“Traditions of the People”

Abstract Conventional wisdom holds that modernism is antithetical to tradition. Yet tradition is not a neutral category. Bringing T. S. Eliot into conversation with African American writer Charles W. Chesnutt, this essay reveals how “tradition” has been deployed in ways that conceal its implicit racial connotations. Eliot aligned it not only with the “mind of Europe,” but also with the reactionary racial politics of the Southern Agrarians, whose critique of industrialism rested upon segregation and anti-immigrant sentiments. Chesnutt, however, makes explicit what is unsaid in Eliot’s theory: that tradition in the US is thoroughly imbricated with racial hierarchies. In The Marrow of Tradition as well as his nonfiction, Chesnutt develops a Black pragmatic modernism, grounded in an understanding of racial prejudice as collective habit. Ultimately, this essay reveals how the concept of tradition in American modernism—and modernist studies—is thoroughly enmeshed with the racial discourse of Jim Crow.