Anita Patterson

Professor Patterson’s research focuses on American literature, modernism, and black poetry of the Americas, and her approach, which emphasizes transnational and intercultural dialogue, is reflected in courses she has taught at all levels, including “Transnational Modernism,” “American Literature and Transculturation,” “American Poetry,” “Introduction to American Studies,” and “American Literature and World Cultures.”  Her first book, From Emerson to King:  Democracy, Race, and the Politics of Protest (Oxford UP, 1997) examined Emerson’s critical engagement with the dynamics of economic individualism and the debate over slavery, and showed how his writings fostered an abiding legacy of protest writing by African Americans such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr.  In Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms (Cambridge UP, 2008), she developed a more global and comparative perspective.

Placing American literature in a New World context, she explored how the poetry of Whitman, Poe, Eliot, and Pound, along with their Francophone avant-garde contemporaries in the Caribbean and in Europe, influenced African American modernists such as Langston Hughes, as well as Caribbean poets such as Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris, and Aimé Césaire.  Her current book project,American Japonisme and Modernist Style, continues with her interest in transnationalism, intercultural exchange, and the American contexts of literary modernism. Here, however, her approach is more interdisciplinary as she studies how the opening of Japan, and the widening popular appeal of Japanese culture in the latter half of the nineteenth century, had a formative effect on the emergence of modernism.