Voices of Negritude in Modernist Print

Brent Hayes Edwards, author of The Practice of Diaspora:
With restless, relentless 'attention to the letter,' Carrie Noland demonstrates that the poetic innovations of Césaire and Damas were first of all major modernist interventions, deeply engaged with the textual sphere of experimental print culture in the interwar period. These virtuosic, revisionary readings are an exhilarating model of what it means to do Diasporic literary criticism today.

Nick Nesbitt, Princeton University:
Carrie Noland's Voices of Negritude in Modernist Print is a landmark work, inaugurating a decisive and crucial advance in our understanding of the poets of Negritude. Noland argues compellingly for a text-centered interpretive practice, one that attends to the determinations of the print medium understood as an aesthetic regime independent of the author's scribal utterance, and the struggle to construct what she terms, following Adorno, an 'aesthetic subjectivity' immanent to the text itself. This path-breaking and original work gathers together the various studies of Negritude poetry of the preceding decades to make an informed, compelling, and necessary intervention into the heart of francophone studies.

J. Michael Dash, New York University:
Carrie Noland offers a timely warning about the tendency to treat literature as a whole as an adjunct to sociopolitical reality. Voices of Negritude in Modernist Print boldly explores the tensions between formally experimental verse and the prevailing identity politics of postcolonial theory.