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Black Modernisms English Studies 318
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English Studies 318: BlackModernisms
2020 Notes
Table of Contents
LECTURE 1: INTRODUCTORY LECTURE................................................................................2
SOCIAL MEDIA/ DEVICES/ INVENTIONS........................................................................................................... 2
MODERNITY.............................................................................................................................................. 2
MODERNISM............................................................................................................................................. 3
BRIEF HISTORY.......................................................................................................................................... 4
ARTWORK IN THE AFTERMATH OF WAR........................................................................................................... 6
WHAT ARE WE MISSING?............................................................................................................................. 6
LECTURE 2: THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE.............................................................................7
INTRODUCTION.......................................................................................................................................... 7
THE GREAT MIGRATION: CAUSES.................................................................................................................. 8
SALVATION............................................................................................................................................. 12
SEVEN PEOPLE DANCING........................................................................................................................... 13
CONCLUSIONS......................................................................................................................................... 14
LECTURE 3...................................................................................................................... 14
THE GAP OF REPRESENTATION (1).............................................................................................................. 14
THE GAP OF REPRESENTATION (2).............................................................................................................. 15
THE GAP OF REPRESENTATION (3).............................................................................................................. 16
THE GAP OF REPRESENTATION (4).............................................................................................................. 17
LECTURE 4...................................................................................................................... 17
MODERNISATION IN SOUTH AFRICA (OR WHAT BECOMES KNOWN AS SOUTH AFRICA).............................................17
PRINT CULTURE AMONG BLACK INTELLECTUALS............................................................................................... 19
THE NEW AFRICANS................................................................................................................................. 20
READERSHIP........................................................................................................................................... 22
MISREMEMBERING.................................................................................................................................... 22
LECTURE 5...................................................................................................................... 24
SOUTH AFRICAN SOCIETY POST-1910......................................................................................................... 24
BLACK MODERNISM.................................................................................................................................. 25
WOMEN’S WORK...................................................................................................................................... 26
LECTURE 6: CONCLUSION................................................................................................ 28
MODERNITY VS TRADITION?....................................................................................................................... 28
MODERNITY IN SOUTH AFRICA.................................................................................................................... 29
AFRICAN NATIONALISM.............................................................................................................................. 31
MODERNIST ART BY BLACK SOUTH AFRICANS................................................................................................33
LOSS OF SOVEREIGNTY............................................................................................................................. 34
FAILURE & REORGANIZATION..................................................................................................................... 35
1
,Lecture 1: Introductory lecture
Will begin with brief historical tour
o Because modernism lot to do with history of ideas
Muhammad Ali video on ‘Introductory Lecture’ slides
Social Media/ Devices/ Inventions
Phones, computers, cars/ general transportation, the internet = inventions of the
modern age
Imagine what happens to the flow of ideas when you remove the concept of movement
or speed?
o Consider how many of the ideas that structure our modern world require the
concept of speed to activate them; How many of the things that we engage with
are structured by time
th
20 century inventions, how many have to do with the transportation & movement of
information?
o In this regard, we introduce the concept of modernity.
Modernity
Modernity & modernism interlink but must be differentiated from one another!
Modernity:
o Concept of you as an individual become a subjective history, intermeshed
with the broader history of the world around you. Meaning your actions &
decisions are directly influenced by the various ideologies, ideas & concepts that
structure the society you inhabit.
o Interaction that begins to take place over late 19 th century & early 20th century,
of the human individual and broader society in a way that is structured by
technology & by invention, things different to what it was before modernity came
about.
Re-shaping of time and consciousness;
Technologies of modernity influence perceptions of time;
The powerful system of ideas that arises from the bourgeois revolutions of Europe in
the late eighteenth century – ideas such as autonomy, personhood, rights and
citizenship.
The emergence of an administered and industrialized society.
These concepts existed before modernity, and outside of the Western paradigm.
What does Modernity mean to you?
Useful to think about the kinds of occurrences that happen during the 19 th century
especially
o That reshape how the world looks & how people engage
o If before advent of Renaissance & advent of modern democracies, world was
structured around basic feudal systems, agricultural ways of living, advent of
tech, invention of factories = fundamentally changed the way we live our lives
because now instead of working on a farm, you work in a factory to produce
goods in a repeatedly fashion, as quickly as possible.
Paul Virilio: a logic of acceleration…lies at the heart of the organisation and
transformation of the modern world;
2
, o The onset of inventions that have to do with machinery, transportation &
the movement of people & things (like planes & cars), is supported by logic
of acceleration – if things can be moved quickly or more efficiently then it will be
better for us all.
o This becomes the guiding emphasis of everything that happens in the 19th
century onwards;
Development of factories, steam trains, locomotives etc & then eventual
development of the automobile
o Growth in technology fundamentally changes what the world looks like, with that
arises a degree of anxiety.
That anxiety has to do with how humans are meant to cope with sudden
shifts in their world view. From a relatively stable, slow paced, existence
to a new kind of existence centered around the time & efficiency of factory
system.
o How do we separate the human from the machine ? The human from the
progress to which it is meshed?
What does this mean to our understandings of progress in relation to the
concept of humanity?
Modernism
We can gloss modernism as being an artistic response to modernity
o Responding to the shift in how we live our lives & the anxiety formulated by that
shift
Creates a break with traditional modes of writing/expression; in an attempt to
think through what this new development means for human kind
We see an experimentation with form that is somewhat unprecedented
o Writers & artists are breaking away from traditional modes of representation &
the traditional concern which was to trying to represent things as they are,
towards thinking about things in the abstract because the development of the
accelerated world creates a situation in which things are no longer dependant on
a 1 to 1 relation between 1 person and another.
o Advent of telephone – able to cross space, time & distance like never before
Modernism is a way of thinking through the abstraction that is occasioned by
acceleration – the removal of the need to be directly in front of one another in order to
communicate & the optimism but also the anxiety that is generated by this
development.
Modernism (some received ideas):
Think about modernism as a series of received ideas about how people interact
with the world around them.
o We’ve come to think about modernism as a reaction to industrialisation
o Reaction to mechanisation of the modern world
o or to a crisis among the bourgeoisie?
o an era of unbridled self-expression?
o The instrumentalization of people?
o man as a diminished agent operating within systems that exceed him?
o The question of authenticity?
Modernism as a zone/reaction of aesthetic innovation and formal
experimentation
Traditional view of modernism as something that occurs only in the West
3
, o We will expand this notion.
So, what I want to ask is: is it possible to geographically expand this notion of
modernism?
o Traditionally, literary historians consider 1890-1930 to be the defined
period of modernism – but what happens when we alter that periodization to
take into account that there was a great deal of literary development happening
that had nothing to do with European culture?
o What about different histories in different parts of the world that was occurring
at the same time?
Brief History
Two images represent WW1 (“Great War”)
What happens in WW1 is fundamental in terms of our understanding of
progress & development
o If modernism & modernity at its earliest roots is about faith in the idea of
progress & idea of mechanisation, then WW1 (1914) marks a dramatic change to
our understanding of progress & development & how we irrevocably understand
the modern world.
Pic 1 (left) = Allies; Russia, France & Britain
Pic 2 (right) = Axis; Germany, Austria-Hungary & Turkish Ottoman Empire
The outbreak of the 1st world war in 1914 is a significant moment in the development
of the modernist imagination.
o Advances in warfare don’t limit death; they enable it on a vast scale
o With new tech, no longer a case of combat or warfare happening on a 1 to 1
basis (for eg. Guns didn’t really fire very far), whereas now there are guns that
can fire over thousands of km’s, & canons, and death can be inflicted on people
whom you cannot actually see from where you are physically standing
o This development enables; dealing out death on a
massive scale. Thus casualties are far higher in this
war than ever before
o Fundamentally shapes & reshapes the modern world
because this war goes on for 4 years – its effects on the
world were huge
WW1 is the logical conclusion of the advances in how
we think about ourselves, occasioned by modernity:
4
, o If you match rapid changes in ideas about nationality & identity with rapid
advances in ideas about the self, & you place in the service of these ideas rapid
developments, you get a war where death happens on an unparalleled scale.
o We see staggering numbers, in keeping with the modern era;
War as the ultimate breakdown in communication (trench warfare)
This abstraction that happens, fundamentally changes the way
society occurs because now we have a shift in things that we
cannot go back from
War as that which fundamentally alters the way society looks.
We see this radical disjuncture between ideology and reality;
Look at what’s going on in an image like this;
Propaganda poster telling people to join the Women’s land army
But what the poster is saying and what the image is aesthetically
telling us, is two different things. On one hand, image of a pastoral
field & sense of people getting together & doing their bit to help the
war effort, on the other hand, we realise that we cannot go back to
how things were before the war.
It also calls attention to people who are traditionally excluded from
our understandings of war. Usually we think war and men, not
women.
Who else is fighting in this war? Who else is being affected by it?
o Do this to question what is excluded in the traditional ideas &
concepts that modernity tends to encode. Who is left out of
the narrative?
Link between the history & our literary work
WW1 brings about a drastic change in how people think about themselves
Many authors & artists, were directly/indirectly involved in the war, thus for many of
them in the aftermath of the war, they were struggling to make sense of how you
return to a normal society. Which makes sense! Millions of people died over 4 years?!
How do you make sense of being able to kill 16 thousand people in a single afternoon?
What happens to your idea of progress if you witness that?
‘What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the
mysterious shutters of the impossible?’ – Marinetti
o War brings about cynicism, disillusionment with man’s investment in
technology & progress.
o WW1 poets exhibit that sense of disillusionment & cynicism
If you live in a society where you’ve been fed this idea that progress is always good &
where progress is always to be desired but progress is also the thing that leads to this
slaughter on a massive scale, you have to question what’s going on.
This is where modernism comes into things. Modernism is shot through with this kind of
cynicism & disillusionment. It is affected by this new sense of self-awareness, of the
individual in relation to the broader society. But that broader society isn’t always
working in your best interests. That occasions a degree of introspection; on the part
of the artists & creatives working in this time period.
We see in a lot of modernist art is explorations of the darker aspects of human nature.
What else is going on in this picture of modernity that we are being fed, this progress
that is being given to us by our governments?
CF: Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto
5
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