Geomodernisms
Race, Modernism, Modernity

Laura Doyle (Edited by), Laura Winkiel (Edited by)

9780253217783

Paperback / softback, published 22 November 2005

368 pages, 1 bibliog., 1 index
23.5 x 15.6 x 2.4 cm, 0.599 kg

"...Highly recommended."—Choice
". . . [these] contributors seek to de-Westernize concepts of modernity and modernism and to give voice to that' domain of the other' that was either appropriated by the European avant-garde for whom 'primitivists are modern while natives are not' . . . or simply regarded as falling altogether outside the modernist paradigm. Vol. 103.1 (Jan. 2008)"—Peter Nicholls, University of Sussex
"The innovative essays in this collection emanate from conferences sponsored by the Modern Language Association. Thus, the book represents high-level academic literary criticism by scholars who go boldly where few have gone before. They explore and try to redefine 'modernism' and 'modernity' by setting their sights on aesthetic creativity inCuba, Brazil, Haiti, India, China, Taiwan, Lebanon, and South Africa—and, in a few instances, more familiar territory (England and the US). Confidently using the critical language of postcolonial analysis in discussing self-awareness, anxiety, freedom, and resistance to assimilation by a dominant ethos, the essays analyze features of rationalized racism, American Indian subjectivity, Haitian primitivism, 'Atlantic modernity,' Arab humanism, 'cabaret' modernism, and the construct of the gypsy. A few essays assess cross-cultural parallels, e.g., between E. M. Forster's A Passage to India and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Jürgen Habermas are among the predictable guides. The book's tentative but fruitful concept of 'geo—modernism' offers a new way of understanding cultural continuities and conflicts through the lens of modernist literary representation. This is a book for seasoned literary adventurers. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, and faculty.— M. S. Vogeler, emerita, California State University, Fullerton December 2006"—Choice

Modernism as a global phenomenon is the focus of the essays gathered in this book. The term "geomodernisms" indicates their subjects' continuity with and divergence from commonly understood notions of modernism. The contributors consider modernism as it was expressed in the non-Western world; the contradictions at the heart of modernization (in revolutionary and nationalist settings, and with respect to race and nativism); and modernism's imagined geographies, "pyschogeographies" of distance and desire as viewed by the subaltern, the caste-bound, the racially mixed, the gender-determined.

Contents
Introduction: The Global Horizons of ModernismLaura Doyle and Laura Winkiel
I. Modernisms' Alternative Genealogies
1. The Future of an Allusion: The Color of ModernityAldon Lynn Nielsen
2. Africa and the Epiphany of ModernismSimon Gikandi
3. Liberty, Race, and Larsen in Atlantic Modernity: A New World GenealogyLaura Doyle
4. The Geopolitics of Affect in the Poetry of Brazilian ModernismFernando J. Rosenberg
5. Ongoing War and Arab HumanismKen Seigneurie
6. On the Ganges Side of Modernism: Raghubir Singh, Amitav Ghosh, and the Postcolonial ModernAriela Freedman
II. Modernisms' Contested States
7. Twentieth-Century Chinese Modernism and Globalizing Modernity: Three Auteur Directors of Taiwan New CinemaSung-sheng Yvonne Chang
8. Against "Library-Shelf Races": José Martí's Critique of Excessive ImitationGerard Aching
9. Modernist (Pre)Occupations: Haiti, Primitivism, and Anticolonial NationalismPatricia E. Chu
10. Gadze ModernismJanet Lyon
11. Cabaret Modernism: Vorticism and Racial SpectacleLaura Winkiel
III. Modernisms' Imagined Geographies
12. Township Modernism Ian Baucom
13. Paranoia, Pollution, and Sexuality: Affiliations between E. M. Forster's A Passage to India and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small ThingsSusan Stanford Friedman
14. Unreal City and Dream Deferred: Psychogeographies of Modernism in T. S. Eliot and Langston HughesEluned Summers-Bremner
15. Modernism's Possible GeographiesJessica Berman
16. Modernism(s) Inside Out: History, Space, and Modern American Indian Subjectivity in Cogewea: The Half-BloodJustine Dymond
Works Cited
Contributors
Index