Scalability

World literature, western and non-western modernisms, and the problem of scale. Genealogies of urban modernity. Georgia.

Modernist Cultures

2016

Acknowledgments vi 1 An aesthetics of motion 1 2 Imperialism 25 3 Cosmopolitanism 59 4 Cultural institutions 89 5 Media 121 6 Conclusion: Modernities at large, or one world system? 157 Bibliography 165 Index 181 ACkNowledGMeNts I would like to thank the New Modernisms series editors Gayle Rogers and Sean Latham for encouraging me to write this book and for providing sensible advice along the way. David Avital and Mark Richardson showed patience and offered editorial guidance as the project developed. Anita Singh and Ryan McGinnis provided expert copy editing, fact checking, and indexing support. A. James Arnold graciously supplied important background information about Aimé Césaire; Elliott Colla did likewise with Tayeb Salih. Conversations with Debra Rae Cohen and Michael Trask were especially helpful as I assembled the chapter on media. I owe a debt of gratitude to my family, who kept this project afloat when I was taking on water: my parents, Elizabeth and Sami Kalliney; my new mother, Raymonde Rignall; my spouse, Karen Rignall; and our children, Nedjma and Zaydan, who remind me on a daily basis that reading ought to be fun.

Modernism/modernity, 2003

In the last hundred years the world has changed far more quickly and completely than in many preceding centuries. .. People in a hurry travel by aeroplane; you can fly to Paris for tea and be back in London in time for dinner. First the telegraph, then the telephone, and finally the discovery of wireless, have brought the remotest parts of the earth closer and closer together.. .. The United States are, in effect, nearer to London than Scotland was one hundred years ago. The developments of science. .. are welding the world into a whole, whether its people wish it or not. 1 So wrote Maxwell Garnett, Secretary of the League of Nations Union, in 1924. 2 Today, the clock may be running faster, but the discourse of globalization is surprisingly the same. Contemporary theories, it is true, focus on the compression of the world through internet connectivity, the rise of multinational corporations, and the homogenizing work of globally marketed music and film; today economics rather than science is "welding the world into a whole." But it is doubtful whether we are much further in grasping the implications of Garnett's title, "The World Becoming One." Globalization, although frequently hailed as a recent phenomenon, has been a long historical process. Political scientist David Held traces the development of globalization from the Roman and Mongol empires; sociologist Roland Robertson begins his schematization in the fifteenth century. Both identify a shift, in the eighteenth century, away from incipient global forms to the primacy of the nation-state; yet both mark the beginnings of a new global consciousness in the second half of the nineteenth

21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual, 2024

As art history begins to take seriously the imperative to decolonize, one of the most vexing areas of resistance to change is the conventional periodization of art historical epochs. Even while acknowledging that spatial divisions like West and Non-West are deeply problematic, as are geographic divisions per se, we continue to honor the “history” in the discipline’s nomenclature by insisting on temporality as a primary organizing category. The period commonly designated as “modernist” (roughly 1860 to 1960) is particularly difficult to divorce from Western ideals of progress as defined both by technological “advances” and by the heroization of artistic “innovation”. When the modernist moment attempts to open itself up to global narratives, its structuring undercurrent is a particular vision of the art of the West. In this essay, I read the conventional narrative of modernism through a decolonial lens and revisit the reception of Impressionism in the 1910s and 1920s in Mexico to consider how an artistic idiom widely seen as retrograde at that moment became the basis for a radical rethinking around the democratization of art. My analysis exposes how, because of its championing of novelty and its inherent Eurocentrism, the category of modernism obscures and suppresses artists and narratives that fall outside of its limited purview.

Introduction to the special issue of Modernist Cultures. Contributors include Douglas Mao, Ira Nadel, Claire Battershill, Daniel Göske.

One Continuous Line: Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Aditya Prakash, 2021

This is the concluding chapter from One Continuous Line: Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Aditya Prakash (Mapin, 2021). It makes the case for rethinking the epistemologies of modernism as a global construct using the writings of Karen Barad as a major reference for thinking. ------- One Continuous Line: Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Aditya Prakash documents and contextualizes the work of one of the most prolific of the first generation of Indian modernists. Prakash was an architect, an urban planner, a painter, sculptor, set-designer, furniture designer, academic, theatre director, and actor, as well as an occasional poet. The first publication devoted solely to Prakash's work, the objective of this book is to introduce scholarly and general audiences the diversity of his work, to locate it in terms of its local, national, and international contexts, and to build a narrative that describes the motivations of the work. The "continuous" in the title refers both to Prakash's fascination with the possibilities of generating form using a single line, and to his search for synergy between the various disciplines.

Art Journal, 2019

Review of Kaira M. Cabañas, Learning from Madness: Brazilian Modernism and Global Contemporary Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. 240 pp.; 61 b/w ills. $45, $10–45 ebook and Sarah J. Townsend, The Unfinished Art of Theater: Avant-Garde Intellectuals in Mexico and Brazil. Evanston, IL.: Northwestern University Press, 2018. 312 pp. 35 b/w ills. $99.95, $34.95 paper, $34.95 ebook

ARS (Sao Paulo) N42 - Ano 19, 2021

Drawing on several decades' experience as an art critic and teacher, I argue that the study of global modernism is more problematic than the study of global contemporary art. This is not merely because of what Ming Tiampo calls "cultural mercantilism." It is also because modernism imposed its artistic language on the rest of the world in the same way that colonialism and imperialism imposed an asymmetrical economic and politic relationship. Hence the problems of center and margin, original and belated, etc. In the conclusion, I argue that, to avoid this asymmetry, the study of global modernism needs to be rooted in social and economic history.

Literature Compass, 2012