The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements This book could not have been written without a good deal of help, advice, and support from a number of institutions and individuals whose encouragement and enthusiasm for the project have been invaluable. I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, who funded a period of research leave, and also to the British Academy for funding two awards: one for a research trip to New York City in 2005, and one covering the costs involved in reproducing the images included in the book. The support for these proposals from George Hutchinson, Peter Nicholls, and Martin Halliwell was extremely heartening, as was the enthusiasm for the project expressed from the very outset by Amy Gorelick at the University Press of Florida. Readers’ reports from Anthony Dawahare and Jennifer Keene assured me that this was a project worth pursuing and gave excellent advice on where that pursuit should go. Barbara Drake and Jacqueline Kinghorn Brown did a very intelligent and thorough job of the copyediting, and staff at the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the New York Public Library main branch, the Schomburg Center, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and, above all, the University of Exeter library have been extremely helpful. The Department of English at the University of Exeter has once again provided exemplary support in ways administrative, financial , intellectual and moral; I could not hope for a better workplace. In particular, Rick Rylance and Helen Taylor have given me excellent guidance on the project, and I have benefited from advice from Regenia Gagnier, Jo Gill, Margaretta Jolly, Bob Lawson-Peebles, Ashley Tauchert, Dawn Teed, and Helen Thomas. Special thanks must go to Helen Hanson, both for her astute feedback on parts of the manuscript and for being such a good studybuddy during our period of research leave. Elsewhere, the book was greatly enhanced by feedback garnered at conferences hosted by the British Association for American Studies, the Modernist Studies Association, the Collegium for African American Research, and the Great War and Popular Culture Conference held at the University of Newcastle in April 2006. Advice from Anne Birien, Alex Goody, George Hutchinson, Barbara Foley, Nancy Kuhl, Mark Levitch, Adam McKible, Bill Miles, and Grace Moore has been very useful, and I am greatly indebted to xxii Donna VanDerZee for her support in my work on her late husband’s photographic archive. Patricia Rae greatly helped shape my thinking on race and memorial while including a piece of this book in her collection Modernism and Mourning, and Jeremy Braddock, Jonathan Eburne, and John N. Duvall at Modern Fiction Studies offered trenchant criticism on the subject of the New Negro Renaissance and Francophilia. Once again, friends and family have provided the kind of support for which I am perpetually grateful. I’m proud to be able to dedicate the book to Rachael, a wonderful little sister, scientist, and friend. Acknowledgments ...