Description:
Revisits the theme of alienation in modernist literature, finding an alternative aesthetic centered on the experience of double exile. Explores examples drawn from the cultural groupings of the New Negro movement, Parisian expatriates in the 1920s, and the queer expatriate scene in Los Angeles before Stonewall.
Brief description: Octavio R. González is Assistant Professor of English at Wellesley College.
Review Quotes:
"Misfit Modernism tends to the 'misfit' structures of feeling of intersectional modernist authors before the full efflorescence of identity politics. In the process, it puts antisociality, negative affect, and arrested agency on the map for queer of color critique. In a series of brilliant and sensitive 'immanent readings, ' González demonstrates how such negative affects respond to the dilemma of the misfit's 'double exile'--a sense of nonconformity and unbelonging with dominant and minoritarian cultures alike."
--Kadji Amin, author of Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History