The space for race: The minority demographics of United States modernism

The Space for Race reconsiders American modernist culture by focusing on the complex relationship between racial identity and spatial experience at the start of the twentieth century. Supplementing formalist approaches to modernism, this dissertation envisions American modernist literature and culture in relation to broader conceptual problems that arise with interracial contact and the global movement of peoples to the United States. To view U.S. modernism in multi-racial, transcultural contexts is to understand that minority subjects have never taken for granted the task of orienting themselves within a social landscape often hostile to their presence. Along with the project of recontextualizing American modernism, the dissertation intervenes in the field of postmodern spatial theory by putting it in dialogue with theories of racial identity. Fredric Jameson's concept of cognitive mapping provides the starting point for my theoretical argument: I claim that the chaotic experience of urban life during the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century illuminates how cognitive mapping might be reconceived. The introductory chapter frames the historical background and the theoretical project of the dissertation, examining modernism as a cultural practice that imagines relationships between agents in social space.; The chapters of my dissertation compare narrative accounts of ethnic European assimilation, Chinese transnationalism, and an African American global imagination. Chapter one interrogates the biopolitics of Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, exploring how racial difference is coded and materialized in the urban geographies he imagines and depicts. Chapter two offers a new perspective on critical debates over the identity politics of Sui Sin Far's writing by shifting the discussion to transnationalism. Within this historical context, Sui's figuration of Chinese merchants translates transnational power dynamics into U.S. racial hierarchies. Chapter three traces the transition W.E.B. Du Bois makes from a national perspective on race to a global one in Darkwater, marking his move from romantic racialism to a social constructionist view. Chapter four examines the relationship between race and space in Nella Larsen's Quicksand by casting the novel's protagonist Helga Crane as a flaneuse, which foregrounds how race, gender, sexuality, and class shape the urban experience of African American women.