A GRAMMAR OF MODERN SILENCE

Abstract

This essay examines the relationship between traditional, or aesthetic, modernism and modernity as a way to gain a deeper understanding of the meaning of race and gender as these have been addressed in modern discourse, and as concerns what I identify as a relationship of simultaneity, rather than mutual exclusiveness which, although invisible, yet exists between them. By rearticulating the meaning of modernism and the modern in terms of modernity and considering race and gender in this new context, after modernism, I argue that because it is a much larger category, the shift to modernity opens the door to a more complete investigation that, in focusing on the hidden meaning of race and gender, transcends aesthetic modernism’s too-heavy reliance on its visible iteration, that of a periodization encompassing the works of the Harlem Renaissance as its primary encounter with race, while encouraging a separate consideration of gender. Filtered through modernity, then, it becomes clear that a more complete understanding of the role of race in modernism can only be obtained by moving backward in time, from an investigation of the twentieth-century visibility of race and gender, to the invisible nineteenth-century origins of race and gender, two examples of which are found in Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s and Pauline Hopkins’s explorations of the tragic mulatta, who embodies the hidden and simultaneous intersection that is race and gender.