After Modernism

Women, Gender, Race

Pelagia Goulimari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781032443393
• eBook ISBN: 9781000850390
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

While celebrating the centenary of the "annus mirabilis" of modernism, we now encounter modernism after postmodernist, poststructuralist, postcolonial, critical race, feminist, queer and trans writing and theory. Out of the figures, narratives and concepts they have developed, a less universal, more global, decentred, context-specific, interconnected modernism emerges.

In "after modernism" the meanings of "after" include periodisation, homage and critique. This book attends to neglected genealogies and intertexts—"high" and "low," yet offering unacknowledged ontological, epistemological, conceptual and figurative resources. How have artists of the Global South negotiated the hierarchical division of art capital into Western high art vs. Global-South culture?

Modernity's location has been the Western metropolis, but other origin stories have been centring slavery, colonialism, the nation-state. If modernity did not originate once, why not multiple and still-to-come modernities? Instead of a universalizable Western modernity vs. local non-Western traditions, the contributors to this book discern multiple modern traditions. Rather than reifying their heterogeneity, the authors tunnel for lost transnational connections.

The nation-state and the citizen have together defined Western modernity and the "civilized." Yet they have required the gender binary, gender and sexual normativity, assimilation, exclusion, forced migration, partition, segregation. In-between the public and the private, humans and the natural world, this book explores a multiple, relational modern subjectivity, collectivity and cosmic interconnectivity, whose space is indivisible, entangled, ever folding and unfolding. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal Angelaki.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Frontispiece Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction—After Modernism: Women, Gender, Race
• 2 The Afters and Now of Modernism: Connecting Leanne Howe’s Native Tribalography and the Decolonizing Arts of Britain’s Kabe Wilson and the Marshall Islands’ Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner
• 3 Rethinking the Liberian Predicament in Anti-Black Terms: On Repatriation, Modernity, and the Ethno-Racial Choreographies of Civil War
• 4 A Grammar of Modern Silence: Race, Gender, and Visible Invisibility in Iola Leroy and Contending Forces
• 5 Indigenismo and the Limits of Cultural Appropriation: Frida Kahlo and Marina Núñez del Prado
• 6 Gender and Race in the Modernist Middlebrow: Louise Faure-Favier’s Blanche et Noir
• 7 Restaging Respectability: The Subversive Performances of Josephine Baker and Nora Holt in Jazz-Age Paris
• 8 Fashioning Modernism: Rose Piper’s Painting and Fabric Design
• 9 The “White Darkness”: Considering Modernist Investments in the “Primitive” through Maya Deren’s Work in Haiti (1947–53)
• 10 Shredding, Burning, Tunnelling: Modernity, Mrs. Dalloway , Sula and My Grandparents circa 1922
• 11 Doublings and Dissociation in Nella Larsen’s Passing and Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird
• 12 Dream*Hoping into Futures: Black Women in the Harlem Renaissance and Afrofuturism
• 13 The Black Woman’s Mask: Fanon, Capécia, Condé
• 14 “In the Centre of Our Circle”: Gender, Selfhood and Non-Linear Time in Yvonne Vera’s Nehanda
• 15 “Screaming in Delight”: Qiu Miaojin’s Queer Modernist Births in and for Taiwan
• Index