Translocal Modernisms

Book excerpt: The full story of modernism is yet to be written. This collection of essays provides an important page in this complex and inconclusive story of fluidities and hybridities by rendering problematical the linear sequence from modernism to postmodernism. This book explores the many facets of modernism in a variety of essays written by an international group of scholars. It deals with and puts in question the western literary tradition in many of its transcontinental and trans-hemispheric encounters. Criticism of 'high modernism' is put in perspective by discussions of German 'reactionary modernism', American 'social modernism' and 'minor arts', mid-twentieth-century 'Baudelairean modernity' and unprecedented expansions of the concepts of modernity and modernism themselves. Engaging in dialogue with the newest geographical, transnational, and global enlargements of the concept of modernism in time and space (from the 'Middle Passage' to emergent cultures of the twenty-first century, from Europe to America, Africa and Asia), the volume covers a wide range of translocal and transtemporal literary, artistic, cultural, and social fields and perspectives.