The Maternal Bodies of Jim Crow Modernism

Abstract This essay sees Jim Crow modernism as emerging from the nexus of women’s literature and reproductive sexuality. It engages the work of Black women writers like Anita Scott Coleman and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, who saw maternity as a vehicle for racial uplift. It examines the work of white women like Margery Latimer and Josephine Schuyler, who reflected on interracial intimacy and linked it to art making. It also considers women writers whose answer to the reproductive imperatives of race was childlessness, like Nella Larsen. Except for Larsen, these writers have received little attention outside of recovery efforts by feminist and Black scholars. Yet bringing them together does more than participate in their further recovery: it demonstrates how women’s reflections on the nexus of race and reproductive sexuality were central to the creation of Jim Crow modernism and suggests it was their transgressive portrayals of race and intimacy that led to their elision from literary historical memory.