This course takes as its starting point the literature and arts of the Harlem Renaissance. However, instead of treating it as solely a movement of Black artists in the United States, following Alain Locke and others, we will look at how it was also connected to the emergence of anti-colonialism globally. The course will put writers like Hubert Harrison, Claude McKay, and Zora Neale Hurston in dialogue with, for example, Aimé Césaire and the Négritude movement, and James Joyce. It will also examine the Harlem Renaissance alongside Home Rule in India, debates about the post-WWI “national question,” as well as the rise of communism and fascism. In doing so, the course will ask students to think about what constituted “modernism” and how formal experiments were connected to political issues.