Black Writing’s Visuals: African American Modernism in Nugent, Ligon, and Rankine

This essay examines the conditions of African American modernism in the twenty-first century. How does a new black modernism differ from an earlier black modernist period commonly associated with the New Negro Movement of the 1920s? Moving briefly from Richard Bruce Nugent’s 1926 short story, “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” to two significant portrayals of a new black modernism by the visual artist Glenn Ligon and the poet Claudia Rankine, the essay considers how Ligon’s text-based paintings and Rankine’s poetry in Citizen play with the dynamic of image and text that has been so productive for black modernism. In particular, Rankine’s use of Ligon’s text-based paintings in Citizen helps the poet depict the subtle, subjective shift that occurs when difference, however defined, “enters the American landscape.”