Periodizing modernism: Postcolonial modernities and the space/time borders of modernist studies

Modernism - Modernity

Volumn 13, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 425-443

  Friedman, Susan Stanford ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950410687     PISSN: 10716068     EISSN: 10806601     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/mod.2006.0059     Document Type: Review

References (93)

1. Marshall Brown, "Periods and Resistances," Special Issue on Periodization: Cutting Up the Past. Modern Language Quarterly 62, no. 4 (December 2001): 309, 315. For their challenges to portions of this essay, I am indebted to audiences at the Modernist Studies Association Conference (1999, 2005); University of Texas, Austin (2004); Lebanese American University, Lebanon (2004); and University of Coimbra, Portugal (2005); and to the anonymous reader for Modernism/Modernity. I owe special thanks to Brian Richardson, who organized the 2005 MSA panel entitled Re-Figuring the Boundaries of Modernism for which I read the short version of this essay; Richardson's paper, "Modernism: Period or Style?," also argues for extending the end points of modernism through the contemporary period.
2. Walter Mignolo, "The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism," Cosmopolitanism, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 158.
3. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, "On Alternative Modernities," Alternative Modernities (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 14.
4. Lawrence Grossberg, "The Space of Culture, the Power of Space," The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, ed. Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (London: Routledge, 1996), 180.
5. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY Cornell University Press, 1981), 9.
6. See my counterimperative, "Always spatialize," in a discussion of "geopolitical literacy" in Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 130-1.
7. See also Christopher Bush's advocacy of a "location-oriented modernist studies" and suggestion that we "imagine a Fredric Jameson of space extolling: 'Always localize'" in "The Other Side of the Other?: Cultural Studies, Theory, and the Location of the Modernist Signifier," Comparative Literature Studies 24, no. 2 (2005), 176.
8. Harry Harootunian attacks the spatial turn in modernity studies as a reinstitution of a European colonial paradigm of center/periphery in "Some Thoughts on Comparability and the Space-Time Problem," boundary 2 32, no. 2 (Summer 2005), 23-52.
9. Fredric Jameson, "Modernism and Imperialism," Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature, ed. Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward W. Said (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).
10. For discussion of the necessity for and problems of periodization in literary history, see the special issue on Periodization: Cutting Up the Past of Modern Language Quarterly 62, no. 4 (December 2001). None of the contributors give serious consideration to the spatial boundaries implicit in historical - that is, temporal - periodization.
11. Susan Stanford Friedman, "Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism." Modernism/Modernity 8, no. 3 (September 2001), 493-514.
12. http://msa.press.jhu.edu/ (emphasis added).
13. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982; rev. ed. New York: Penguin, 1988);
14. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, ed. Modernism (New York: Penguin, 1976);
15. Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990);
16. Peter Nicholls, Modernism: A Literary Guide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995);
17. and Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life," Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. R. E. Charvet (New York: Penguin, 1973), 403-5.
18. Modernism in Spanish has yet another periodization, as Cathy L. Jrade explores in Modernismo Modernity and the Development of Spanish American Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998).
19. Houston A. Baker Jr.'s pathbreaking book Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1987) was an early positing of a distinctive and differently periodized modernity for African Americans and thus for their particular modernism.
20. Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks: The Experiences of a Black Man in a White World (1952), trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967).
21. Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (1990), trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1997), 138.
22. Hugh Kenner. "The Making of the Modernist Canon." Chicago Review 34, no. 2 (spring 1984), 53-57.
23. On modernist primitivism, see especially Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1990);
24. th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. Vol. 1 (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1984), 1-84.
25. For discussion of philosophical primitivism in the development of Western modernity, see Fuyuki Kurasawa, The Ethnological Imagination: A Cross-Cultural Critique of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
26. Simon Gikandi, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992);
27. Charles W. Pollard, New World Modernisms: T. S. Eliot, Derek Walcott, and Kamau Brathwaite (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004);
28. Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, ed. Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).
29. See also the growing body of criticism of non-Western writers as modernist with a concomitant reconceptualization of modernist internationalism in Anthony L. Geist and José B. Monléon, ed. Modernism and Its Margins: Reinscribing Modernity from Spain and Latin America (New York: Garland, 1999);
30. Priya Joshi, In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002);
31. Jrade, Modernismo Modernity and the Development of Spanish American Literature; Chana Kronfeld, On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (Controversions: Critical Studies in Jewish Literature, Culture, and Society) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996);
32. Michael Valdez Moses, The Novel & The Globalization of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995);
33. Fernando J. Rosenberg, The Avant-Garde and Geopolitics in Latin America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2006);
34. Vicky Unruh, Latin American Vanguards: The Art of Contentious Encounters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994);
35. and Susan Stanford Friedman, "Modernism in a Transnational Landscape: Spatial Poetics, Postcolonialism, and Gender in Cesaire's Cahier/Notebook and Cha's Dictee," Paideuma 32.1/2/3 (spring, fall, winter 2003), 39-74.
36. J. M. Blaut, The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York: Guilford Press, 1993).
37. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996);
38. Immanuel Wallerstein, "Eurocentrism and Its Avatars: The Dilemmas of Social Science," New Left Review no. 226 (November/December 1997), 105.
39. See also Wallerstein's summary of his influential world-systems theory in World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004)
40. and my extended analysis of what Wallerstein and Huntington share in "Unthinking Manifest Destiny: Muslim Modernities on Three Continents," Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, ed. Wai Chee Dimock (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2007).
41. Susan Stanford Friedman, "Cultural Parataxis and Transnational Landscapes of Reading: Toward a Locational Modernist Studies"; an extended version of this paper is forthcoming in Modernism, ed. Vivian Liska and Astradur Eysteinsson (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007).
42. Pollard, New World Modernisms, 5; he cites Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 29.
43. Doyle and Winkiel, Introduction, Geomodernisms, 3.
44. Edward W. Said, "Traveling Theory," The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 226.
45. Edward W. Said, "Traveling Theory Reconsidered" (1994), Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), 452.
46. Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 3.
47. John King, ed. Introduction, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Latin American Culture (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2.
48. See also Unruh, Latin American Vanguards.
49. For Western literary modernism's formation through engagement with the colonies, see especially Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996);
50. Elleke Boehmer's discussion of "the globalized interface of modernism" in Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890-1920 (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2002), 175
51. Rubin, "Modernist Primitivism: An Introduction," 7. See also Simon Gikandi's discussion of Picasso's borrowings from African art and the Western suppression of African intellectual and aesthetic thought in "Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference," Modernism/Modernity 10, no. 3 (September 2003), 455-80.
52. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University, 2000) and Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2002);
53. Homi K. Bhabha's concept of colonial mimicry in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1993).
54. The Partha Chatterjee Omnibus (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1-282.
55. Goankar, "On Alternative Modernities," 4-6.
56. R. Radhakrishnan, "Derivative Discourses and the Problem of Signification," The European Legacy 7, no. 6 (2002), 790, 788.
57. For conventional Eurocentric definitions of modernity, see for example, Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990)
58. and the textbook by Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben, Formations of Modernity (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1992), especially 1-16;
59. See especially Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 (Oxford, U. K.: Oxford University Press, 1989);
60. Blaut; Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Wolfgang Schluchter, eds., Special Issue on Early Modernities, Daedalus 127, no. 3 (summer 1998);
61. S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., Special Issue on Multiple Modernities, Daedalus 129, no.1 (winter 2000);
62. André Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998);
63. Stephen K. Sanderson, ed., Civilizations and World Systems: Studying World-Historical Change (London: Sage, 1995);
64. Jack Weatherford, Ghengis Kahn and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004);
65. and Friedman, Planetary Modernism.
66. nd. ed., New York: Norton, 1978), 577-78 (Berman, 21).
67. See also James Clifford's dialectical understanding of tradition/modernity in "Traditional Futures," Questions of Tradition, ed. Mark Salber Phillips and Gordon Schochet (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 152.
68. For a different view, see Moses, The Novel & The Globalization of Culture; although he brings attention to the modernisms produced in the postcolonies, Moses finds in these texts a critique of Western modernity based in the authors' pre-modern and traditional cultural contexts (especially xiv-xvi, 24-25, 107-92). Like many social theorists, Moses argues that modernization causes global homogenization, and he regards the pre-modern and the traditional in the Third World as forces of resistance to modernity's homogenizing.
69. Others, like Clifford in "Traditional Futures," Gaonkar in "On Alternative Modernities," and Victor Roudeometof in "Globalization or Modernity?" (Comparative Literature Review no. 31 [1994], 18-45) argue against this view, suggesting instead that globalization heightens the indigenizations of traveling cultures and the ensuing hybrid heterogeneity of local cultures.
70. Paul de Man, "Literary History and Literary Modernity," Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 147-8.
71. Gaonkar, "On Alternative Modernities," 17.
72. See for example Radhakrishnan; Gaonkar; Friedman, "Definitional Excursions"; Abbas Milani, Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Modernity in Iran (Washington, D.C.: Mage Publishers, 2004);
73. Eisenstadt and Schluchter; Eisenstadt; Julios Ramos, Divergent Modernities: Culture and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, trans. John D. Blanco (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001);
74. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Hearing Voices: Vignettes of Early Modernity in South Asia, 1400-1750," Daedalus 127, no. 3 (1998), 75-104.
75. Subrahmanyam, "Hearing Voices," 99-100; for virus and toxin imagery for modernity, see Wallerstein's "Eurocentrism and Its Avatars."
76. Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North (1967), trans. Denys Johnson-Davies (Boulder, Colo.: Three Continents Books, 1970); hereafter abbreviated SMN.
77. Criticism on the novel is proliferating rapidly; although references to Salih's echoing of Heart of Darkness abound, no one (with the exception of Saree Makdisi) considers Season within the context of modernism. For discussion of Saleh's community of exiles and writers in Beirut, see Mona Takieddine Amyuni, Introduction, Season of Migration to the North, by Tayeb Salih: A Casebook, (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1985);
78. Philip Sadgrove, "Al-Tayyib Salih," African Writers, Vol. 2, ed. Brian C. Cox. (New York: Charles Scribner's, 1997), 733-44.
79. For selected discussions of the novel, see especially Amyuni's Casebook, produced in Beirut; Ali Abdalla Abbas, "Notes on Tayeb Salih: Season of Migration to the North and The Wedding of Zein," Sudan Notes and Records 55 (1974): 46-60;
80. John E. Davidson, "In Search of a Middle Point: The Origins of Oppression in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North," Research in African Literatures 20, no. 3 (fall 1989): 385-400;
81. Patricia Geesey, "Cultural Hybridity and Contamination in Tayeb Salih's Mawsim al-hijira ila al-Shamal (Season of Migration to the North), Research in African Literatures 28 (fall 1997): 128-40;
82. Brian Gibson, "An Island unto Himself? Masculinity in Season of Migration to the North," Jouvert 7, no. 1 (autumn 2002);
83. Barbara Harlow, "Othello's Season of Migration," Edebiyat 4, no. 2 (1979): 157-75;
84. Wail S. Hassan, "Gender (and) Imperialism: Structures of Masculinity in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North," Men and Masculinities 5, no. 3 (2003): 309-24;
85. R. S. Krishnan, "Reinscribing Conrad: Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North," International Fiction Review 23, nos. 1-2 (1996): 7-15;
86. Saree S. Makdisi, "The Empire Renarrated: Season of Migration to the North and the Reinvention of the Present," Critical Inquiry 18 (summer 1992): 804-20;
87. Mohammad Shaheen, "Tayeb Salih and Conrad." Comparative Literature 22, no.1 (spring 1985): 156-71;
88. Muhammed Siddiq, "The Process of Individuation in Al-Tayyeb Salih's Novel Season of Migration to the North, Journal of Arabic Literature 9 (1978): 67-104;
89. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 54-66.
90. For the relation of the novel to Heart of Darkness, see especially Shaheen, "Tayeb Salih and Conrad"; Krishnan, "Reinscribing Conrad"; and Spivak, Death, 54-66.
91. For discussion of Season and other contemporary Arab novels (especially by Lebanese writers) as part of an "Arab modernism," see Makdisi, "'Postcolonial' Literature in a Neocolonial World: Modern Arabic Culture and the End of Modernity," boundary 2 22, no. 1 (1995): 104-5.
92. On Mustafa's "hyper-masculinity" and its relationship to colonialism, see Gibson; Hassan. Spivak also briefly discusses gender, modernity, and tradition in Season, noting Salih's displacements of the familiar binary.
93. Constance E. Berkley and Osman Hassan Ahmed, ed. Tayeb Salih Speaks: Four Interviews with the Sudanese Novelist, trans. Berkley and Ahmed (Washington, D.C.: Embassy of the Democratic Republic of the Sudan, 1982), 15-6.