Mediterranean Modernism: Intercultural Exchange and Aesthetic Development

375 Pages·2016·3.55 MB·English

by  Adam J. Goldwyn

EDITED BY ADAM J. GOLDWYN & RENÉE M. SILVERMAN
MEDITERRANEAN
MODERNISM
Intercultural Exchange and Aesthetic Development
Mediterranean Perspectives
Series Editors
Brian   Catlos
University of Colorado - Boulder
Boulder ,  Colorado ,  USA
Sharon   Kinoshita
University of California Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz ,  USA
As a region whose history of connectivity can be documented over at
least two and a half millennia, the Mediterranean has in recent years
become the focus of innovative scholarship in a number of disciplines.
In shifting focus away from histories of the origins and developments of
phenomena predefi ned by national or religious borders, Mediterranean
Studies opens vistas onto histories of contact, circulation and exchange in
all their complexity while encouraging the reconceptualization of inter-
and intra-disciplinary scholarship, making it one of the most exciting and
dynamic fi elds in the humanities. Mediterranean Perspectives interprets
the Mediterranean in the widest sense: the sea and the lands around it,
as well as the European, Asian and African hinterlands connected to it
by networks of culture, trade, politics, and religion. This series publishes
monographs and edited collections that explore these new fi elds, from the
span of Late Antiquity through Early Modernity to the contemporary.
More information about this series at
http://www.springer.com/series/15161
Adam J . Goldwyn • Renée M. Silverman
Editors
Mediterranean
Modernism
Intercultural Exchange and Aesthetic Development
Editors
Adam J. Goldwyn Renée M. Silverman
North Dakota State University Florida International University
Fargo , North Dakota, USA Miami, Florida, USA
Mediterranean Perspectives
ISBN 978-1-137-58927-9 ISBN 978-1-137-58656-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-58656-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016942673
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2 016
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A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
This volume has its origins in the 2012 American Comparative Literature
Association (ACLA) conference, held at Brown University, Providence,
Rhode Island, for which Adam Goldwyn organized the seminar
“Mediterranean Modernisms.” The ideas from the many seminar presen-
tations, including Renée Silverman’s, gave rise to the present work. As
the volume’s title suggests, the aim of the seminar was to explore how
Mediterranean Modernism differed from modernism p er se , which is often
conceived either in terms of specifi c national traditions or as a broad and
vaguely defi ned international phenomenon—one that usually but not
always ends up being limited to Northern or Western Europe, or a set of
cosmopolitan cities. Although the eight papers dealing with the diverse
regions and cultural traditions of the Mediterranean that were presented
over the two days of the seminar demonstrated a number of shared politi-
cal, aesthetic, and cultural concerns, what turned out to be most striking
was the great diversity of artistic production in the region that has been
identifi ed as, or identifi ed itself, as “modern.” The papers also showed
Mediterranean Modernism to have in common a felt need by writers, art-
ists, architects, and other cultural fi gures to balance an interest in new for-
eign ideas, and a certain degree of cosmopolitanism, with long-standing
local traditions. The “Mediterranean Modernisms” seminar brought this
tension between local and foreign, tradition and innovation, the colonial
and the postcolonial, to the fore; the present volume addresses these pecu-
liar and productive paradoxes in a deliberate and detailed way.
Our fi rst acknowledgment is to those who participated in the seminar:
the speakers whose presentations shaped this project, as well as the other
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
conference participants who enlivened our sessions with fruitful discussion
and questions. We as the Editors of the current volume are also grateful
to those contributors who joined our collective project after the ACLA
conference, giving the present volume additional meaning and widening
its scope within the Mediterranean region. Thanks are due to both groups
of contributors for their dedication to the volume as well as for sharing
their expertise in its pages.
Adam Goldwyn would especially like to thank his former colleagues at
Uppsala University, where he held a postdoctoral research fellowship dur-
ing the period that this project began to take shape. He is most grateful for
the supportive environment created by the members of the Department of
Linguistics and Philology, the Byzantine Studies research group and, most
of all, Professor Ingela Nilsson, whose generosity with research funding
was far surpassed by her generosity of spirit.
Renée Silverman wishes to thank Florida International University and
the Department of Modern Languages, in particular the department
Chair, Pascale Bécel, for the support necessary to make endeavors such as
this volume possible. She would also like to express her gratitude to Juli
Highfi ll and the late Tobin Siebers for their intellectual generosity, as well
as for many thought-provoking conversations about modernism, moder-
nity, and the avant-garde over the years.
It is also important for us to acknowledge all those at Palgrave Macmillan
who encouraged and sustained the production of this volume: Brian Catlos
and Sharon Kinoshita, the Editors of Palgrave’s Mediterranean Studies
Series, for recognizing the importance of this fi eld and creating a venue
in which we could share our work; Kristin Purdy, the History Editor; and
Michelle Smith, Assistant to the History Editor. All of them helped at vari-
ous stages to bring this project to fruition, for which we are truly grateful.
Emilee Ruhland at North Dakota State University deserves many thanks
for undertaking the time-consuming process of formatting, proofreading,
and copy-editing each of the contributions. Last, but certainly not least,
we would like to express our sincere gratitude to the anonymous review-
ers whose suggestions signifi cantly improved each of the essays and the
volume as a whole.
And fi nally, we wish to thank our families for their patient and loving
sustainment of both ourselves and our work.
AJG and RMS
Fargo and Miami, September 2015
C
ONTENTS
1 Introduction: Fernand Braudel and the Invention
of a Modernist’s Mediterranean 1
Adam J. Goldwyn and R enée M. Silverman
Part I P ersonal Refl ections on the Multi-C ultural
Mediterranean 27
2 Mafarka Before Being a Futurist: The Intimate Egypt
in the Writings of F.T. Marinetti 2 9
Nadine Wassef
3 Marginal Modernists: Claude McKay, Panait Istrati,
and the “Minor Mediterranean” 5 1
Charles Sabatos
4 Mediterranean Crossroads: The Spanish University
Cruise, 1933 73
Juan Herrero-Senés
vii
viii CONTENTS
5 Catalan Political Modernism: The Case of Gabriel Alomar
i Villalonga (1873–1941) and Modernism on the Periphery 97
David W. Bird
6 Geopoetics and Historical Modernism: Gertrude Stein,
Laura Riding, and Robert Graves in Mallorca, 1912–1936 123
Anett Jessop
7 A Scent of Jasmine from the Sea: Representations of 
Tunis in V illa Jasmin by Férid Boughedir and L e chant
des mariées by Karin Albou 1 49
Federica Frediani
Part II C ommunal Refl ections of the Postcolonial
Mediterranean 1 69
8 Naming Surreally: Lautréamont’s C hants de Maldoror
and Nikos Engonopoulos’s Worship of the “Greek” 1 71
Vasiliki Dimoula
9 Sharing the Stage in Istanbul: The Multi-ethnic
Beginnings of Ottoman Theatre 1 97
Defne Çizakça
10 From Autarky to “Barbarian” Cosmopolitanism: The 
Early Avant-Garde Movements in Slovenia and Croatia 233
Marijan Dović
11 Modernism, Nationalism, Albanianism: Geographic
Poetry and Poetic Geography in the Albanian and 
Kosovar Independence Movements 2 51
Adam J. Goldwyn
CONTENTS ix
12 Gender Dystopia on the Kibbutz: From Plato to Marx 2 83
Rob Baum
13 Flâneurs in the Orient: The Colonial Maghrib and
the Origins of the French Modernist Tradition 317
Gavin Murray-Miller
14 The Alexandria Biennale and Egypt’s Shifting
Mediterranean 3 43
Dina A. Ramadan
About the Editors 3 63
About the Contributors 365
Index 3 67