Global Modernism: An Introduction and Ten Theses

Positioning modernist texts in the English department in Hong Kong: From ‘planetary’ modernisms to ‘planetary’ pedagogies?

“…For instance, Paul Saint‐Amour (2018), as Mao points out, has cautioned against “the exercise of entitlement’ (p. 454) in reworkings of modernism, and suggests that ‘[i]t would be a terrible irony—and, worse, both intellectually and ethically noxious—if a field expansion […] were to result in a homogenizing triumphalism fed by the annexation of others' intellectual resources, spaces, voices, and rights‐of‐way’ (p. 453). This is what Alys Moody and Stephen J. Ross (2020) describe as the ‘cultural imperialism’ of ‘[a] global modernism that defines its texts either by their conformity to Western models or by their historical links with Western artists and milieus,’ which ‘will always be open to this devastating charge’ (p. 4). As Andrew Thacker (2016) has noted, in Friedman's book, such ‘vague[ness] in formulation’ is partially countered by her utilization of the characteristic of ‘representational rupture,’ one feature of Western modernism, to discover ‘non‐Anglo‐European modernisms,’ with the resultant ‘difficulties of identifying non‐Western modernisms without using Western modernist categories,’ which ‘is something that Friedman is acutely aware of, but does not entirely resolve’ (p. 16).…”

“…The familiar's return as the unfamiliar, and vice versa, unsettles the idea of ‘home,’ making the reading of modernist texts a process of homecoming that is at the same time alienating, an overturning of the text and its context as central, and the reader's context as peripheral. In modernist studies, the ‘set of debates about formal strategies, authorial positioning, and the relation of art to the social and political,’ ‘the set of key issues’ instead of ‘a single position’ ‘around which these debates are mobilized’ (Moody & Ross, 2020, p. 10), is then also shaped by students carving such a space out in their own specific locales.…”

Global modernist studies: Asian perspectives

“…In their capacious introduction to global modernism, Alys Moody and Stephen J. Ross put forward 10 theses that describe its characteristics and structures. The fifth one reads: “Western modernism was one of the central problems for non‐Western modernism, but the relationship between any given modernism and the West, while always central and contested, was not derivative.” Moody and Ross further assign agency to non‐Western writers and artists in creating “active reappraisal of Western modernism” through innovative engagements with it (2020, pp. 11–12).…”

Language questions: Translation, modanizumu, and modernist studies in Japan

“…On the other hand, as Maria del Pilar Blanco warns, the same tendency raises a practical question of linguistic competency and increasing dependence on English translations that will be problematic if unaccompanied with an awareness that translations are themselves ‘active sites of cultural tensions that require careful unpacking’ (Blanco, 2021, p. 73; also see, Beasley, 2012, p. 552). More specifically, as Alys Moody and Stephen J. Ross suggest, we need to be constantly alert to the ‘uneven politics of language’ insofar as translation is the ‘necessary precondition’ of global modernism (2020, p. 14). Here, we may find the problematic dominance of English reproduced in different guise as a literary and academic language, whose relationship to the global language of business is rather ambiguous.…”