Modernism and the Middle Passage

Laura Winkiel

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Hardback

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English

Columbia University Press
14 October 2025

Literary studies: general; Gender studies, gender groups

Series: Modernist Latitudes

Modernism is typically thought of as focusing on the new and now, not looking backward at historical catastrophes. Yet in many surprising, often submerged ways, the transatlantic slave trade shaped the works of both Black and white writers. This book reveals how modernists turned to the Middle Passage-and, in so doing, upended Western ideas about time and space, race and gender, and the category of the human.

Bringing together Afro-diasporic and Black studies scholarship, modernist aesthetics, and environmental studies, Laura Winkiel presents a new literary history of modernism from the perspective of the Atlantic and its role in slavery and colonization. She examines the works of African, Caribbean, British, and US writers including Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Rhys, Amos Tutuola, and Virginia Woolf, as well as later interlocutors such as Marlon James and Jamaica Kincaid. Paying particular attention to settings on shorelines, deltas, archipelagos, and the ocean, Winkiel argues that allusions to the slave trade make visible the exploitative structural relations between the metropolis and the colonies and between the liberal subject and its others. By turning to the ocean and its violent histories, this groundbreaking book rethinks the fraught relationship of modernism and race.

By: Laura Winkiel
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Country of Publication: United States [Currently unable to ship to USA: see Shipping Info]
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9780231217248
ISBN 10: 0231217242
Series: Modernist Latitudes
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 14 October 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , College/higher education , Undergraduate , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Laura Winkiel is professor of English and affiliate faculty in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. A past president of the Modernist Studies Association, she is the author of Modernism: The Basics (2017) and Modernism, Race, and Manifestos (2008), as well as a coeditor of Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (2005).

Reviews for Modernism and the Middle Passage

Modernism and the Middle Passage is a brilliant display of Laura Winkiel’s mastery of modernism and modernist studies. Using the lens of oceanic geographies and temporalities, and focusing on the archipelagos of the Atlantic world, she reroutes modernism from its familiar places and reconfigures its connection to different ways of being and becoming. The book expands the history and geography of modernism beyond its European borders and forcefully connects the modernist aesthetic to the violence of the Middle Passage. -- Simon Gikandi, Class of 1943 University Professor of English, Princeton University