This course investigates the centrality of notions of exclusion and exclusivity to the development of modernist literature on both sides of the Atlantic. The period of literary modernism stretching from the late-19th century to roughly the Second World War coincides with the high point of European imperial claims as well as the sedimentation of Jim Crow. We will trace the articulation of forms of belonging - and non-belonging - along the interrelated axes of space and race in modernist figures and writings ranging from Joseph Conrad, George Orwell, James Joyce, and Jean Rhys to Djuna Barnes, Aimé Césaire, Albert Camus, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Richard Wright. Our quarter will conclude with Kamal Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation, a defiant recasting of Camus’s 1942 The Stranger. (Fiction, 1830-1940, Theory)