Modernity & Modernism and the mind-body problem

The impressionistic style and its shortcircuiting by the opacity of black bodies in Conrad’s classic novella.

Early documentary attempts to lay claim to the ‘authenticity’ of native communities by staging their bodies for the camera.

Follows Manfield’s treatment of marginalised native bodies through the famous modernist technique of stream of consciousness.

The investigation of the dual identities of African and American in black bodies in the Harlem Renaissance poetry.

Black women’s bodies the site of multiple axes of discrimination and the search for bodily pleasure and spiritual liberation.

Cross-dressing in early cinema as a source of entertainment as well as a coded representation of queer identities.

Woolf’s early challenge to the gender binary and the situatedness of sexual idenity.

Djuna Barnes’ remarkable novel of Lesbian love in the night world of 1930s Paris.

The conflicted masculinity of male bodies disabled by the war as see through D.H. Lawrence’s celebration of vitality

: ‘Deviant’ pleasure and the ‘deviant’ body in the celebrated work of James Joyce.

Questioning the workings of power hierarchies through the metaphor and reality of presenting blindness on the theatre stage.

Early cinema was fascinated with disabled bodies objectified through the horrified lens of the ‘freak show’. This film employs a similar setup to humanise and empower disabled characters.

The challenge for art in the 20th century