Modernism and the Middle Passage

Modernism and the Middle Passage challenges the typical perception of modernism as solely focused on the new and immediate, disregarding historical catastrophes. In truth, the transatlantic slave trade profoundly influenced the works of both Black and white writers. This book uncovers how modernists engaged with the Middle Passage, thereby disrupting Western concepts of time and space, race and gender, and the very notion of what it means to be human.

By bringing together Afro-diasporic and Black studies scholarship, modernist aesthetics, and environmental studies, Laura Winkiel presents a novel literary history of modernism from the vantage point of the Atlantic, its role in slavery, and colonisation. She explores the writings of African, Caribbean, British, and US authors, including Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Rhys, Amos Tutuola, and Virginia Woolf. Furthermore, she considers the work of later interlocutors such as Marlon James and Jamaica Kincaid.

Winkiel pays particular attention to settings like shorelines, deltas, archipelagos, and the ocean. She argues that references to the slave trade bring to light the exploitative structural relations between the metropolis and the colonies, as well as between the liberal subject and its others. By focusing on the ocean and its violent histories, this groundbreaking book rethinks the complex relationship between modernism and race.