In an English Literature Modernism module somewhere inside a Science Faculty building on Oxford Road in 2022, we are being asked to consider how much the Harlem Renaissance was a modernist movement. My lecturer notes that the likes of T.S Eliot, James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield were exiles from their home countries. By choice, they left their birthplaces. Their writing grapples with questions of rejecting and embracing identity. It is non-traditional and novel work.
