Oskar Gordon
Doctoral Student in Literature - Oskar’s thesis is entitled ‘Irish Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance: Race, Ethnography and Transatlantic Literary Culture’.
Research project title
Irish Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance: Race, Ethnography and Transatlantic Literary Culture
Supervisors
Dr Fionnghuala Sweeney, Dr Mark Byers and Prof Stephen Regan (Durham)
Contact details
Email: o.gordon2@newcastle.ac.uk
Research interests
- race and ethnography
- Diaspora studies
- mathematics and science in modernist literature
- James Joyce
A brief outline of my research project
My research explores the emergence of an ethnographic consciousness in the literature of Irish modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. I will aim to position both movements as mutually imbricated literary events that were part of a wider transatlantic renaissance linked to an emerging imperative for a new grammar of representation for colonial and marginalised subjects. I will also consider the relationship between these modernist movements and the changing terrain of anthropology around the turn of the century through the contributions of Frank Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, and others, and how writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, a student of Boas’s, seek to interrogate the politics of ethnography in literary works.