'Interracial,’ explains Korey Garibaldi in his compelling first book, is a term ‘not as familiar as it once was’, though it was often used in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century to describe ‘cross-racial collaborations and cultural influences’ across the literary world. One of the most influential advocates of such literary interracialism was W.S. Braithwaite, a poet, critic, and anthologist born in Boston in 1878 to a British Guyanese father and an African American mother, with Braithwaite boldly declaring that ‘all great artists are interracial and international’. Garibaldi’s critical work traces the ups and downs of this interracial aesthetic from the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1960s. In the process, he adds another dimension to our understanding of the complex racial dynamics of this era.

For most of this period, American authors tended to take experimental pleasure in tracing affinities and crossovers between different racial categories. Gertrude Stein’s story ‘Melanchtha’, part of her Three Lives (1909), provocatively describes a love affair between a Black man and a mixed-race woman, while authors such as Frank Yerby and John O. Killens, who are not much read today, were much admired in their own time for aspiring to transcend narrow racial classifications and instead treat human experience as part of a universal whole.