Modernism and Race is comprised of new accounts of how literary practice in late modernity engaged with raciologies – the hypothetical premises about humankind, to paraphrase David Theo Goldberg, which, supported by once prestigious knowledge in such fields as anthropology, sociology, linguistics and biology, became embedded as commonsense culture. All the essays collected here are involved with such issues as how ‘races’ are imagined and represented in modern and modernist literatures. They interrogate the anxieties and desires that are expressed in or projected onto racialised figures, and examine how individual modern writers relate to the collective identities posited by race discourse. At the same time, these essays respond to the larger and more general claim that race is a central conceptual category in which the cultural project of modernism, however it be defined and historicised, took place. In this context, literary modernism and, indeed, the wider literature of the modern period, become inextricably related in complex and often ambiguous ways to the dynamics of the all-encompassing conception modernity, ‘the general period emerging from the sixteenth century in the historical formation of what only relatively recently has come to be called “the West”’.

The literary history addressed in Modernism and Race, then, is quite different from the kind of history implied in a tradition represented at its best by a book like Michael H. Levenson's A Genealogy of Modernism (1984). The concern here is not primarily with tracing the development of literary form.