Geomodernisms Race, Modernism, Modernity [Paperback]

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 modernisms imagined geographies, pyschogeographies of distance and desire as viewed by the subaltern, the caste-bound, the racially mixed, the gender-determined.

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 Libertys 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.

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 Africaand, 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 thelS)