This book explores a rich cultural hybridity at the heart of transatlantic modernism. Focusing on cubism, jazz, and Josephine Baker's performance in the Danse Sauvage, Sieglinde Lemke uncovers a crucial history of white and black intercultural exchange, a phenomenon until now greatly obscured by a cloak of whiteness. Considering artists and critics such as Picasso, Alain Locke, Nancy Cunard, and Paul Whiteman, in addition to Baker, Lemke documents a potent cultural dialectic in which black artistic expression fertilized white modernism, just as white art forms helped shape the black...

Vernacular Matters of American Literature blurs and dissolves existing lines of literary demarcation and responds to the unanswered call to practice a genuinely comparative approach to American Studies. Sieglinde Lemke examines three novels from distinct cultures and times, within their discrete ethnic contexts and with an understanding of their role in the American vernacular literary tradition. From this study of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Ana Castillo's So Far From God, a new model for analyzing American...

This book brings the emergent interest in social class and inequality to the field of television studies. The case studies in this book demonstrate how sophisticated narrative techniques coincide with equally complex ways of exposing class divisions in contemporary American life and how the examined shows disrupt the hegemonic order of class.