Race, Gender, and Comparative Black Modernism uses the work of African American and Francophone Caribbean women writers to examine the aesthetic and critical parameters produced by iterations of archetypal blackness. By exploring how these writers engaged modernist currents from expressionism to surrealism, the book rethinks the categories of blackness, modernity, and engagement. The book concludes with an exploration of how the themes explored by black women modernists recur and are revised in the work of contemporary black women writers.