Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Afromodernisms – Black Modernist Practice in Contemporary Context
- I Paris, blackness and the avant-garde
- II Afromodern Caribbean
- III Harlem: Metaphors of modern experience
- 7 ‘Death to any one that puts his foot in No Man['s] Land’: ‘Afromodernist’ Reimagining and Aesthetic Experimentation in Horace Pippin's World War I Manuscripts and Paintings
- 8 Making the Word Flesh: Three at the Threshold of Tomorrow
- 9 ‘Thinking in hieroglyphics’: Representations of Egypt in the New Negro Renaissance
- Afterword: Stormy Weather and Afromodernism
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
9 - ‘Thinking in hieroglyphics’: Representations of Egypt in the New Negro Renaissance
from III - Harlem: Metaphors of modern experience
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Afromodernisms – Black Modernist Practice in Contemporary Context
- I Paris, blackness and the avant-garde
- II Afromodern Caribbean
- III Harlem: Metaphors of modern experience
- 7 ‘Death to any one that puts his foot in No Man['s] Land’: ‘Afromodernist’ Reimagining and Aesthetic Experimentation in Horace Pippin's World War I Manuscripts and Paintings
- 8 Making the Word Flesh: Three at the Threshold of Tomorrow
- 9 ‘Thinking in hieroglyphics’: Representations of Egypt in the New Negro Renaissance
- Afterword: Stormy Weather and Afromodernism
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
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. 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. Judging the impact of travel to the Soviet Union upon Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and Paul Robeson, Kate A. Baldwin introduces Communism into the mix, describing ‘internationalism's potential to trigger others’ national self-consciousness'. Focusing upon ‘concepts of culture’, David Luis-Brown has documented the development of hemispheric intellectual networks, led by the anthropologist Franz Boas, which prompted a flow of ideas between the New Negro movement, Cuban negrismo and Mexican indigenismo. More controversially, Mark Christian Thompson has argued that such writers as Marcus Garvey, Zora Neale Hurston and George Schuyler looked beyond America as they ‘appropriated and elaborated on fascist ideology as a means of revolutionary black nation building’.
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- AfromodernismsParis, Harlem and the Avant-Garde, pp. 204 - 231Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013