Introduction

Abstract 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 portmanteau phrase for the broad array of laws and practices that promulgated legal segregation, cultural separation, and racial antagonism in the United States 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.