Modernism, Inc.

Body, Memory, Capital

Jani Scandura, Michael Thurston

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780814708569
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Drawing on a variety of interdisciplinary debates in cultural studies and contemporary theory, Modernism, Inc. provides a new look at the relationship between modernism and postmodernism within the critical frame of twentieth-century American culture.

Organized around the idea of "incorporation"--embodiment, repressed memory, and advanced capitalism-- Modernism, Inc. covers a wide range of topics: Josephine Baker's "hot house style"; the president's penis in American political life; myth-making and the Hoover Dam; trauma, poetics, and the Armenian genocide; feminist kitsch and the recuperation of North America's "Great Lady painters"; Gertrude Stein and Jewish Social Science; the Reno Divorce Factory and the production of gender; Andy Razaf and Black Bolshevism. Collectively, the essays suggest that the relationship between the modern and the postmodern is not one of rupture, belatedness, dilution, or extremity, but of haunting.

Modernism, Inc. looks at our ghosts, and at the unspeakable secrets of modernity from which they're derived.

Contributors: Maria Damon, Walter Kalidjian, Walter Lew, Janet Lyon, William J. Maxwell, Cary Nelson, John Timberman Newcombe, David G. Nicholls, Thomas Pepper, Paula Rabinowitz, Daniel Rosenberg, Marlon Ross, Jani Scandura, Kathleen Stewart, Julia Walker.

INDEX

Abraham, Nicolas, 7, 13n. 13, 116, 118

Academia: and history of genocide, 114–16

and labor practices, 286–87

affected by McCarthyism, 286–87

Accommodation. See Assimilation

Adams, Charles Francis, Jr., 9

Adorno, Theodor, 9, 206, 207

Aesthetes, modern, 202

Aesthetics, 11

figuring in assimilation, 181

of “the shocking new,” 35. See also Language; Poetry

Africa, 192

African American(s): artists and modernity, 19

cultural nationalism, 192

depiction by Kang, 184

discrimination against, at Hoover Dam, 96

folk songs, 82

literature, 225–234

modernism, 219–37

and the New Negro, 48–69

in the 1920s, 151–70

in Paris, 29–43. See also Black bolshevism; Black culture; Blues; Culture; Ethnicity; Folk song; Harlem Renaissance; Jazz; New Negro; Race; Race and labor; Racialism; Racial trespassing; Racism

Agrarian. See South, the

Akchura, Yusuf, 113

Alloula, Malek, 217n. 51

America: ethnocentrism, revisionism, and denial of genocide, 113

as melancholy, 5

missionaries and modernization in Turkey, 122

as a narrative of modernity, 4

as a term, 4

all, incorporated into the United States, 192. See also Americanism; Americanization; United States

American Indians, 200, 211

and the Hoover Dam, 94–96

Americanism, 5, 7, 8, 260

Americanization, 191, 256

and assimilation, 8–9

of Kang, 171–90. See also Assimilation; Grafting; Immigration; Migration; Nationalism; Nativism

American Legion, 276

American national identity, and the Harlem Renaissance, 221–22

Amnesia. See History and memory; Mourning; Razaf, Andy; Repression

Anderson, Amanda, 41

Anderson, Benedict, 5

Anderson, Perry, 4

Anderson, Sherwood, 242

Animality. See Primitivism

Anthropology, 141

Anticapitalism. See Black bolshevism; Socialism

Apollinaire, Guillaume, 136

Arbenz, Jacobo, 197

Architecture, 81

and Hoover Dam, 102–3n. 34

Armenian people, 14n. 15

genocide of, 82, 108–32. See also Genocide; Genocide, Armenian

Armstrong, Louis, 219–20

Art: female identity linked to national terrain by, 200

and national identity, 200. See also Architecture; Art history; Dance; Music; Painte...