1 Such possibilities include the significance of intertextuality in the modernist contributions of authors from disparate cultures and identities, as well as the impact on their work of having lived in multiple cultural contexts. With such understanding, it will become possible to learn many potentially useful things about modernism, its time and its effects, that would otherwise miss notice. Such work must also begin to analyze the interrelationships between these disparate visions of modernism and, in so doing, seek to offer a clearer, less fragmented comprehension of literary modernity as a cultural movement. Yet if the goal of such explorations is actually to change our understanding of modernism, of what it is and was, then this revisionist work must undertake much more than simply bringing to the fore numerous previously silenced voices.

Each of these has demarcated its own discrete space within modernism, and each has recuperated a piece of modernism to an extrapolation of its own separate cultural framework (whether that be defined by race, gender, geography, or any other means of organizing knowledge about a specific subject)-rather than seeking to rearticulate the more traditional notions we hold about modern culture itself. However, while such critical analyses have greatly broadened our understanding of modernism, bringing to the field many new perspectives previously unconsidered in this context, they have also succeeded in bringing to light a number of alternative modernist canons. Arguments decrying traditional modernism’s exclusionary nature have produced numerous revisionist literary histories giving voice to the rich variety of contributions written by what we might call modernism’s “others”: from the writers of the Harlem Renaissance (Baker de Jongh), to the writings of women modernists (Scott), to those of Latin America and of the African diaspora (Calinescu Gilroy). From the late 1980s, critical analysis of the relationship between modernism and race has slowly picked up speed.

James baldwin and giovanni