The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance by James Smethurst (review)

James Smethurst's The African American Roots of Modernism is an impressively thorough and provocative account of the impact of African American literature on modernism in the United States. While previous scholarship has addressed the importance of African American culture, and especially language and music, on the development of modernism, this book emphasizes the influence of African American writers on the understanding of modernity in the U. S. Smethurst identifies "the African American roots of modernism" with the establishment of the Jim Crow system of segregation, beginning with the "separate but equal" system of the South and continuing with the segregation of urban space throughout the U. S. African American artists and intellectuals who wrote between Reconstruction and the New Negro Renaissance not only conceptualized the "sort of fragmented subjectivity and urban alienation that became a hallmark of modernism in the United States," they also were "among the very first to imagine, represent, and promote a U. S. artistic bohemia linked to an 'American' new literature" that was distinctively interracial (215).

Although not as comprehensive as Smethurst's magnificent The Black Arts Movement (2005), The African American Roots of Modernism is perhaps more likely to transform perceptions of African American literary history. The chapters of this book are organized thematically, but they also follow a chronological trajectory of two "waves" of African American writers. The first group includes Paul Laurence Dunbar, W. E. B. Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, Charles Chesnutt, and Booker T. Washington, who grew up after emancipation but became active as writers as Jim Crow superseded the ideals of Reconstruction in the 1890s. The second features James Weldon Johnson, Fenton Johnson, and William Stanley Braithwaite, whose early literary careers coincide with the extension of Jim Crow segregation in northern cities in the 1900s and 1910s.

The first chapter of The African American Roots of Modernism examines constructions of African American dualism that responded to the intensification of Jim Crow segregation by the turn of the century. This chapter incisively explains how concepts of dualism articulated in Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, Washington's Up from Slavery, James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Chesnutt's conjure stories, and the poetry of Dunbar and Fenton Johnson not only respond specifically to the political and cultural questions of the Jim Crow U. S., but also have a lasting resonance in U. S. modernism. While Du Bois's concepts of "double consciousness" and "the veil" are the best-known figures for African American dualism, Smethurst emphasizes the dialogue about black subjectivity and culture in which they emerged, the dialogue compelled by the Jim Crow "dual status" of African Americans as "citizens and subcitizens" (63). He furthermore argues for the greater literary influence of Dunbar's concept of "the mask," which is comparable to the veil but is more assertive in showing "the act of concealment and its coerced motivation, underpinning militant and historically pointed social criticism" (34).

Dunbar's influence as a poet and novelist is paramount throughout The African American Roots of Modernism. His underappreciated importance is also evident in the second chapter, which documents how the trope of the black Civil War soldier evolved as a figure of "black modernity in which African American citizenship would be a key constituent of the new reconstructed nation" (19). With the development of the Jim Crow system, the figure of the black Civil War veteran becomes one of betrayal, of regret, of melancholy, or of "an existential validation of African American humanity adrift in the fogs of an American political limbo" (20), a figure comparable to subsequent African American literary portrayals of World War I, World War II, and Vietnam War veterans.

The next two chapters address the literary and cultural implications of the Jim Crow system in urban centers, especially Northern cities such as Chicago and New York. The chapter on the early...