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In this book, Octavio R. González revisits the theme of alienation in the twentieth century novel, identifying an alternative aesthetic centered on the experience of double exile, or marginalization from both majority and home culture. This misfit modernist aesthetic decenters the mainstream narrative of modernism—which explores alienation from a universal and existential perspective—by showing how a group of authors leveraged modernist narrative to explore minoritarian experiences of cultural nonbelonging.
Original and innovative, Misfit Modernism is a vital contribution to conversations about modernism in the contexts of sexual identity, nationality, and race. Moving beyond the debates over the intellectual legacies of intersectionality and queer theory, González shows us new ways to think about exclusion.
Misfit Modernism tends to the ‘misfit’ structures of feeling of intersectional modernist authors before the full efflorescence of identity politics. In the process, it puts antisociality, negative affect, and arrested agency on the map for queer of color critique. In a series of brilliant and sensitive ‘immanent readings,’ González demonstrates how such negative affects respond to the dilemma of the misfit’s ‘double exile’—a sense of nonconformity and unbelonging with dominant and minoritarian cultures alike.
This wide-ranging book celebrating some of modernism’s most perplexing and pleasurable misfits stages an original conversation between the new modernist studies, queer-of-color critique, theories of intersectionality, and narratology. It pushes the growing field of queer modernist studies in new and exciting directions.
