Geomodernisms

Laura Doyle is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her book Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture won the Barbara and George Perkins Award from the Narrative Society. She is author of Liberty's Empire: Race and the Force of Freedom in Atlantic Modernity.Laura Winkiel is Assistant Professor of English at Iowa State University. She has published articles on Djuna Barnes, Elizabeth Robins, and Valerie Solanas. She is completing a book project on manifestos, modernism, and race.

• ContentsIntroduction: The Global Horizons of ModernismLaura Doyle and Laura WinkielI. Modernisms' Alternative Genealogies1. The Future of an Allusion: The Color of ModernityAldon Lynn Nielsen2. Africa and the Epiphany of ModernismSimon Gikandi3. Liberty, Race, and Larsen in Atlantic Modernity: A New World GenealogyLaura Doyle4. The Geopolitics of Affect in the Poetry of Brazilian ModernismFernando J. Rosenberg5. Ongoing War and Arab HumanismKen Seigneurie6. On the Ganges Side of Modernism: Raghubir Singh, Amitav Ghosh, and the Postcolonial ModernAriela FreedmanII. Modernisms' Contested States7. Twentieth-Century Chinese Modernism and Globalizing Modernity: Three Auteur Directors of Taiwan New CinemaSung-sheng Yvonne Chang8. Against "Library-Shelf Races": José Martí's Critique of Excessive ImitationGerard Aching9. Modernist (Pre)Occupations: Haiti, Primitivism, and Anticolonial NationalismPatricia E. Chu10. Gadze ModernismJanet Lyon11. Cabaret Modernism: Vorticism and Racial SpectacleLaura WinkielIII. Modernisms' Imagined Geographies12. Township Modernism Ian Baucom13. Paranoia, Pollution, and Sexuality: Affiliations between E. M. Forster's A Passage to India and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small ThingsSusan Stanford Friedman14. Unreal City and Dream Deferred: Psychogeographies of Modernism in T. S. Eliot and Langston HughesEluned Summers-Bremner15. Modernism's Possible GeographiesJessica Berman16. Modernism(s) Inside Out: History, Space, and Modern American Indian Subjectivity in Cogewea: The Half-BloodJustine DymondWorks CitedContributorsIndex

"...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