Patricia Chu

Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1997

Humanities 374
(518) 442-4080
pechu@albany.edu

	Read an excerpt of the book Race, Nationalism and the State in British and American Modernism by Patricia Chu

Pat is the author of Race, Nationalism and the State in British and American Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2006). In this book she examines the ways in which Anglo-American modernism was significantly shaped by the development and application of state administrative technologies during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She argues that the “new” subjectivities and identities imagined by modernist artists emerged in tandem with changes in how Western states were defining and managing the people within their jurisdictions, with particular attention to areas under colonial conquest and administration. Her analysis of modernity and its creatures frames “Anglo-American” modernism with the economic, political, technological, and cultural histories of Atlantic modernity: the sugar plantation, the sugar mill, slavery, colonialism, revolution, American occupation and Voudun. The figure of the white zombie is a reminder of how the “native” always anchors the modern citizen-subject. The authors and filmmakers covered are T.S. Eliot, Sara Jeannette Duncan, Katherine Mansfield, Rebecca West, Ellen Glasgow, Jean Toomer, Victor Halperin, and D.W. Griffith.

Pat is on the National Advisory Board for Teen Voices, Boston MA

“Dog and Dinosaur: The Modern Animal Story,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature (March 2007).