Modern America: Gwendolyn Bennett and Victoria Ocampo Capture the Continents
Modern America: Gwendolyn Bennett and Victoria Ocampo Capture the Continents

Summary/Abstract: This project presents the ways in which early 20th century national and continental consciousnesses, both of which contain universalizing tendencies, become key points in the identity making of ‘Americans.’ It juxtaposes Gwendolyn Bennett, the Harlem Renaissance writer of the Ebony Flute series with Argentinean Victoria Ocampo, the editor of the literary magazine Sur. This comparative analysis of ‘minor’ and ‘major’ women intellectuals argues that a kind of ‘American Literature‘ emerges through particular formations of specific racialized and gendered identities creating, and created by, the politico-economic battle between modernist capitalism and socialism. The project is part of a larger work—including Virginia Woolf (England), Grazia Deledda (Italy), and Cornelia Sorabji (India)—that maps how the making of racialized and gendered ‘natives’ in the frames of political philosophies produces types of literature that are conflicted in terms of local and global aspirations. This synchronic study also has a diachronic dimension in that it traces the legacies of identity, nation, and literature for our own modernities.

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