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. 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 Jamieson and Victor Daly, among many others – adopted self-reflexive practices designed to challenge formal conventions by transgressing aesthetic boundaries. Working to develop an alternative and even a new textual language, they sought to extrapolate the psychological and physical realities of the terrible phenomenon that was modern warfare. More particularly, they grappled with dominant generic categorisations and existing narrative frameworks in order to come to grips with the ways in which black military experiences were caricatured, burlesqued and even annihilated in white mainstream representations.