Modernism in Black & White

Abstract

Modernism in Black & White Suzanne W. Churchill (bio) Can innovative practices in the classroom transcend old divisions in the field? The New Modernist Studies has toppled the hierarchies of high modernism, challenging the traditional canon’s exclusion of women, minorities, political activists, popular writers, and other marginalized figures. But the vital attention paid to the work of what Cary Nelson calls “Repression and Recovery” hasn’t fully overcome the neglect of the Harlem Renaissance, if Lawrence Rainey’s Modernism: An Anthology (2005) is any index to the state of the field.1 This hefty, 1181-page textbook claims to be “the most comprehensive anthology of Anglo-American modernism ever to be published,” yet it does not include a single African American writer (Nancy Cunard is the closest it sails to Harlem). This is not the only sign of the scarcity of African American representation in modernist studies. Modernism/Modernity, although certainly more inclusive than the Blackwell anthology, devotes more attention to T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis than to Zora Neale Hurston or Wallace Thurman, and the attendance at the Modernist Studies Association annual conference—including those of us participating in this forum—is conspicuously white, despite concerted efforts to diversify the program. I teach at a small liberal arts college in the South, where diversity is also a challenge and goal, in our curriculum as well as our community. The teaching innovation I’ll discuss here was motivated by a desire to bridge the divide between modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. It was thus driven not by any deficiency in student preparation or engagement, but by a problem more deeply embedded in the structures of modernist scholarship and pedagogy. We are products of our educations. I [End Page 489] had little exposure to the Harlem Renaissance either as an undergraduate or graduate student, and my course offerings tended to privilege what I knew best: white, Anglo-American modernism. Yet my research in periodical studies taught me that modernism was not always divided along the color line: Fenton Johnson published poems in the largely white avant-garde magazine Others, Claude McKay and Mike Gold co-edited the Liberator, and William Stanley Braithwaite’s 1918 Anthology of Magazine Verse included war poems by Jesse Fauset and William Rose Benét. Such instances of border crossing and collaboration made me wonder what other intersections might be uncovered in modernist periodicals. I decided to conduct an experiment in collaborative research with undergraduates, based on a model developed by my colleague in the history department, John Wertheimer.2 I designed an upper-level seminar, “Modernism in Black & White,” with a dual focus: 1) crossing the color line between modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, and 2) doing collaborative research in modernist periodicals. Throughout the semester, as students read major modernist texts by T. S. Eliot, W. E. B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, and Virginia Woolf, they would work in teams to research and write papers on modernist magazines. Together, we would use the new methodologies of periodical studies to transcend an old divide in modernist studies. In the process, we would reactivate the collaborative energies that generated so much modernist artistic and literary production. The seminar’s combination of great books and periodical studies reflected my ambivalence about periodical pedagogy. I’d had good results with previous, smaller-scale efforts to teach modernism through little magazines. When students encountered “difficult” modernist poems in their original magazine contexts—jostled among book reviews, artwork, and ads for cigarettes and soap—the poems seemed less baffling and remote: they became part of a media format students already knew how to read. Modernist magazines work like the contemporary analogues Michael Sayeau describes in his essay: within their sundry pages, arcane literary forms “come to appear familiar, already a part of . . . students’ everyday experiences of media and entertainment, yet something they suddenly feel empowered to understand and describe.” Like Marsha Bryant, I’ve also noticed that when students break out of the traditional framework for literary analysis (say, a three- to five-page close-reading of a poem or novel), they “often write livelier and more creative arguments.” Encouraged by such results, I was eager to incorporate periodical studies on...