Modernism/modernity

Focusing on the representation of artists and their models in the work of Jean Rhys and Claude McKay, I argue that during the interwar years, Caribbean artists produced a modernism that critiqued European modernist aesthetics as complicit in the bourgeois projects of nation and empire. Caribbean artists criticized the merging and sexualizing of black and female identities in European modernism by redefining modernist conceptions of the prostitute and the primitive. Asserting alternative conceptions of the primitive, of sexuality, and of community, they produced aesthetics and politics that challenged European modernism and modernity as well as the anglophone Caribbean nationalisms emerging in the 1930s.