"Mapping Global Modernisms: Nella Larsen and Jean Rhys" at the Keystone Digital Humanities Conference.

This July, I will be presenting "Mapping Global Modernisms: Nella Larsen and Jean Rhys" at the Keystone Digital Humanities Conference, held at the University of Pennsylvania's Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts. This paper examines the element of what Emily Apter calls "untranslatability" in Against World Literature (2013) in teaching global modernism using digital tools, specifically the mapping of Nella Larsen’s Harlem in Passing (1929) and Jean Rhys’s Paris in Good Morning, Midnight (1938). The students in my Global Digital Modernisms course at Georgia Tech completed map and essay projects examining how the women of Passing and Good Morning, Midnight navigate the city. Both assignments asked students to formulate arguments engaging a constellation of texts, ideas, and forms of media in order to analyze texts’ and cultures’ untranslatable elements. I have included below one student group's map of flâneurie in Good Morning Midnight and you can see more examples of students' maps here.