Modernist Studies and the Redlining of African American Poetry

Abstract This chapter compares the practice of “redlining” in real estate to the mid-twentieth-century exclusion of Black poetry from the field of modernist studies. The redlining of Black poetry from modernism is evident in its confinement to sociological journals and its absence in academic literary journals in the mid-twentieth century. The effect of this was to produce a canon and literary history of modernist poetry as the exclusive property of whites only. Poetry by Black writers became inherently devalued as merely “of sociological interest.” The absence of Black poetry in the formation of a modernist poetry canon contradicts the historical evidence of the many ways Black poets were active in the literary field during the modernist period.