Sexuality And Modernity Bruce Nugent s Modernist Aesthetic

Sexuality and Modernity: Bruce Nugent’s Modernist Aesthetic Within the purview of new scholarship conducted on the expression of black queer sexuality during the Harlem Renaissance, scholars are quick to acknowledge the longstanding critical reticence to address such expression. Only relatively recently have scholars been willing to analyze queerness not just as negligible intimation of sexual otherness, but as a significant thematic pulse that shaped and fashioned the Renaissance into the dynamic literary and artistic movement that we study today. In many ways, the historical silence of literary critics on homoerotic love mirrors the hesitation by early Renaissance writers to explore these topics in their poetry and fiction for fear of confirming racist sexual stereotypes. In keeping with the â€Å"New Negro† creed of respectability, intellectuals such as W.E.B. DuBois and Alain Locke espoused a code of racial uplift that necessitated a certain kind of asceticism vis-à  -vis human sexuality. But the cadre of young Harlem Renaissance writers known as the Niggeratti changed the face of the movement significantly when they challenged the prudish, conservative critics and intellectuals by writing shocking stories and poems that directly confronted themes of primitivism, overt sexuality and homosexuality (Schwartz 122). Chief among them, Bruce Nugent, â€Å"refused to bear the black artist’s ‘burden of representation,† rendering his queer characters shamelessly and rebuffing theShow MoreRelatedOne Significant Change That Has Occurred in the World Between 1900 and 2005. Explain the Impact This Change Has Made on Our Lives and Why It Is an Important Change.163893 Words   |  656 Pagespower generators and atomic weaponry, and they also examine the ways that advances in these enmeshed fields of scientific and technological endeavor became emblematic in the cold war decades of national power and prestige, as well as symbols of modernity itself. They go well beyond the usual focus on the two superpowers INTRODUCTION †¢ 7 to look at â€Å"nuclear politics,† which encompasses both state initiatives and popular dissent, in former but diminished national great powers such as France