Lecture: "Race and the Modernist Anthology," Dr. Peter Kalliney, University of Kentucky

Race and the Modernist Anthology:

Nancy Cunard, Langston Hughes, Claude MacKay, and Ezra Pound

The Department of English and the Harry Ransom Center present a talk by Dr. Peter Kalliney, Associate Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, on "Race and the Modernist Anthology."  Relying on the HRC's Nancy Cunard archive, this talk will focus on black modernist writers' committment to and value of aesthetic autonomy and artistic purity in comparison to their white counterparts.

Using the occasion of Nancy Cunard's *Negro* anthology (1934), Kalliney examines the possibilities and limits of cross-racial collaboration among modernist intellectuals such as Langston Hughes, Nancy Cunard, Ezra Pound, and Claude MacKay and the ways in which professional considerations, rather than political views, determined how and in what circumstances modernist writers were willing to collaborate across racial boundaries.