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Modernism and modernity are [...] mortal antagonists, not blood brothers.
- Tony Pinkney, "Editor's Introduction: Modernism and Cultural Theory."
In his introductory comments to Raymond Williams's The Politics of Modernism, Tony Pinkney emphatically reiterates modernism's own fantasy of broken kin: modernism is not a kindred affiliate of modernity, and it is not, so Pinkney repeatedly avows, suffocating hopelessly within modernity's cognitive grip. One wonders whether such avowals of disaffiliation do not themselves misrecognize the problem from the outset, confusing as they do aesthetic and political oppositionality with notions of purity and definitive externality Pinkney, who is representative on this point, imagines that modernism is for or against modernity, in turn abandoning the more pressing problem of how to theorize the fact that modernism is in and of modernity. By turning to Zora Neale Hurston, specifically her ethnographic fiction Mules and Men,we question the logic of Pinkney's familial metaphor for an understanding of the critical difference modernism asserts against the force of modernity. Hurston, occupying a social, disciplinary, and critical position that is oblique to the dominant coordinates of high modernism, is thus our occasion to draw out the shortcomings of the willfully heroic narrative of modernism's break with modernity upon which critics such as Pinkney habitually insist.
By paying special attention to Hurston's ethnographic practice, her engagement with the Harlem Renaissance, and her indebtedness to white capital, we recast modernism's impulsive critical purity against both textual and extra-textual evidence that betrays a mutual contamination of Pinkney's "mortal antagonists" (5). It is not by manifestly avowing modernism's willful break with modernity that critical practice adequately proceeds, according to Hurston's counter-intuitive line of reasoning, but by acknowledging the impurity - the kindred "blood" - at work in any oppositional knowledge and practice. By the end of our discussion, modernism's definitive difference from modernity will hopefully be under a new kind of critical pressure, at the same time that postmodernism, modernism's other "mortal antagonist," will have to be thought anew as well. If Hurston shows us that modernism's critical difference from modernity is no guarantee, then postmodernism, insofar as it signals for so many thinkers a pseudocritical practice fully immersed in postmodernity will have lost its conventional coordinates as well.
Unwittingly enough, the critical work surrounding Hurston itself...