Modernism/modernity

Abstract:

In Ulysses, Joyce thematizes the ways that non-American global writers leverage and export narratives of American racial violence in order to mark themselves as modern, cosmopolitan actors, situating themselves within a global discursive network by commentating on spectacular American racism. I use the term "lynching modernism" to delineate the ways both British and Irish creators wielded "Americanness" as a productive cultural fiction that informed their own modes of modern creative production. Blackness, as an aesthetic category, gets juggled carefully to become representative of, useful to, and used both by non-blacks within the United States and by non-Americans outside of it.