Felski, Susan Stanford Friedman, Rado, and Scott in feminist studies; Boone in gay studies/queer theory; Gikandi in postcolonial studies. See also Gilroy, Black Atlantic, for a diasporic conception of modernity in which he places African American history in the larger context of African migra- tions and exiles. 3. Charles Baudelaire’s definition of modernity as “the transient, the fleet- ing, the contingent” (qtd. in Harvey 10) in his 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life” provides the foundation for scholarly explorations of the word’s meaning. Also useful for this project is Paul De Man’s essay “Literary History and Literary Modernity” in Blindness and Insight. For similar definitions of modernity as “a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier” (De Man 148) and a deliberate break with the past, see also Appadurai; Berman; Susan Stanford Friedman, “Definitional Excursions”; Harvey; Hoffman and Murphy. 4. In using the term “hybridity,” I am aware of its racial overtones and dan- gerous uses in nineteenth-century racial theories. As Young warns, the 164 NOTES use of this term inevitably reinvokes and repeats the racialized debates of Victorian thinkers who sought to prove the inferiority of nonwhite, non- Western cultures. Yet, as Young himself shows, this term has been reap- propriated to signify the blending of cultures that results from cultural interaction. See Friedman’s Mappings, especially pp. 82–93, for discussion of different definitions and models of hybridity with varying degrees of cultural preservation and blending. 5. For more detailed discussions and examples of the historical changes in this period, see Berman; Harvey; Painter, Standing; Susman; Trachtenberg. Harvey is particularly important for this project’s under- standing of modernity. He defines the fundamental changes in Americans’ relationship to time and space in this period as a “time-space compression,” in which time was accelerated through the increased organization of production (Henry Ford’s assembly line) and space was collapsed with the arrival of radio and the widespread use of automobiles. 6. This scholarship has tended to focus on the literature of a single group in relation to mainstream American culture but not in relation to other ethnic communities as this book does. For important examples of this ten- dency, see Baker; Douglas; Doyle; Gilroy; Hutchinson; Michaels; North; Sundquist. Other crosscultural approaches to modernity in literary studies include Batker; Keresztesi; Konzett, Ethnic Modernisms; Schedler. Batker deploys a broad historical overview and thematic analysis of jour- nalistic and literary writing by African, Native, and Jewish American women writers in the early twentieth century. Keresztesi explores thematic issues of alienation, modernization, and industrialization in literature by African Americans, Native Americans, Eastern European Jewish immigrants, and Mexican immigrants, focusing on how ethnic writers appropriate the trope of the stranger in different ways than Modernist writers do. Konzett rethinks modernism in terms of ethnicity and dis- placement in her author study of Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Rhys. Schedler focuses on Mexican, Native American, and Chicano writers, those “outside the metropolis” as he puts it (xii), and compares them to European and Anglo American Modernists in his examination of what he calls “border modernism.” While the individual essays in Boelhower’s edited collection focus on single ethnic groups or authors, when taken as a whole The Future of American Modernism offers a multiethnic portrait of modernism. 7. On African American modernity, see Baker; Rampersad. On Jewish modernity, see Cheyette and Marcus. While a public discussion of Native American modernity has not fully emerged, see Krupat, Ethnocriticism, for the beginnings of one. See also Warrior, who, in his project to trace the roots of an American Indian intellectual tradition, marks this period as the first “coming together” of a generation of Native writers. 8. For connections between modernism and anthropology: in the field of anthropology, see Fox’s edited collection Recapturing Anthropology and NOTES 165 Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture; in literary studies, see Manganaro; in American culture studies, see Hegeman. See also Elliott, who links anthropology and its project of constructing cultural difference to the earlier literary movement of late-nineteenth-century American realism. 9. According to the then popularly accepted thesis by Frederick Jackson Turner, who argued that the frontier molded a distinctly American char- acter, 1890 marked the end of an era with the closing of the frontier. As the open spaces of the American West were settled and Indian popula- tions were “removed,” America was no longer seen as a land of endless possibilities. As Dippie argues, the closing of the frontier ended the pos- sibility that the frontier could continue to serve as an “escape valve,” an open space to send immigrants and a place of refuge for others to escape the confines of the growing cities. 10. For examples of important thematic studies of migration in African American literature, see Griffin; Rodgers; Scruggs. 11. Pound’s demand to “make it new,” the title of a collection of his essays in 1934 that has now become the slogan most associated with the Modernist writers, has come to serve as a synecdoche for the Modernist project. Many poets and editors, however, articulated this view earlier in the century, including e. e. cummings, who dubbed Modernist art “the New Art” in an essay in the Harvard Advocate in 1915, and Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson, whose collection The New Poetry: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Verse in English was published in 1917. See Hoffman and Murphy. See also Bernstein on Pound. 12. Nostalgia, whose Greek root nóstos means to return home, suggests not only a desire to return to the past but also, more fundamentally, a desire to return home, as Engel discusses. See also Konzett, Ethnic Modernisms, for a discussion of similar challenges to the meanings of home by ethnic writers in this period. 13. These changes include Charles Darwin’s earlier theories about evolution, which radically changed many people’s relationship to God; Karl Marx’s economic theories, which altered many people’s view of class relations and economic systems (even as religion and class hierarchies remained enduring paradigms); Sigmund Freud’s and William James’s work about the human psyche, which led to new ideas about the self; and Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, which occasioned a new relationship to the larger universe. 14. Boas’s work on cultural pluralism first appeared in the 1890s, while his most influential writings began in the 1910s and ’20s. Boasian notions of cultural relativism and pluralism did not become more widely accepted until the 1930s (Susman). For information about the anthropological theories and contributions of Boas, see Stocking; Herbert Lewis; Rohner and Rohner; Vernon Williams; Boas’s own writings and lectures (in particular, Race, Language, and Culture). For discussions of the changing view of culture in this period and on Boas’s role in this change, also see Dippie; 166 NOTES Elliott; Hegeman; Hutchinson; Kroeber and Kluckhoh; Manganaro, Culture. German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) and later sociolo- gists played key roles in this discussion as well. German immigrant Horace M. Kallen (1882–1974) coined the term “cultural pluralism” in 1925. For a discussion about the etymology of this term, as well as “ethnic” and “ethnicity,” see Sollors’s “Foreword” to Theories of Ethnicity and the essays in that volume, which provide a sampling of key voices, including Weber and Kallen’s “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot.” 15. See Haenni for a study of the increasing popularity of “slum fiction,” film, and photographs of the New York ghetto in this turn-of-the-century period among middle-class readers and viewers. 16. For further arguments about the racialization of Jews in this period, see Brodkin; Cheyette; Garb; Jacobson; Nochlin. 17. Aristotle did not delineate a hierarchy within humanity on the Great Chain. During the Enlightenment, Aristotle’s concept was used to justify a racial hierarchy among humans. See Graves for a history of the concept of race. 18. See also Cohen for a historical overview and definitions of the term diaspora. The modern definition of diaspora is rooted in the experience of Jews living in exile throughout much of history, Cohen notes. 19. For discussions of American realism, see Elliott; Amy Kaplan; Wald, Constituting Americans. 20. For a study of ethnic writers’ varying responses to readers’ quest for authenticity in their texts, see Karem. 21. See Marcus and Fischer for a discussion of this recent trend in anthropology. CHAPTER 2 1. See Levine, who traces the development of African American culture and argues for its African origins.

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