For the past twelve years, James Smethurst has influentially rounded out the critical landscape of twentieth-century African American literature – attending to the roads less travelled of poetry in the 1930s and 1940s in his The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry 1930–1946 (1999), and to the black arts movement in his acclaimed The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (2005). Here he continues this revisionary project by pressing the claims of the “Nadir” writers, to use Rayford Logan's term for the period when Reconstruction hopes collapsed into a fully institutionalized and constitutionally legitimated system of racial segregation and disfranchisement at the beginning of the twentieth century. His claim for writers such as James Weldon Johnson, Pauline Hopkins, Fenton Johnson, and, above all, Paul Lawrence Dunbar is that their literary responses to the psychological, spatial, and sexual dynamics of the Nadir were amongst the first examples of what would become the preoccupations of American modernism. This leads to two central theses: first, that American modernism is different from its European counterparts through being, in effect, a Jim Crow modernism, conditioned by the dualistic divisions of mass North–South migration and segregated urban space bequeathed by American racial politics; and second, that it was writers of the Nadir, not the rather more overexposed authors of the Harlem Renaissance, who initiated these insights – insights that would inform the entire American literary culture.

For the most part, this is not a history of the institutional and personal relationships that brought black and white artists together in US modernism akin to studies by George Hutchinson, William Maxwell, and Emily Bernard. (The brilliant chapter on Fenton Johnson and William Stanley Braithwaite's engagement with the little magazines and interracial bohemias of the “New Poetry” is a welcome exception.) Instead Smethurst works through a checklist of central phenomena of modernist culture – dualistic imaginaries, a crisis of cultural memory, new urban bohemian spaces, and dynamics of sexual coercion and sexual freedom played out on the terrain of race – and locates how these frequently were pioneered in the writing of the Nadir. In doing so he skillfully demonstrates how this writing broke with traditions of the slave narrative produced by an earlier generation of African American writers, as postbellum aspirations for full citizenship and feelings of national belonging morphed into more elegiac moods, divided psychologies, and sectional affiliations. Notable chapters locate social/psychological dualism not solely as the groundbreaking and exceptional theorization of W. E. B. Du Bois, but as a widely accepted feature of African American experience articulated by several other fin de siècle authors. Smethurst also illuminates the representation of territorially confined and sexually transgressive bohemias in the novels of Dunbar and Johnson, which were among the first descriptions of interracial bohemian districts anywhere in American literature. For the most part Smethurst avoids the issue of how directly this work influenced a later generation of canonical modernist writers – save for close considerations of Gertrude Stein's Melanctha, and William Carlos Williams's engagements with African American culture. Instead, The African American Roots of Modernism makes the broader assertion that African American authors participated both early and definitively in crafting “a broad sense of ‘American’ artistic modernity” (25).

The African American Roots of Modernism wears its scholarship lightly, but its erudition is impressive – in fields as diverse as US labor and imperial history, canons of anglophone poetry, the cultural impact of the Civil War, the complex relation between nationalism and socialism in African American aesthetics, and European–American modernism. This fashions the book into a richly insightful and informative account of the often occluded racial dynamics of early modernism, and also one of the development of an American literature of urban modernity. Yet the fault line lurking underneath the book is the question of what (and who) defines “modernism,” a fault line Smethurst is hardly alone in struggling to navigate. Early on he voices his intention to avoid the familiar game of “find the modernism” (25) in reading African American writers, but often his fairly traditional view of canonical modernism and modernist preoccupations seems to set the terms of debate for assessing the writers of the Nadir, however welcome and insightful that assessment might be. This seems to fall into the catch-22 of much recent work in modernist studies: either one allows traditional canons to define the terms of entry to petitioning newcomers, or one risks modernism becoming a term so elastic that it becomes functionally meaningless. Ultimately, though, many will appreciate Smethurst's bullish confidence over what modernism is, and will be convinced that its American manifestation was ineluctably conditioned by the spatial and psychological conditions of Jim Crow.