Backwards Modernity: The Crisis, Miscellaneity, and the Legacy of Slavery

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article looks at the Crisis’s intervention in the periodical modernity of the 1910s in the United States. While the magazine modeled itself on white periodicals of the period, it also clearly stands out. Instead of focusing on W. E. B. Du Bois’s role as an editor, this article foregrounds the collective principle of miscellaneity and the ways in which this traditional form changes in its use in the Crisis. The Crisis refracts the multiplicity of modern experiences marred by the specters of a past that is not really over but largely unacknowledged—a backwards modernity.