Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-07T11:56:19.544Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Introduction: Afromodernisms – Black Modernist Practice in Contemporary Context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2013

Fionnghuala Sweeney
Affiliation:
University College Dublin
Kate Marsh
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
Get access

Summary

‘beauty is dead’

Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto, 1918

‘it is the bounden duty of black America to begin this great work of the creation of beauty, of the preservation of beauty, of the realization of beauty’

W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘Criteria of Negro Art’, 1926

What kind of world does the black interwar artist, writer and intellectual see? How do black artists, writers and intellectuals configure this world? A contemporary example of the ways in which one intellectual imagined the interrelated geographies of black experience is useful perhaps. In May of 1932, Eslanda Goode Robeson, then resident in London, wrote to George Horace Lorimer, editor of Philadelphia's Sunday Evening Post, of her plans ‘to write a series of articles on the Negro’. Signalling her intention ‘to approach the subject from an entirely new angle’, Goode claimed that she knew ‘personally nearly every Negro of interest and importance both at home and abroad’, and that she had always enjoyed ‘such access as perhaps would never be gained by any other person, white or black’. Her idea, she explained, was to undertake ‘a leisurely world tour, stopping for an indefinite period in various Negro centers, collecting interesting general and intimate information, absorbing local color and interviewing the most important and significant personalities, and collecting photographs, – writing articles as I go’.

Type
Chapter
Information
Afromodernisms
Paris, Harlem and the Avant-Garde
, pp. 1 - 16
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×