Field Reports

Anglophone Literature from the borderland region of Northeast India has a relatively short history with the major works comprising the oeuvre published in the last four decades or so. One of the most visible trajectories in Northeast Indian Anglophone Literature (NIAL) [1] is the reworking of myths and origin stories, especially by writers from indigenous communities. [2] NIAL writers weave myths to explore both deep pasts and contemporary conundrums about community and political identity...

It is the twentieth month of genocide, our planet’s second rotation around the sun, drenched in Palestinian blood, 600 days of Palestinian slaughter, and nothing is new except the finality of the massacre. The world has sacrificed the Palestinians with its complicity and silence, and it will soon start rehabilitating itself by erecting monuments of guilt, reciting land acknowledgements, mythologizing the Palestinian, and cannibalizing the myth. Given the scale of this historic calamity, the...

Understanding that modernity is always already global and colonial informs how Field Reports approaches modernism. Modernist studies is inevitably a comparative project because modernity has a shared material ground of an ever-expanding colonial-capitalism that traverses and connects the globe but that nevertheless manifests differently in singular locations. Colonial-capitalism produces a world-spanning interrelated singularity that renders the Anglophone world, including its imperial centers...

I’m sitting on my parents’ couch, working on the translation of an archival text by the Polish sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, who is most famous, perhaps, for his work on “liquid modernity” and globalization. Though much of his writing was in English, this is one of his earlier works, entitled On Frustration and Conjurers, about the events that took place in Poland in March, 1968—the student uprisings and anti-Semitic propaganda campaign—and there is a discussion of the situation of the working...

My final words of advice to you are educate, agitate and organize; have faith in yourself. With justice on our side I do not see how we can lose our battle. The battle to me is a matter of joy. The battle is in the fullest sense spiritual. There is nothing material or social in it. For ours is a battle not for wealth or for power. It is battle for freedom. It is the battle of reclamation of human personality. [1] B. R. Ambedkar In the introduction to their graphic novel Bhimayana: Incidents in...

From its contested origins in Germany’s Black Forest to the Black Sea, Europe’s second longest river connects ten countries and its watershed four more. Navigable along the entire route, the Danube river serves as the artery and border of a diverse geographic region, and frustrates attempts to divide Europe from non-Europe even as it facilitates the flow of transnational environmental, economic, and cultural exchange. Diversity along the Danube has long eluded stable political arrangement; nor...

The specter of modernism has haunted South African culture for quite some time. In Katharine Kilalea’s recent novel, O.K. Mr. Field (2018), it takes the form of “the House for the Study of Water,” a replica of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, transplanted from its original setting in Poissy, France, to the coastal cliffs of South Africa’s Cape Peninsula. [1] After an accident that leaves him unable to continue his career as a concert pianist, Field purchases the Villa from Hannah Kallenbach, the widow of Jan Kallenbach who, in the imaginary world of Kilalea’s novel, was a disciple of Le Corbusier (Kilalea Field, 4-5). It is worth noting, however, that the name “Kallenbach” suggestively recalls one of the leading figures of South African architectural modernism: Hermann Kallenbach, described by Loren Kruger as “friend of Ghandi and heir of German modernism.” [2] Modernism, in other words, is the motor that drives the novelistic machinery of Kilalea’s O. K. Mr. Field.

In the introduction to his superb book Realism after Modernism, Devin Fore describes a “shared modernist aspiration to achieve conditions of perception and consciousness outside of what is customarily arrogated to the human.” [1] He sees this as the tie that binds avant-garde movements across early twentieth-century Europe: from José Ortega y Gasset to Jean-François Lyotard, Paul Cezanne to Velimir Khlebnikov, modernism was a radically diverse enterprise with an eye to the aesthetic...

What is this thing called modernist studies? And what does it look like when viewed from the—for most—faraway islands of Aotearoa/New Zealand? A Bird’s-Eye View Such a shift in perspective, I want to suggest, can prompt a new way of writing and thinking about modernism. Modernism itself is full of such shifts in perspective, of course. Think, for example, of the radical new poetic forms that Futurists such as Vasily Kamensky and F. T. Marinetti produced in response to the invention of the...

Those of us who work in traditions considered “global” within US and, to varying degrees, European academies are often pulled in two professional directions. On the one hand, many of us feel rightly accountable to a kind of work most welcome in area studies: granular, situated, concerned with historical depth over what can feel like untenable generalization. On the other, we feel the sting of exclusion from the field’s “big” conversations, and seek broad conceptual discussion of “the literary,” as such. Both impulses—as an Africanist, I think here of toggling between the African Studies Association and the MLA—have value. In the effort to entrench a globally conscientious modernism, though, I find their differences hard to split. Terms like “global modernity” often feel removed from the lives and locales that anchor aesthetic practices beyond a few transnational publishing houses. Neither an historically intertwined (whether network-based or world-systematic) nor a discrete, comparative approach to global modernist method feels quite right, and yet the challenge to find something that does (to modernists, at least) is perennially cast as urgent. Job and book titles aside, I have grown to see Global Northern takes on the “global” even within the “global Anglophone” field as an over-beat drum, stemming as they often do from a form of what Modernism/modernity readers might recognize as “ weak theory.” As David Ayers has written in his reponse to the Modernism/modernity special issue on weak theory, there is only so much one can do to inclusivize an exclusive position, which, like a maximally expansive modernism, “simultaneously claims and renounces its universality.

Three recent New York exhibitions highlight Latin American and Caribbean culture, crossing contemporary art and anthropology: Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art (Whitney Museum of American Art, July 2018–September 2018); Taíno: Native Heritage and Identity in the Caribbean (National Museum of the American Indian, July 2018–October 2019), and Lydia Cabrera and Édouard Glissant: Trembling Thinking (Americas Society, October 2018–January 2019). The first two...

Turn-of-the-century Rio de Janeiro: this period was a time of radical changes for what was then Brazil’s capital. These changes intended to make the city Brazil’s “capital of the twentieth century” (to paraphrase Walter Benjamin). Rio’s transformations were part of broader changes taking place in the country. In 1888 slavery had been abolished in Brazil, followed a year later by the ousting of the imperial family. These events marked the start of the First Republic (1889-1930) and signaled a new era for the country. Once in power, the Republican government set out to reinvent the country’s identity. The former colony’s peripheral character was to be a thing of the past. Incorporating European imperial ideas that promoted universal values of civilization and progress, the elite turned its back on Brazil’s rural, slave-holding history to rewrite its identity as a modern nation-state, a nation of order and progress, as the new flag announced–one equal to any other on the Western world.

Cushioned in an archival box in the Museum of Applied Arts, Belgrade, Serbia, lies a remarkable surrealist photograph: Nikola Vučo’s The Arrested Flight of Surreality ( Zadržano bekstvo nadstvarnosti, 1929, fig. 1). Posing as a visual riddle, the photograph shows the figure of a woman with her back to the viewer, as if intent on moving on, or fleeing, and the semitransparent hands arresting her flight or gently pulling her in the opposite direction. The surreal effects of the photograph result from double exposure, considered an innovative technique at the time, wherein superimposition is obtained by apparatic means rather than interventions on the negative. Dual exposure photographs have to be premeditated and carefully staged performances, thus presenting great examples of what Pavle Levi has called “ cinema by other means.”

When the photography exhibit Provoke: Photography in Japan between Protest and Performance, 1960-1975 began its tour of Europe and the United States in January of 2016, its relevance to the contemporary moment was unclear.

In the final room of Thick Time, the William Kentridge show recently on at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, viewers encountered yet another of the installation environments those familiar with the South African artist’s work have come to expect from this fascinating—mercurial, polymath—contemporary global art-maker. [1] We imagine we are in a room in a villa near the sea. On one wall, a demagogue gesticulates in vintage newsreel footage, addressing an audience in French (apparently an international gathering of socialists), while disappearing slowly from view as water rises to obscure all but the English subtitles.

“Well this exhibition feels a little too timely,” my colleague Clare Davies posted to Facebook during a November 21, 2016 visit to Art et liberté: Rupture, guerre et surréalisme en Egypte (1938-1948) at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. The exhibit—a major contribution to contemporary

When race is pictured historically, it often is removed from leftist radicalism. (Ellison’s novel Invisible Man is about Harlem in the 1930s, a decade when even middle of the road intellectuals were at their most socialist.) Likewise, when the “American” is imagined, it is at a distance from the mobility of artistic lives, influences and historical factors, including the circuits of Soviet communism (mentioned, briefly, in a sign about “industry and labor” in “After the Fall”).

It has been between 15,000 and 30,000 years since dogs began living with humans, and although it is appealing to imagine that it was humans who originally domesticated man’s best friend, it is actually more likely that the ancestors of modern dogs effectively domesticated themselves—finding it evolutionarily advantageous to adopt behaviors that would permit them to live symbiotically with early humans, from whom they could then obtain food and protection. Similarly, chickens were apparently first domesticated in China about 10,000 years, but for much of that time they were used primarily for symbolic and social purposes, and the earliest evidence we have that they were being consumed in large numbers dates back only about 2,200 years ago.

The study of literary modernism has expanded so dramatically over the past few decades that I’ve heard more than one colleague ask in exasperation, “Well, then, what isn’t modernism?” As Stephen Colbert might ask: is this a great problem to have . . . or the greatest? Almost certainly the latter, but even so, such dynamism and growth bring challenges: so much to read, compelling us to choose from among the now-dizzying array of possibilities, according to criteria that are themselves subject to change.