Breaking the Iceberg: Ernest Hemingway, Black Modernism, and the Politics of Narrative Appropriation

This project redresses the scarcity of literary criticism that deals with the fictions of Ernest Hemingway in relation to black cultural productions of the twentieth century. Building from a postcolonial theoretical framework, it establishes a historicized dialogue in which African-American authors such as Langston Hughes and James Baldwin strategically confront, appropriate, and repurpose Hemingway's modernist narratives. This dialogue dramatizes my conviction that black writers of the Harlem Renaissance and post-Renaissance decades were tactically reading and resisting Modernism's central texts in ways that can be seen to anticipate critical deconstruction. Reading Hemingway through minority discourse thus gives this project a new purchase on his aesthetic choices, at the same time that it complicates and augments existing theories about influence, ingenuity, and power in twentieth-century African-American literature.