Isabel Soto

Isabel Soto holds degrees from University of London and London School of Economics. She is an Associate Professor in English Studies in the Modern Languages Department of Spain’s Universidad Nac...

Violet Showers Johnson

Violet Showers Johnson is Professor of History at Agnes Scott College, Atlanta, Georgia.

Western Fictions, Black Realities
Meanings of Blackness and Modernities

Isabel Soto

Violet Showers Johnson

This anthology interrogates two salient concepts in studying the black experience. Ushered in with the age of New World encounters, modernity emerged as brutal and complex, from its very definition to its manifestations. Equally challenging is blackness, which is forever dangling between the range of uplifting articulations and insidious degradation. The essays in Western Fictions address the conflicting confluences of these two terms. Questioning Eurocentric and mainstream American interpretations, they reveal the diverse meanings of modernities and blackness from a wide range of milieus of the black experience. Interdisciplinary and wide-ranging in thematic and epochal scope, they use theoretical and empirical studies of a range of subjects to demonstrate that, indeed, blackness is relevant for understanding modernities and vice versa.