Race and the modernist aesthetic

This chapter begins with the relation between race and the modernist aesthetic by making two general statements: first, no student of literature and the arts can ignore the fact that the modernist movement in literature, and second, the arts was one of the most important phenomena in the changing nature and function of culture in the twentieth century. Race enters modernism, first and foremost, in the form of the primitive. Indeed, there is enough documentation to show that almost every major modern writer, painter and theorist posited the exotic and the primitive as an alternative to the Western industrial culture many of them were revolting against. The new discipline of psychology attracted almost every major modern writer because it provided both what seemed to be a compelling diagnosis of the problems of modern industrial culture and a mode of cognition which, by privileging the unconscious and irrational aspects of experience, posited an alternative to the rationality of modernity.