With portraits of actors, dancers, architects, poets, directors, and musicians, Some of These Days highlights how the so-called New Negro Movement of the 1920s reverberated far beyond Harlem to cities such as London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna to ignite the global renaissance of modernist culture.

Introduction A Migration of Stars ; Chapter 1 New Negro ; Paul Robeson's Formation in Harlem ; Chapter 2 Between the Jungle and the Skyscraper ; Josephine Baker in Paris and Berlin ; Chapter 3 Ballet mecanique ; Jazz Aesthetics and Modernist Film ; Chapter 4 Jazz in Stone and Steel ; Josephine Baker and Modern Architecture ; Chapter 5 Borderlines ; Race, Cosmopolitanism and the Modern Uncanny ; Chapter 6 Down the River of Dreams ; Songs of Exile and Nostalgia ; Chapter 7 Here I Stand ; Performing Politics ; Coda: Nick's Bar, New York City ; Notes ; Bibliography ; Index

"Some of These Days is a deft and engrossing double helix: a cultural history of international modernism through interwoven chapters on its two greatest African American stars, Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson. Tracing their unparalleled impact across a variety of fields, from the stage to the screen, in architecture as well as politics, Donald demonstrates that Baker and Robeson - with their outsized charisma, their artistic daring, and their peripatetic restlessness - were the 'barometers' of the new age."--Brent Hayes Edwards, author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism - Brent Hayes Edwards, author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism "From the Tiller Girls to Paul Robeson, from Josephine Baker to dancing and architecture, Some of These Days is a rich, captivating work that challenges us to rethink the relationship between race, modernity, and diaspora identities. More than a resource providing insight into and analysis of cultural politics in the jazz age, this text also prods us into making vital connections between our own, contemporary 'culture wars', and the unfurling landscape of racial politics during the first decades of the twentieth century."--Baroness Lola Young of Hornsey "Elegant and erudite, Some of These Days retells the story of modernism's relationship to blackness in ways that are illuminating and often surprising. While Baker and Robeson are ever present in this story, the main characters are really the moderns who drew from their performances to explore the new rhythms of the machine age and the possibilities of cosmopolitanism in a modern world. Crafted with style and sophistication, Some of These Days is an impressive, graceful achievement."--Shane Vogel, author of The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, and Performance

Selling point: Deftly mixes biography and cultural history to capture the exciting, global intellectual currents that created modernist art Selling point: Upends traditional "primitivist" understandings of black American artists in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century Selling point: Presents an engagingly written account of the multiple figures and events that led to a more cosmopolitan culture

James Donald is Professor of Film Studies at the University of New South Wales and Visiting Professor in Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool. His previous books include Imagining the Modern City and Close Up, 1927-1933.

Selling point: Deftly mixes biography and cultural history to capture the exciting, global intellectual currents that created modernist art Selling point: Upends traditional "primitivist" understandings of black American artists in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century Selling point: Presents an engagingly written account of the multiple figures and events that led to a more cosmopolitan culture