Paul Bradley Bellew
ABSTRACT
The modernist magazine Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms was founded and edited by Charles Henri Ford and was published over the course of ten issues from 1929 to 1930. Although the title seems to suggest that the journal would focus on or be inspired by the musical genre of the blues, jazz, or perhaps even more broadly on black culture, only three contributions in the entire run mention black music or culture at all. This article analyzes those three poems by Ford, assistant editor Kathleen Tankersley Young, and Witter Bynner to demonstrate the way queer white avant-garde writers of modernist literature simultaneously recognized the vitality of black culture and the problem of racial inequality and violence while also appropriating the sense of marginalization of black Americans. While these queer authors share sense of marginalization with black people—a theme of each of these poems—they also reduce black life and culture to mere shorthand to show a white writer is a progressive-minded rule breaker. In this way, I argue that Blues exemplifies the use of black culture in avant-garde modernism to assert a kind of cultural capital while, in effect, appropriating black culture.
KEYWORDS: modernism, racial appropriation, black culture, little magazines, poetry, queer writers
Paul Bradley Bellew, Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Fu Jen Catholic University, Taiwan (paul.b.bellew@gmail.com).
DOI: 10.30395/WSR.202512_19(1).0005
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