Adam McKible - Böcker

The "problem of the twentieth century" was one of the most important factors in the development of American modernism. W. E. B. Du Bois, of course, identified that problem as "the color line" a phrase for the broad array of laws and practices that promulgated legal segregation, cultural separation, and racial antagonism in the US from the end of Reconstruction through the Civil Rights era. A more familiar name, borrowed from the popular tradition of blackface minstrelsy, personified this elusive but ever-present racial regime: Jim Crow. Taking as its starting point the contemporaneity of the Jim Crow era and the modernist era in art and culture, Jim Crow Modernism explores how these phenomena informed one another, and how artists and thinkers on both sides of the color line worked in and against the "separate but equal" landscape and the organizing logic of Jim Crow. This collection of new essays by prominent scholars in several fields-from American literary studies to film, media, art history, politics, and performance-provides a broad and deep analysis of this vital aspect of modern cultural history. Contributors address well known modernist figures like T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, and Wallace Thurman, as well as many others, from the Jamaican-American writer Claude McKay to the Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi to the Afro-Latino writer Piri Thomas, whose peripatetic lives and careers initiated them into far-ranging traditions and contexts. At the same time, Jim Crow Modernism reaches well beyond the segregated US South to examine national and global spaces, networks, and migrations, from New York and Los Angeles to the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Winner, 2023-2024 RSAP Book Prize, Research Society for American PeriodicalsShortlisted, 2025 Modernist Studies Association Book PrizeIn the early twentieth century, the Saturday Evening Post was perhaps the most popular and influential magazine in the United States, establishing literary reputations and shaping American culture. In the popular imagination, it is best remembered for Norman Rockwell’s covers, which nostalgically depicted a wholesome and idyllic American way of life. But beneath those covers lurked a more troubling reality. Under the direction of its longtime editor, George Horace Lorimer, the magazine helped justify racism and white supremacy. It published works by white authors that made heavy use of paternalistic tropes and demeaning humor, portraying Jim Crow segregation and violence as simple common sense.Circulating Jim Crow demonstrates how the Post used stereotypical dialect fiction to promulgate white supremacist ideology and dismiss Black achievements, citizenship, and humanity. Adam McKible tells the story of Lorimer’s rise to prominence and examines the white authors who provided the editor and his readers with the caricatures they craved. He also explores how Black writers of the Harlem Renaissance pushed back against the Post and its commodified racism. McKible places the erstwhile household names who wrote for the magazine in conversation with figures such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ann Petry, W. E. B. Du Bois, and William Faulkner. Revealing the role of the Saturday Evening Post in normalizing racism for millions of readers, this book also offers a new understanding of how Black writers challenged Jim Crow ideology.

Winner, 2023-2024 RSAP Book Prize, Research Society for American PeriodicalsShortlisted, 2025 Modernist Studies Association Book PrizeIn the early twentieth century, the Saturday Evening Post was perhaps the most popular and influential magazine in the United States, establishing literary reputations and shaping American culture. In the popular imagination, it is best remembered for Norman Rockwell’s covers, which nostalgically depicted a wholesome and idyllic American way of life. But beneath those covers lurked a more troubling reality. Under the direction of its longtime editor, George Horace Lorimer, the magazine helped justify racism and white supremacy. It published works by white authors that made heavy use of paternalistic tropes and demeaning humor, portraying Jim Crow segregation and violence as simple common sense.Circulating Jim Crow demonstrates how the Post used stereotypical dialect fiction to promulgate white supremacist ideology and dismiss Black achievements, citizenship, and humanity. Adam McKible tells the story of Lorimer’s rise to prominence and examines the white authors who provided the editor and his readers with the caricatures they craved. He also explores how Black writers of the Harlem Renaissance pushed back against the Post and its commodified racism. McKible places the erstwhile household names who wrote for the magazine in conversation with figures such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ann Petry, W. E. B. Du Bois, and William Faulkner. Revealing the role of the Saturday Evening Post in normalizing racism for millions of readers, this book also offers a new understanding of how Black writers challenged Jim Crow ideology.

This book examines reactions to the Russian Revolution by four little magazines of the teens and twenties (TheLiberator, The Messenger, The Little Review, and TheDial) in order to analyze some of the ways modernist writers negotiate the competing demands of aesthetics, political commitment and race. Re-examining interconnections among such superficially disparate phenomena as the Harlem Renaissance, Greenwich Village bohemianism, modernism and Leftist politics, this book rightly emphasizes the vitality of little magazines and argues for their necessary place in the study of modernism.

This book examines reactions to the Russian Revolution by four little magazines of the teens and twenties (TheLiberator, The Messenger, The Little Review, and TheDial) in order to analyze some of the ways modernist writers negotiate the competing demands of aesthetics, political commitment and race. Re-examining interconnections among such superficially disparate phenomena as the Harlem Renaissance, Greenwich Village bohemianism, modernism and Leftist politics, this book rightly emphasizes the vitality of little magazines and argues for their necessary place in the study of modernism.

Little magazines made modernism happen. These pioneering enterprises were typically founded by individuals or small groups intent on publishing the experimental works or radical opinions of untried, unpopular, or underrepresented writers. Recently, little magazines have re-emerged as an important critical tool for examining the local and material conditions that shaped modernism. This volume reflects the diversity of Anglo-American modernism, with essays on avant-garde, literary, political, regional, and African American little magazines. It also presents a diversity of approaches to these magazines: discussions of material practices and relations; analyses of the relationship between little magazines and popular or elite audiences; examinations of correspondences between texts and images; feminist modifications of the traditional canon or histories; and reflections on the emerging field of periodical studies. All emphasize the primacy and materiality of little magazines. With a preface by Mark Morrisson, an afterword by Robert Scholes, and an extensive bibliography of little magazine resources, the collection serves both as an introduction to little magazines and a reconsideration of their integral role in the development of modernism.