Women Writing Race, Nation, and History: N/native

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Notes

1 Sonita Sarker, Women Writing Race, Nation, and History: N/native, 1–2.

2 Sarker began developing this argument in 2019, calling attention to the limitations of the “transnational” turn in global modernisms that, she argues, is actually predicated on a lacuna (“Absence and Containment: English-Language Transnational Literary Modernist Studies Today.” “The absence of the term ‘transnational’ in the vocabulary of modernist figures, and our use of it as a substitute for ‘international,’ both elides the significance of the nation-state and effects a paradox,” Sarker writes. “While ‘trans’ is intended to make the boundaries of identity flexible and porous, it actually results in a containment of modernist subjectivity … it signifies mostly an imagination of belonging-in-the-world from an essentially mono-local or mono-cultural position [and in other instances it] is made to signify the ‘other,’ minoritized on the basis of colony, culture, class, gender, or race” (e.m.). I have also expressed an ambivalence to pluralism, and the dangers of segregation inherent to “multiple modernisms,” with respect to Black artists and thinkers of the twentieth century. See Zoë Henry, “Syncopating Commemoration: On the Legacy of Langston Hughes.”

3 Sarker, Ibid, 24.

4 Ibid, 38, 29.

5 Ibid, 64.

6 Ibid, 97, quoting Zitkala-Ša, American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings, 111–12.

7 Ibid, 120–21.

8 Ibid, 169.

9 Ibid, 168-–9, 189.

10 Ibid, 196.