Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity [Paperback]

Laura Doyle (Editor), Laura Winkiel (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 22, 2005

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"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" —Choice, December 2006

(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." —Peter Nicholls, University of Sussex, The Modern Language Review, Vol. 103.1 (Jan. 2008)

(Peter Nicholls, University of Sussex The Modern Language Review )

About the Author

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.

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Indiana University Press (November 22, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0253217784
• ISBN-13: 978-0253217783
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #148,951 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)