Planetary modernism: provocations on modernity across time

466 Pages·2018·3.108 MB·English

by  Friedman, Susan

PLANETARY
MODERNISMS
MODERNIST
LATITUDES
MODERNIST LATITUDES
JESSICA BERMAN AND PAUL SAINT-AMOUR, EDITORS
Modernist Latitudes aims to capture the energy and ferment of mod-
ernist studies by continuing to open up the range of forms, locations,
temporalities, and theoretical approaches encompassed by the field.
The series celebrates the growing latitude (“scope for freedom of
action or thought”) that this broadening affords scholars of modern-
ism, whether they are investigating little-known works or revisiting
canonical ones. Modernist Latitudes will pay particular attention to
the texts and contexts of those latitudes (Africa, Latin America, Aus-
tralia, Asia, Southern Europe, and even the rural United States) that
have long been misrecognized as ancillary to the canonical modern-
isms of the global North.
Barry McCrea, In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in
Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust, 2011
Jessica Berman, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics,
and Transnational Modernism, 2011
Jennifer Scappettone, Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice, 2014
Nico Israel, Spirals: The Whirled Image in Twentieth-Century
Literature and Art, 2015
Carrie J. Noland, Voices of Negritude in Modernist Print: Aesthetic
Subjectivity, Diaspora, and the Lyric Regime, 2015
PLANETARY
MODERNISMS
PROVOCATIONS
ON
MODERNITY
ACROSS
TIME
SUSAN
STANFORD
FRIEDMAN
COLUMBIA
UNIVERSITY
PRESS
NEW YORK
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2015 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Friedman, Susan Stanford.
Planetary modernisms : provocations on modernity across time /
Susan Stanford Friedman.
pages cm.—(Modernist latitudes)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-231-17090-1 (cloth : acid-free paper)
ISBN 978-0-231-53947-0 (e-book)
1. Modernism (Literature) 2. Modernism (Aesthetics)
3. Civilization, Modern. 4. Cosmopolitanism.
5. Postcolonialism. I. Title.
PN56.M54F75 2015
809'.9112—dc23
2014044880
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent
and durable acid-free paper.
This book is printed on paper with recycled content.
Printed in the United States of America
c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Cover design: Matt Roeser
Book design: Lisa Hamm
References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing.
Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs
that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
For
Owen Friedman Weber
2008–2012
Ever curious, ever laughing, ever tender, ever brave
Everlastingly cherished
and
Dylan Friedman Weber
Ever loving older brother
❧

CONTENTS
Preface ix
Introduction 1
PART I
RETHINKING MODERNIST STUDIES
1. Definitional Excursions 19
2. Planetarity 47
PART II
RETHINKING MODERNITY, SCALING SPACE AND TIME
3. Stories of Modernity: Planetary Scale in the Longue Durée 83
4. Figures of Modernity: Relational Keywords 143
PART III
RETHINKING MODERNISM, READING MODERNISMS
5. Modernity’s Modernisms: Aesthetic Scale
and Pre-1500 Modernisms 183
(cid:54)(cid:41)(cid:41)(cid:41)(cid:0)(cid:115)(cid:0) (cid:35)(cid:47)(cid:46)(cid:52)(cid:37)(cid:46)(cid:52)(cid:51)
6. Circulating Modernisms: Collages of Empire in Fictions
of the Long Twentieth Century 215
7. Diasporic Modernisms: Journeys “Home” in Long Poems
of Aimé Césaire and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha 283
Conclusion. A Debate with Myself 311
Notes 345
Bibliography 403
Index 433
PREFACE
P
lanetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time
proposes a paradigm shift to reorient the way we think about
modernity and the aesthetic modernisms that contribute to its
creation. Challenging the familiar story that the West invented
modernity in the post-1500 period of Europe’s “rise,” the book
enlarges the scale of space and time to argue for a fully planetary
approach to modernity. Within this larger frame, modernity is a
planetary phenomenon across the millennia and is understood as
multiple, polycentric, and recurrent instances of transformational
rupture and rapid change across the full spectrum of political, eco-
nomic, cultural, technological, demographic, and military arenas
of interlocking societies and civilizations. Not reducible to utopic
progress or dystopic devastation, modernity in the full scope of geo-
history often incorporates both ends of the spectrum, with uneven
effects on different groups of people and areas of the world. As a
bang/clash of contradiction, modernity often results from violent
conquest and imperial expansions that produce hybridic and regen-
erative mixtures of peoples, cultures, goods, and ideas. Out of the
vortex comes change that takes shape in vast networks of relational
circulation around the globe.
In some ways, the planetary turn in modernist studies is a
phenomenon of the twenty-first century, enabled as a new way
of reading geohistory and its aesthetic manifestations by the new
modernities of an ever-more interconnected and digital age. What