Panel: “English, Spanish, and the Politics of Global Modernisms”
“Pound, Spanish Literature, and the Worldly Possibilities of Modernist Mistranslation”
Gayle Rogers, University of Pittsburgh
Before he was an avant-garde poet, a founder of movements, a modernist kingmaker, an international provocateur, or a political ideologue, Ezra Pound was a student and emerging scholar of Spanish literature. The advisor of his abandoned dissertation at Penn, in fact, was Hugo Rennert, an internationally renowned scholar of Lope de Vega, and Rennert secured Pound’s first fellowship for research abroad—in Madrid, at the National Library and the archives of the Royal Palace in 1906. The fruit of these studies is first apparent in Pound’s iconoclastic pedagogical and translational text The Spirit of Romance (1910), whose vast comparative literary history provides a logic that undergirds much of his poetry in the teens. Pound’s treatment of Spanish literary history became integral to the structure of the Three Cantos, the initial set of which were published in Poetry in 1917 (known as the Ur-Cantos), and which were revised for inclusion in the Cantos (1925-69). Here, the figure of El Cid, from the twelfth-century Castilian national epic Poema del Cid, plays a vital role as an exiled and multiply-translated figure. What interests me in this paper, however, is the way in which Pound mistranslates portions of the text over the course of his several revised treatments of it. Pound’s poetics of mistranslation are well-known, from “The Seafarer” to Cathay to Homage to Sextus Propertius. When he turns to the Spanish language and its literary history, though, they transform into a critique of the course of the Spanish empire and its decline from a global power in the seventeenth century to the heart of an intellectual waste land in the twentieth. Incorporating also his travel essays and his indictments of Spanish literature in publications for Spanish magazines in the 1920s, I argue that Pound uses mistranslation to reenact the historical linguistic isomorphism of Spanish and to infuse it with his own reinvented English.
"Vernacular Networks and the Seaways of Hemispheric Modernism"
Harris Feinsod, Northwestern University
This paper takes up the old trope of "transatlantic liners passing in the night" as a metonymy for a larger literary-sociological history of a modernist poetics of the Americas circa 1930. Following poems through the network of cisatlantic liner lanes and ports of call that stitch New York, Havana, Veracruz, Santos and Buenos Aires, I describe a disarticulated, inter-American poetic community, whose poems often alight on the commonplace iconography and mixed-language argot of stevedores and ordinary sailors. Reading poems by Hart Crane, Salvador Novo, Federico García Lorca, Langston Hughes, and Manuel Maples Arce, I pay particular attention to Crane's "Cutty Sark" (1927), Novo's bilingual Seamen Rhymes (1934), and Novo's related conception of an "imaginary anthology" of sea poems composed in all the imperial languages of the Atlantic, which he describes in the essay "Canto a Teresa" (1934). In these clusters of poems, what I call a "vernacular network" of often queer, often radical attentions to maritime labor comprises one of the stronger formulations of a "poetry of the Americas" circulating in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Comparing these poems not in terms of material connectivity (translation, influence, correspondence, intertexts, etc.), but instead by their shared states of fantasy, figural doublings and blind, formal affinities, I suggest an alternative to prevalent formulations about transnational circulation as a constitutive feature of hemispheric modernisms.
“Our America”: Translating the Americas Across the Atlantic”
Lori Cole, Brandeis University
The point of departure for this paper is the questionnaire, a ubiquitous genre in the 1920s that galvanized magazine editors and contributors alike around questions of art and national identity, and by extension, the politics of translation. In 1928 the Cuban magazine Revista de Avance issued a series of questions, including: “What should American art be? What should the attitude of American artists towards European art be?” In this context “Our America” refers to the 1892 essay “Nuestra América,” written by the Cuban revolutionary and poet José Martí. Across the Atlantic, also in 1928, the expatriate magazine transition based in Paris, polled its North American contributors “Why do Americans Live in Europe?” and surveyed its European writers to ask: “How are the influences of the United States manifesting themselves upon Europe?” Similarly, Imán, a Latin American magazine based in Paris, asked European Surrealists, “How do you imagine Latin America?” in 1931. Editors of these publications all articulated the debate over what constituted “America” in terms of translation, translating texts into either Spanish or English in their magazines to spur the development of an American culture that was viable internationally. For instance, Alejo Carpentier, who wrote for all three magazines, called upon his Latin American audience “to translate America with the most intensity possible.” This question of “translating” one’s work for the international avant-garde was in turn problematized by transition, which printed foreign-language material in English in order to spur Americans to develop an elastic, liberatory relationship to language. Moreover, while these magazines all sought to define and promote a uniquely “American” avant-garde, they shared many contributors, suggesting a dynamic model of global modernism, whose national identities were structured relationally and enabled by translation. In this paper I argue that the hemispheric notion of “America” was constructed through the rhetoric of translation, which was at once cultural and linguistic, as these publications competed to determine what version of “America” would inherit the cultural legacy of Europe through debates in print culture.
Panel: “Fictions of Authoritarianism and the (Re)turns of Modernism”
“The Ends of Realism: Literary Technics and Writing the Dictator”
Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra, University of Mississippi
This paper will explore the use of the fantastic or a-realist narrative technique in two novels about dictators and dictatorship—Sony Labou Tansi’s Life and a Half (La Vie et demie, 1979) and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow (Mũrogi wa Kagogo, 2004-2007; 2006), with reference to Gabriel García Márquez’s canonical dictator-novel The Autumn of the Patriarch (El otoño del patriarca, 1975). While the term “magical realism” is most often used to describe recourse to the fantastic within the general frame of realism, the “deformations” realism as a mimetic principle undergoes as part of the critique of dictatorship in these novels are not in fact so easily categorized. Indeed, “magical realism” is just one kind of alteration evinced in these narratives. A broader—and perhaps more precise—descriptive term for the narrative modes employed in these novels is “modernist,” which Rebecca Walkowitz (in the Introduction to Cosmopolitan Style) defines as including: “wandering consciousness, paratactic syntax, recursive plotting, collage, and portmanteau language” (2). To push this connection further: the political phenomenon to which each of these novels respond—dictatorship—is itself tied to the experience of (post-independence) modernity and/or processes of modernization in the global South. But can we read these novels as modernist texts? Alternately, what is the “modernism” of which these novels may serve as exemplars? To address these questions, I will (first) use the category of “modernism” to explore the limits of realism as a representative mode in Life and a Half and Wizard of the Crow. I will then turn attention to the problem of the designation “modernist” itself, using these three novels to map the contours of the broader category of “global modernisms” as it is taking shape in our current critical moment.
"Political Authority and the Traces of Modernism in Angola: Boaventura Cardoso’s Mother, Maternal Sea"
Lanie Millar, University of Oregon
While the post-independence political organization in Angola shares many aspects of authoritarian regimes elsewhere in the global South, works explicitly addressing authoritarian political figures in the post-colonial period are quite rare in the Angolan context, and do not generally fall in with the Latin American and African genre of “dictator novels,” for example. In this paper, I will nonetheless argue that Angolan novelist Boaventura Cardoso’s 2001 Mãe, materno mar [Mother, maternal sea] indirectly takes on the question of post-colonial authoritarianism via modernist and post-modernist techniques. The novel narrates the period after Angola’s independence via an allegorical fifteen-year train journey from the interior city of Malange to the port capitol of Luanda that is plagued by delays, breakdowns and reroutings. During this voyage, the representations of political and social authority transitions from a colonial patriarchy to revolutionary leadership to evangelical prophets, each embodying different aspects of the post-independence authoritarian state. My analyses will be grounded in several of the novel’s formal and linguistic practices including the fragmentation of narrative perspective among different characters, collective interjections, questions directed toward the reader, and linguistic experimentation. In addressing these features, I will draw on the work of two scholars: Brian McHale’s argument that modernism is fundamentally concerned with epistemology while postmodernism is primarily concerned with ontology and Ato Quayson’s claim that modernist and postmodernist practices overlap, or even co-exist, in late twentieth and early twenty-first century African literature. While some critics have seen the novel’s formal and linguistic inventiveness as linked to the postmodern dissolution of political authority into the global capitalist market—a clear concern with the latter half of the novel—I will argue in dialogue with McHale and Quayson that the traces of modernism’s epistemological concerns are fundamental to the novel’s critical work.
"The Tricontinental and the Modernist Lens: Race, the International Left, and Castrismo"
Anne-Garland Mahler, University of Arizona
This presentation aims to contribute to a fuller understanding of the relationship between global modernisms and the international Left by addressing how the modernist aesthetics of the propaganda produced by the Tricontinental alliance linked the Cuban Revolution to a global radicalist community and simultaneously provided a platform for a critique of the Castro regime’s authoritarianism.In January 1966, delegates from the liberation movements of eighty-two African, Asian, and Latin American nations came together at the Tricontinental Conference in Havana, Cuba to form an alliance against imperialism. This Tricontinental alliance aimed, I suggest, to revive and reframe the Pan-Africanist anti-imperialism that circulated through the négritude-negrismo-New Negro nexus–or what Vera Kutzinksi has called “fringe modernist” movements–into a non-racially deterministic vision of subaltern resistance. In this vein, the Tricontinental used its cultural production–especially newsreels that relied on modernist techniques like montage, fragmentation, jump cuts, and collage–to critique racism and racial discrimination as a product of imperialism in places like the United States. Yet alongside the rise of tricontinentalism and its newsreel aesthetic in the late 1960s was the increasing authoritarianism and Sovietization of the Cuban Revolution, which produced all of the Tricontinental’s materials. A widening gap emerged both between the newsreels’ avant-garde aesthetics and the socialist realism of Cuba’s film industry as well as between the Tricontinental’s indictment of racial oppression and the Cuban Revolution’s dismissively Marxist exceptionalist position towards domestic racial inequality.
Coffea arábiga (1968), a twenty-minute short by Nicolás Guillén Landrián, Afro-Cuban filmmaker and nephew of negrista poet Nicolás Guillén, attempts to address this dissonance. Coffea arábiga appropriates the Tricontinental’s newsreel style to argue that the racist ideologies and exploitation of black labor from Cuba's colonial legacy are perpetuated under the Revolution. In this way, Guillén Landrián’s film is a testament to the way in which the Tricontinental provided, in the tradition of global modernism, a praxis for articulating dissent against authoritarianism and oppression by gesturing beyond the nation and towards a transnational political community.
Panel: Ethics and The Aesthetics of Difference
"The Aesthetics of Sameness: Japonisme and Global Modernity"
Christopher Bush, Northwestern University
A shared anxiety about a global decline in difference can make for strange cultural-political bedfellows. While the desire to respect and preserve difference is today most strong associated with the political left, during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries, critiques of capitalism’s leveling effect, its seemingly unstoppable drive toward global homogeneity, was one of the defining obsessions of conservative, even radical right, cultural pessimism.
My talk discusses some of the strange political permutations of this desire for difference with respect to modernist-era ideas about Japan in the West. Drawing on writers as diverse as Vladimir Soloviev, Oswald Spengler, and W. E. B. Du Bois, I show how debates about the future of Japanese modernization shaded into fears and fantasies of a unified, even uniform world. I then turn to the consequences of this history for literary interpretation. If Japan represented not a singular reserve of premodern cultural difference, but the generalizable template of a coming global modernity, how would this change the way we read, for example, the modernist haiku?
"Second-Hand Modernism: The Worldly Ethics of Linguistic Migrants"
Joshua L. Miller, University of Michigan
This talk will use Charles Reznikoff’s narrative By the Waters of Manhattan (1930) as an example of what I term “second-hand modernism.” This refers to a mode of US modernism that problematizes linguistic and literary re-versioning as techniques that overtly negotiate multiple cultural inheritances, histories, and temporalities. Second-hand modernism does not use historical generational models, but rather identifies a set of artists who respond to the artistic imperatives of early modernists selectively, just as they do to national and transnational precursors by writing self-consciously as and about linguistic migrants.
The prose, poetry, and translations of Reznikoff and those of other second-hand modernists share an ethic that lends itself (or, arguably, emerges from) engagements with worldliness according to the Saidian secular, contextualist definition and the extranational, planetary meaning. Eschewing political and artistic manifestoes and dogmas, Reznikoff and others prioritize globalist ethics over philosophical consistency. Their works are frequently “minor” or derivative – translations, revisions, adaptations, and so on -- as they represent the mundane everyday without the contrasts of epiphanic connection. What arises in a study of such authors is not a version of late or documentary modernism, but a translational migrancy modernism, one grounded in the extranationalist ethos of immigrants and emigres. Reznikoff’s project is to craft a durable immigrant modernism, which reemerges to confront the linguistic dilemmas of post-World War 2 cultures as well and which has became more, not less, present in late 20th and early 21st century arts.
"Multilingual Literature and Invisible Difference"
Ania Spyra, Butler University
While we are used to the trope of invisibility in the context of translation – suffice it to mention Lawrence Venuti’s seminal The Translator’s Invisibility – when Christine Brooke-Rose titled her last work Invisible Author, she called attention to the invisibility of texts that insist on inclusion of unexplained difference. As an example she quotes the dissimilar reception of her own 1968 multilingual novel Between and George Perec’s 1969 La Disparition. While Perec advertised his constraint to make it obvious to the reader and thus ascertain the placement of his novel in the experimental literary cannon, Brook-Rose let her constraint – the omission of the verb “to be” – go without a footnote or foreword. That her novel attempts to formally make visible what usually goes unnoticed in globalizing discourses – the influence of translation on international communication, unacknowledged differences among European nations during the cold war, the female translators who convey delegates’ messages at international congresses – makes this lipogram particularly meaningful.
In my talk, I will focus the multilayered invisibility that Between exemplifies to argue that literature rarely allows us to engage with radical difference. While the texts that mix foreign languages within one text are exemplary global texts in their attempt to represent a reality of transcultural identities and experiences, they disappear from literary conversations when they fail to manage and explain their difference. Like foreignization in translation, multilingual literature does not allow its reader to believe in the seamless transference from one language to another and thus draws attention to what resists planetarity.
Panel: Modernism and Internationalism
"Stories without Plots: The Modernism of Others"
Aarthi Vadde, Duke University
In order to transform modernist studies from a European to a global field, scholars have sought to recalibrate its centers and peripheries as well as to acknowledge multiple origin points and lacunas in our story of modernism’s development. This paper reflects on spatial theories inherent to transnational modernism while also attempting to find new vocabularies for understanding the development of modernist aesthetics beyond circulation and diffusion. I focus particularly on the aesthetic of “plotlessness” by exploring the strategic deformations of plot in two novels of the Caribbean diaspora: Claude McKay’s Banjo: A Story without a Plot and George Lamming’s The Emigrants. Both novels feature “plotlessness” as a strategy for testing national norms of citizenship, engaging with the demands of socialist internationalism, and finding a style of anti-imperialism consistent with deterritorialized blackness. “Inter-national” in the sense of between nations, McKay’s vagabonds and Lamming’s emigrants are nomadic collectives that counter persistent and variegated forms of political exclusion by imagining ways of belonging outside the physical and conceptual boundaries of a fixed or contiguous territory.
The encounter that this paper stages between global modernism, a contemporary field formation, and what I call modernist internationalism, an aesthetic and political project that organized experimental writers from across colonial peripheries, is intended to enrich historical understandings of modernism’s constitution across differentials of power. It also seeks to establish how deriving a wider historical net for modernism’s aesthetic theories and stylistic signatures (i.e. a rejection of plot) changes our understanding of the conceptual challenges that modernists faced and that their fiction can mediate. It thus concludes by bringing McKay’s and Lamming’s novels to bear on ongoing dilemmas in the theorization of transnational belonging in such works as Seyla Benhabib’s The Rights of Others and Etienne Balibar’s We, the People of Europe.
“Late Modernism as Geopolitical Description”
Thomas Davis, The Ohio State University
Much of the recent work under the banners of “transnational,” “cosmopolitan,” or “global” modernism emphasizes cultural exchange across national lines or explores the complex ethical dilemmas that arise from various cultural contact zones. But does the prevailing critical terminology apply equally to all phases and all types of modernist cultural production? I suggest that late modernists developed a unique version of international relations during the world systemic disorder of the 1930s-1950s; this version turns on enmity, territory, force, and the frailty of highly interdependent economic and political systems. This paper argues for an explicitly geopolitical method that assesses the ways late modernist artworks conceptualize their moment of systemic disorder as it unfolds. I draw on fiction of dispossession by Sam Selvon and Basil Wright's 1934 documentary, Song of Ceylon, to demonstrate how late modernism’s formal involutions mediate geopolitical distress.
"Twinned Towers: Yeats, Tatlin, and the Unfashionable Performance of Internationalism"
Nico Israel – CUNY Graduate Center and Hunter College
In this talk I explore two spirals produced and frequently revised in the 1917–1925 period, Yeats’s occult system that he outlined in A Vision and Tatlin’s never-built Monument to the Third International, two of high modernism’s most earnestly designed and most totalizing, towering spiral structures. While it has long been recognized that Yeats’s work during this period tended toward fascism, a new look at the system’s architectural performativity reveals how the metaphors of winding and unwinding gyres, cones, and “perns” in his poetry link spiral-conceived history to spiral thought, and the body to space, conceived internationally and civilizationally. Tatlin’s Tower, as the collectively designed project came to be known, combined Leninist principles of historical development with planetary and celestial notions of spatio-temporality in order to translate the aims of the international working class. The enormous spiral tower was initially designed to contain a series of glass halls, of different geometric shapes, housing the “Soviet of the People’s Commissars of the World” (cube), the Comintern’s executive committee (pyramid), and a state-of-the-art information/communication/propaganda department (cylinder, topped by a hemisphere), the shapes of which were designed to rotate yearly, monthly, and daily, respectively. My focus on the question of the translatability of the tower turns (back) to images of the Tower of Babel, which Babelian “confusion” and misapprehension Tatlin’s structure itself seeks to encompass and overcome. Yeats’s and Tatlin’s nearly simultaneous but utterly politically opposed spiral projects, when viewed together, throw for a loop familiar modernist presumptions about internationalism and the politics of totality.
Panel: Genre and Global Modernism
“Black South African Writing & Modernist Ontologies”
Lily Saint, Wesleyan University
Classification was apartheid’s hallmark approach to structuring individual identity. The government policed its racist taxonomies through violence as well as legislation, but whatever means it used, the point was to keep categories distinct from one another, to establish, as Derrida has suggested in other contexts, the law of genre. This paper seeks to show how black anti-apartheid memoir often pushed at the limits of the genre, formally and thematically destabilizing structural obsessions with boundaries and laws, emphasizing instead the singularity of individual South African lives.
Njabulo Ndebele’s famous critique of anti-apartheid fiction does, on the surface, apply to memoirs of the period. Works such as Richard Rive’s Emergency, Sindiwe Magona’s To My Children’s Children, or Bloke Modisane’s Blame Me on History, display an overriding concern to expose the “spectacle” of apartheid’s excesses, and in so doing they rely on polarities to make their point. The racial categories insisted upon by the apartheid state prevail in these works even while they challenge its hierarchical ordering. While they refuse the apartheid claim that “Africans,” “coloureds,” and “Indians” were inferior to “whites,” they seem nonetheless willing to concede that these were indeed natural and permanent categories.
My paper suggests that Ndebelean readings of anti-apartheid “life writing” belie the undoing of categories that occurs formally in may of these works. From the enigmatic interludes in Es’kia Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue to the deployment of fiction to narrate the autobiographical in Peter Abraham’s A Wreath for Udomo, apartheid-era memoirs are riven through and through with their own refusal to adhere to the laws of genre. To heed these anti-categorical impulses, therefore, may also involve a refusal of the monikers of modernism or global modernism to describe these books, as these terms threaten to reinscribe works which aim instead to refuse segregation and classification entirely.
“Aqueous Modernism: Genre and the Sea”
Nicole Rizzuto, Georgetown University
Despite the transnational turn in new modernist studies, and the accompanying concentration on de-racination, cosmopolitanism, and mobility, what remains overlooked is the very medium that made literal and figural traversals in the modernist era possible —the seas. Addressing this oversight can challenge periodizing categories and create a bridge between generic and disciplinary boundaries that separate interwar literary and aesthetic discourses, including English surrealism and Bloomsbury modernism. Because the ocean is a global entity, understanding its role in movements that aim to reveal a “truth” and reality allegedly hidden by national traditions and conventions allows us to re-assess various modernisms’ engagements with the nation and beyond. Codifications of the waters undergo great shifts during the interwar era; so too do literary and visual aesthetics. I consider how literature and visual arts formally register effects of this transitional moment in maritime geopolitics and modernist aesthetics. Analyzing how discourses of the first legally global space are stitched into forms whose aim is to innovate complicates divisions between high modernism, associated with cosmopolitanism, and late modernism, turned inward to the nation, and also pressures the dominant interpretation of interwar British culture as one defined by travel and mobility.
Panel: Center and Periphery Modernisms
Pure Art and Significant form: Roger Fry, English Formalism, and the Debate with Psychoanalysis
Jennifer Spitzer, Ithaca College
While the expanding frame of the new modernist studies along temporal, spatial and vertical axes has led to fruitful destabilizations of the so-called centers of modernist production, a significant lacuna has been an attention to the ways in which English modernism was formed within a matrix of cross-disciplinary contact, exchange, and contest. My reading of the work of art critic Roger Fry will contribute to an account of how English modernism sought to consolidate its heterodox nature in part through its rivalry with the upstart discourse of psychoanalysis, which was viewed by Fry and other English modernists as a disciplinary interloper threatening to colonize the literary field. Bloomsbury’s hospitality to psychoanalysis in the 1910s and 20s aroused considerable anxiety among English writers and critics, including Fry, Clive Bell, and Virginia Woolf, about the ascendance of psychoanalysis as an authoritative discourse. While as Perry Meisel has noted, Sigmund Freud looked to England as the next great capital of psychoanalysis, on a par with Vienna and Berlin, psychoanalysis encountered its firmest opposition in England, where it was portrayed as a dangerous theoretical import from the continent. I argue in this paper that the particular literary cast that psychoanalysis acquired in England as a result of its engagement with Bloomsbury motivated the very acts of boundary maintenance on the part of English authors and critics that we have come to associate with high modernism.
Undergirding this resistance to psychoanalysis were other motivations: anti-German sentiment, anti-Semitism, and an obvious hostility to mass culture. The rest of my paper will highlight Roger Fry’s championing of a brand of English formalism against a psychoanalytically-oriented culture industry hungry for wish-fulfillment and fantasy, one Fry equates with female producers and consumers. I go on to suggest that psychoanalysis is worrisome for Fry, not only because it threatens to encroach upon the self-enclosed artwork by creating links to history, biography, and subjectivity, but because psychoanalysis represents another form of expertise that threatened the privileged position of the English art critic.
“the great work of the creation of beauty": W.E.B. Du Bois, Madam C.J. Walker, and the aesthetics of transnational activism
Elizabeth Sheehan, Oregon State University
This paper shows that ideas, images, and practices of beauty were pivotal to competing visions of transnational racial solidarity articulated and pursued by influential African American artists, intellectuals, and activists in the 1910s and 1920s. It argues that, while W.E.B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess (1928) claims racialized feminine beauty as a resource for cultivating a politicized cosmopolitan dandyism, the novel's attempt to disarticulate beauty from feminine self-fashioning undercuts the alternative visions of racial community and activism that emerged from African American women's beauty culture of the period. The novel thus illuminates a broader contest over what sorts of aesthetic forms and activities can underpin political projects and collectivities. By analyzing contrasting accounts of what beauty is and what beauty can do, the paper also raises questions about why certain discourses of racial activism remain largely unexplored despite the "transnational turn."
"Hunger and the Cultural Geography of the Periphery"
Tim Wientzen, Harvard University
In recent years as the field of modernist studies has inaugurated an interest in the transnational as a critical category, we have witnessed the extension of what Mao and Walkowitz call its “spatial axis.” Expanding the geographic range of modernism, that is, scholars have worked to understand the circulation and reception of texts, as well as the cross-cultural movement of modernism’s distinctive techniques. Yet the critical methodologies of reading modernism globally remain, in many ways, tied to the most literal forms of border crossing.
Focusing on Knut Hamsun’s 1890 novel, Hunger, this paper attempts to outline a method of reading the relationship between modernism and transnationalism that prioritizes shared cultural geographies of economic development over migration, circulation, and translation. With its strong emphasis on social anomie, the unconscious mind, and the shocks of metropolitan life, Hunger has long occupied a central position in genealogies of modernism. Yet, writing in one of Europe’s least developed countries near the end of a century that witnessed the deracination and mass emigration of over half a million Norwegian citizens, Hamsun makes an odd precursor for the formal projects of metropolitan modernity. In this talk, I suggest that Hamsun’s novel stands as a powerful (but often misread) example of a modernism that self-consciously speaks in an idiom of the periphery. Historicizing an experience of hunger common across the “developing” world in the late nineteenth century, this talk suggests that the formal experimentation of Hunger represents an effort to mediate conditions of modernization unique to the global periphery. Moreover, it offers a useful lesson in transnationalism as a reading practice, one sensitive to an experience of modernization that looked markedly different from without than from within.
“Pound, Spanish Literature, and the Worldly Possibilities of Modernist Mistranslation”
Gayle Rogers, University of Pittsburgh
Before he was an avant-garde poet, a founder of movements, a modernist kingmaker, an international provocateur, or a political ideologue, Ezra Pound was a student and emerging scholar of Spanish literature. The advisor of his abandoned dissertation at Penn, in fact, was Hugo Rennert, an internationally renowned scholar of Lope de Vega, and Rennert secured Pound’s first fellowship for research abroad—in Madrid, at the National Library and the archives of the Royal Palace in 1906. The fruit of these studies is first apparent in Pound’s iconoclastic pedagogical and translational text The Spirit of Romance (1910), whose vast comparative literary history provides a logic that undergirds much of his poetry in the teens. Pound’s treatment of Spanish literary history became integral to the structure of the Three Cantos, the initial set of which were published in Poetry in 1917 (known as the Ur-Cantos), and which were revised for inclusion in the Cantos (1925-69). Here, the figure of El Cid, from the twelfth-century Castilian national epic Poema del Cid, plays a vital role as an exiled and multiply-translated figure. What interests me in this paper, however, is the way in which Pound mistranslates portions of the text over the course of his several revised treatments of it. Pound’s poetics of mistranslation are well-known, from “The Seafarer” to Cathay to Homage to Sextus Propertius. When he turns to the Spanish language and its literary history, though, they transform into a critique of the course of the Spanish empire and its decline from a global power in the seventeenth century to the heart of an intellectual waste land in the twentieth. Incorporating also his travel essays and his indictments of Spanish literature in publications for Spanish magazines in the 1920s, I argue that Pound uses mistranslation to reenact the historical linguistic isomorphism of Spanish and to infuse it with his own reinvented English.
"Vernacular Networks and the Seaways of Hemispheric Modernism"
Harris Feinsod, Northwestern University
This paper takes up the old trope of "transatlantic liners passing in the night" as a metonymy for a larger literary-sociological history of a modernist poetics of the Americas circa 1930. Following poems through the network of cisatlantic liner lanes and ports of call that stitch New York, Havana, Veracruz, Santos and Buenos Aires, I describe a disarticulated, inter-American poetic community, whose poems often alight on the commonplace iconography and mixed-language argot of stevedores and ordinary sailors. Reading poems by Hart Crane, Salvador Novo, Federico García Lorca, Langston Hughes, and Manuel Maples Arce, I pay particular attention to Crane's "Cutty Sark" (1927), Novo's bilingual Seamen Rhymes (1934), and Novo's related conception of an "imaginary anthology" of sea poems composed in all the imperial languages of the Atlantic, which he describes in the essay "Canto a Teresa" (1934). In these clusters of poems, what I call a "vernacular network" of often queer, often radical attentions to maritime labor comprises one of the stronger formulations of a "poetry of the Americas" circulating in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Comparing these poems not in terms of material connectivity (translation, influence, correspondence, intertexts, etc.), but instead by their shared states of fantasy, figural doublings and blind, formal affinities, I suggest an alternative to prevalent formulations about transnational circulation as a constitutive feature of hemispheric modernisms.
“Our America”: Translating the Americas Across the Atlantic”
Lori Cole, Brandeis University
The point of departure for this paper is the questionnaire, a ubiquitous genre in the 1920s that galvanized magazine editors and contributors alike around questions of art and national identity, and by extension, the politics of translation. In 1928 the Cuban magazine Revista de Avance issued a series of questions, including: “What should American art be? What should the attitude of American artists towards European art be?” In this context “Our America” refers to the 1892 essay “Nuestra América,” written by the Cuban revolutionary and poet José Martí. Across the Atlantic, also in 1928, the expatriate magazine transition based in Paris, polled its North American contributors “Why do Americans Live in Europe?” and surveyed its European writers to ask: “How are the influences of the United States manifesting themselves upon Europe?” Similarly, Imán, a Latin American magazine based in Paris, asked European Surrealists, “How do you imagine Latin America?” in 1931. Editors of these publications all articulated the debate over what constituted “America” in terms of translation, translating texts into either Spanish or English in their magazines to spur the development of an American culture that was viable internationally. For instance, Alejo Carpentier, who wrote for all three magazines, called upon his Latin American audience “to translate America with the most intensity possible.” This question of “translating” one’s work for the international avant-garde was in turn problematized by transition, which printed foreign-language material in English in order to spur Americans to develop an elastic, liberatory relationship to language. Moreover, while these magazines all sought to define and promote a uniquely “American” avant-garde, they shared many contributors, suggesting a dynamic model of global modernism, whose national identities were structured relationally and enabled by translation. In this paper I argue that the hemispheric notion of “America” was constructed through the rhetoric of translation, which was at once cultural and linguistic, as these publications competed to determine what version of “America” would inherit the cultural legacy of Europe through debates in print culture.
Panel: “Fictions of Authoritarianism and the (Re)turns of Modernism”
“The Ends of Realism: Literary Technics and Writing the Dictator”
Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra, University of Mississippi
This paper will explore the use of the fantastic or a-realist narrative technique in two novels about dictators and dictatorship—Sony Labou Tansi’s Life and a Half (La Vie et demie, 1979) and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow (Mũrogi wa Kagogo, 2004-2007; 2006), with reference to Gabriel García Márquez’s canonical dictator-novel The Autumn of the Patriarch (El otoño del patriarca, 1975). While the term “magical realism” is most often used to describe recourse to the fantastic within the general frame of realism, the “deformations” realism as a mimetic principle undergoes as part of the critique of dictatorship in these novels are not in fact so easily categorized. Indeed, “magical realism” is just one kind of alteration evinced in these narratives. A broader—and perhaps more precise—descriptive term for the narrative modes employed in these novels is “modernist,” which Rebecca Walkowitz (in the Introduction to Cosmopolitan Style) defines as including: “wandering consciousness, paratactic syntax, recursive plotting, collage, and portmanteau language” (2). To push this connection further: the political phenomenon to which each of these novels respond—dictatorship—is itself tied to the experience of (post-independence) modernity and/or processes of modernization in the global South. But can we read these novels as modernist texts? Alternately, what is the “modernism” of which these novels may serve as exemplars? To address these questions, I will (first) use the category of “modernism” to explore the limits of realism as a representative mode in Life and a Half and Wizard of the Crow. I will then turn attention to the problem of the designation “modernist” itself, using these three novels to map the contours of the broader category of “global modernisms” as it is taking shape in our current critical moment.
"Political Authority and the Traces of Modernism in Angola: Boaventura Cardoso’s Mother, Maternal Sea"
Lanie Millar, University of Oregon
While the post-independence political organization in Angola shares many aspects of authoritarian regimes elsewhere in the global South, works explicitly addressing authoritarian political figures in the post-colonial period are quite rare in the Angolan context, and do not generally fall in with the Latin American and African genre of “dictator novels,” for example. In this paper, I will nonetheless argue that Angolan novelist Boaventura Cardoso’s 2001 Mãe, materno mar [Mother, maternal sea] indirectly takes on the question of post-colonial authoritarianism via modernist and post-modernist techniques. The novel narrates the period after Angola’s independence via an allegorical fifteen-year train journey from the interior city of Malange to the port capitol of Luanda that is plagued by delays, breakdowns and reroutings. During this voyage, the representations of political and social authority transitions from a colonial patriarchy to revolutionary leadership to evangelical prophets, each embodying different aspects of the post-independence authoritarian state. My analyses will be grounded in several of the novel’s formal and linguistic practices including the fragmentation of narrative perspective among different characters, collective interjections, questions directed toward the reader, and linguistic experimentation. In addressing these features, I will draw on the work of two scholars: Brian McHale’s argument that modernism is fundamentally concerned with epistemology while postmodernism is primarily concerned with ontology and Ato Quayson’s claim that modernist and postmodernist practices overlap, or even co-exist, in late twentieth and early twenty-first century African literature. While some critics have seen the novel’s formal and linguistic inventiveness as linked to the postmodern dissolution of political authority into the global capitalist market—a clear concern with the latter half of the novel—I will argue in dialogue with McHale and Quayson that the traces of modernism’s epistemological concerns are fundamental to the novel’s critical work.
"The Tricontinental and the Modernist Lens: Race, the International Left, and Castrismo"
Anne-Garland Mahler, University of Arizona
This presentation aims to contribute to a fuller understanding of the relationship between global modernisms and the international Left by addressing how the modernist aesthetics of the propaganda produced by the Tricontinental alliance linked the Cuban Revolution to a global radicalist community and simultaneously provided a platform for a critique of the Castro regime’s authoritarianism.In January 1966, delegates from the liberation movements of eighty-two African, Asian, and Latin American nations came together at the Tricontinental Conference in Havana, Cuba to form an alliance against imperialism. This Tricontinental alliance aimed, I suggest, to revive and reframe the Pan-Africanist anti-imperialism that circulated through the négritude-negrismo-New Negro nexus–or what Vera Kutzinksi has called “fringe modernist” movements–into a non-racially deterministic vision of subaltern resistance. In this vein, the Tricontinental used its cultural production–especially newsreels that relied on modernist techniques like montage, fragmentation, jump cuts, and collage–to critique racism and racial discrimination as a product of imperialism in places like the United States. Yet alongside the rise of tricontinentalism and its newsreel aesthetic in the late 1960s was the increasing authoritarianism and Sovietization of the Cuban Revolution, which produced all of the Tricontinental’s materials. A widening gap emerged both between the newsreels’ avant-garde aesthetics and the socialist realism of Cuba’s film industry as well as between the Tricontinental’s indictment of racial oppression and the Cuban Revolution’s dismissively Marxist exceptionalist position towards domestic racial inequality.
Coffea arábiga (1968), a twenty-minute short by Nicolás Guillén Landrián, Afro-Cuban filmmaker and nephew of negrista poet Nicolás Guillén, attempts to address this dissonance. Coffea arábiga appropriates the Tricontinental’s newsreel style to argue that the racist ideologies and exploitation of black labor from Cuba's colonial legacy are perpetuated under the Revolution. In this way, Guillén Landrián’s film is a testament to the way in which the Tricontinental provided, in the tradition of global modernism, a praxis for articulating dissent against authoritarianism and oppression by gesturing beyond the nation and towards a transnational political community.
Panel: Ethics and The Aesthetics of Difference
"The Aesthetics of Sameness: Japonisme and Global Modernity"
Christopher Bush, Northwestern University
A shared anxiety about a global decline in difference can make for strange cultural-political bedfellows. While the desire to respect and preserve difference is today most strong associated with the political left, during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries, critiques of capitalism’s leveling effect, its seemingly unstoppable drive toward global homogeneity, was one of the defining obsessions of conservative, even radical right, cultural pessimism.
My talk discusses some of the strange political permutations of this desire for difference with respect to modernist-era ideas about Japan in the West. Drawing on writers as diverse as Vladimir Soloviev, Oswald Spengler, and W. E. B. Du Bois, I show how debates about the future of Japanese modernization shaded into fears and fantasies of a unified, even uniform world. I then turn to the consequences of this history for literary interpretation. If Japan represented not a singular reserve of premodern cultural difference, but the generalizable template of a coming global modernity, how would this change the way we read, for example, the modernist haiku?
"Second-Hand Modernism: The Worldly Ethics of Linguistic Migrants"
Joshua L. Miller, University of Michigan
This talk will use Charles Reznikoff’s narrative By the Waters of Manhattan (1930) as an example of what I term “second-hand modernism.” This refers to a mode of US modernism that problematizes linguistic and literary re-versioning as techniques that overtly negotiate multiple cultural inheritances, histories, and temporalities. Second-hand modernism does not use historical generational models, but rather identifies a set of artists who respond to the artistic imperatives of early modernists selectively, just as they do to national and transnational precursors by writing self-consciously as and about linguistic migrants.
The prose, poetry, and translations of Reznikoff and those of other second-hand modernists share an ethic that lends itself (or, arguably, emerges from) engagements with worldliness according to the Saidian secular, contextualist definition and the extranational, planetary meaning. Eschewing political and artistic manifestoes and dogmas, Reznikoff and others prioritize globalist ethics over philosophical consistency. Their works are frequently “minor” or derivative – translations, revisions, adaptations, and so on -- as they represent the mundane everyday without the contrasts of epiphanic connection. What arises in a study of such authors is not a version of late or documentary modernism, but a translational migrancy modernism, one grounded in the extranationalist ethos of immigrants and emigres. Reznikoff’s project is to craft a durable immigrant modernism, which reemerges to confront the linguistic dilemmas of post-World War 2 cultures as well and which has became more, not less, present in late 20th and early 21st century arts.
"Multilingual Literature and Invisible Difference"
Ania Spyra, Butler University
While we are used to the trope of invisibility in the context of translation – suffice it to mention Lawrence Venuti’s seminal The Translator’s Invisibility – when Christine Brooke-Rose titled her last work Invisible Author, she called attention to the invisibility of texts that insist on inclusion of unexplained difference. As an example she quotes the dissimilar reception of her own 1968 multilingual novel Between and George Perec’s 1969 La Disparition. While Perec advertised his constraint to make it obvious to the reader and thus ascertain the placement of his novel in the experimental literary cannon, Brook-Rose let her constraint – the omission of the verb “to be” – go without a footnote or foreword. That her novel attempts to formally make visible what usually goes unnoticed in globalizing discourses – the influence of translation on international communication, unacknowledged differences among European nations during the cold war, the female translators who convey delegates’ messages at international congresses – makes this lipogram particularly meaningful.
In my talk, I will focus the multilayered invisibility that Between exemplifies to argue that literature rarely allows us to engage with radical difference. While the texts that mix foreign languages within one text are exemplary global texts in their attempt to represent a reality of transcultural identities and experiences, they disappear from literary conversations when they fail to manage and explain their difference. Like foreignization in translation, multilingual literature does not allow its reader to believe in the seamless transference from one language to another and thus draws attention to what resists planetarity.
Panel: Modernism and Internationalism
"Stories without Plots: The Modernism of Others"
Aarthi Vadde, Duke University
In order to transform modernist studies from a European to a global field, scholars have sought to recalibrate its centers and peripheries as well as to acknowledge multiple origin points and lacunas in our story of modernism’s development. This paper reflects on spatial theories inherent to transnational modernism while also attempting to find new vocabularies for understanding the development of modernist aesthetics beyond circulation and diffusion. I focus particularly on the aesthetic of “plotlessness” by exploring the strategic deformations of plot in two novels of the Caribbean diaspora: Claude McKay’s Banjo: A Story without a Plot and George Lamming’s The Emigrants. Both novels feature “plotlessness” as a strategy for testing national norms of citizenship, engaging with the demands of socialist internationalism, and finding a style of anti-imperialism consistent with deterritorialized blackness. “Inter-national” in the sense of between nations, McKay’s vagabonds and Lamming’s emigrants are nomadic collectives that counter persistent and variegated forms of political exclusion by imagining ways of belonging outside the physical and conceptual boundaries of a fixed or contiguous territory.
The encounter that this paper stages between global modernism, a contemporary field formation, and what I call modernist internationalism, an aesthetic and political project that organized experimental writers from across colonial peripheries, is intended to enrich historical understandings of modernism’s constitution across differentials of power. It also seeks to establish how deriving a wider historical net for modernism’s aesthetic theories and stylistic signatures (i.e. a rejection of plot) changes our understanding of the conceptual challenges that modernists faced and that their fiction can mediate. It thus concludes by bringing McKay’s and Lamming’s novels to bear on ongoing dilemmas in the theorization of transnational belonging in such works as Seyla Benhabib’s The Rights of Others and Etienne Balibar’s We, the People of Europe.
“Late Modernism as Geopolitical Description”
Thomas Davis, The Ohio State University
Much of the recent work under the banners of “transnational,” “cosmopolitan,” or “global” modernism emphasizes cultural exchange across national lines or explores the complex ethical dilemmas that arise from various cultural contact zones. But does the prevailing critical terminology apply equally to all phases and all types of modernist cultural production? I suggest that late modernists developed a unique version of international relations during the world systemic disorder of the 1930s-1950s; this version turns on enmity, territory, force, and the frailty of highly interdependent economic and political systems. This paper argues for an explicitly geopolitical method that assesses the ways late modernist artworks conceptualize their moment of systemic disorder as it unfolds. I draw on fiction of dispossession by Sam Selvon and Basil Wright's 1934 documentary, Song of Ceylon, to demonstrate how late modernism’s formal involutions mediate geopolitical distress.
"Twinned Towers: Yeats, Tatlin, and the Unfashionable Performance of Internationalism"
Nico Israel – CUNY Graduate Center and Hunter College
In this talk I explore two spirals produced and frequently revised in the 1917–1925 period, Yeats’s occult system that he outlined in A Vision and Tatlin’s never-built Monument to the Third International, two of high modernism’s most earnestly designed and most totalizing, towering spiral structures. While it has long been recognized that Yeats’s work during this period tended toward fascism, a new look at the system’s architectural performativity reveals how the metaphors of winding and unwinding gyres, cones, and “perns” in his poetry link spiral-conceived history to spiral thought, and the body to space, conceived internationally and civilizationally. Tatlin’s Tower, as the collectively designed project came to be known, combined Leninist principles of historical development with planetary and celestial notions of spatio-temporality in order to translate the aims of the international working class. The enormous spiral tower was initially designed to contain a series of glass halls, of different geometric shapes, housing the “Soviet of the People’s Commissars of the World” (cube), the Comintern’s executive committee (pyramid), and a state-of-the-art information/communication/propaganda department (cylinder, topped by a hemisphere), the shapes of which were designed to rotate yearly, monthly, and daily, respectively. My focus on the question of the translatability of the tower turns (back) to images of the Tower of Babel, which Babelian “confusion” and misapprehension Tatlin’s structure itself seeks to encompass and overcome. Yeats’s and Tatlin’s nearly simultaneous but utterly politically opposed spiral projects, when viewed together, throw for a loop familiar modernist presumptions about internationalism and the politics of totality.
Panel: Genre and Global Modernism
“Black South African Writing & Modernist Ontologies”
Lily Saint, Wesleyan University
Classification was apartheid’s hallmark approach to structuring individual identity. The government policed its racist taxonomies through violence as well as legislation, but whatever means it used, the point was to keep categories distinct from one another, to establish, as Derrida has suggested in other contexts, the law of genre. This paper seeks to show how black anti-apartheid memoir often pushed at the limits of the genre, formally and thematically destabilizing structural obsessions with boundaries and laws, emphasizing instead the singularity of individual South African lives.
Njabulo Ndebele’s famous critique of anti-apartheid fiction does, on the surface, apply to memoirs of the period. Works such as Richard Rive’s Emergency, Sindiwe Magona’s To My Children’s Children, or Bloke Modisane’s Blame Me on History, display an overriding concern to expose the “spectacle” of apartheid’s excesses, and in so doing they rely on polarities to make their point. The racial categories insisted upon by the apartheid state prevail in these works even while they challenge its hierarchical ordering. While they refuse the apartheid claim that “Africans,” “coloureds,” and “Indians” were inferior to “whites,” they seem nonetheless willing to concede that these were indeed natural and permanent categories.
My paper suggests that Ndebelean readings of anti-apartheid “life writing” belie the undoing of categories that occurs formally in may of these works. From the enigmatic interludes in Es’kia Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue to the deployment of fiction to narrate the autobiographical in Peter Abraham’s A Wreath for Udomo, apartheid-era memoirs are riven through and through with their own refusal to adhere to the laws of genre. To heed these anti-categorical impulses, therefore, may also involve a refusal of the monikers of modernism or global modernism to describe these books, as these terms threaten to reinscribe works which aim instead to refuse segregation and classification entirely.
“Aqueous Modernism: Genre and the Sea”
Nicole Rizzuto, Georgetown University
Despite the transnational turn in new modernist studies, and the accompanying concentration on de-racination, cosmopolitanism, and mobility, what remains overlooked is the very medium that made literal and figural traversals in the modernist era possible —the seas. Addressing this oversight can challenge periodizing categories and create a bridge between generic and disciplinary boundaries that separate interwar literary and aesthetic discourses, including English surrealism and Bloomsbury modernism. Because the ocean is a global entity, understanding its role in movements that aim to reveal a “truth” and reality allegedly hidden by national traditions and conventions allows us to re-assess various modernisms’ engagements with the nation and beyond. Codifications of the waters undergo great shifts during the interwar era; so too do literary and visual aesthetics. I consider how literature and visual arts formally register effects of this transitional moment in maritime geopolitics and modernist aesthetics. Analyzing how discourses of the first legally global space are stitched into forms whose aim is to innovate complicates divisions between high modernism, associated with cosmopolitanism, and late modernism, turned inward to the nation, and also pressures the dominant interpretation of interwar British culture as one defined by travel and mobility.
Panel: Center and Periphery Modernisms
Pure Art and Significant form: Roger Fry, English Formalism, and the Debate with Psychoanalysis
Jennifer Spitzer, Ithaca College
While the expanding frame of the new modernist studies along temporal, spatial and vertical axes has led to fruitful destabilizations of the so-called centers of modernist production, a significant lacuna has been an attention to the ways in which English modernism was formed within a matrix of cross-disciplinary contact, exchange, and contest. My reading of the work of art critic Roger Fry will contribute to an account of how English modernism sought to consolidate its heterodox nature in part through its rivalry with the upstart discourse of psychoanalysis, which was viewed by Fry and other English modernists as a disciplinary interloper threatening to colonize the literary field. Bloomsbury’s hospitality to psychoanalysis in the 1910s and 20s aroused considerable anxiety among English writers and critics, including Fry, Clive Bell, and Virginia Woolf, about the ascendance of psychoanalysis as an authoritative discourse. While as Perry Meisel has noted, Sigmund Freud looked to England as the next great capital of psychoanalysis, on a par with Vienna and Berlin, psychoanalysis encountered its firmest opposition in England, where it was portrayed as a dangerous theoretical import from the continent. I argue in this paper that the particular literary cast that psychoanalysis acquired in England as a result of its engagement with Bloomsbury motivated the very acts of boundary maintenance on the part of English authors and critics that we have come to associate with high modernism.
Undergirding this resistance to psychoanalysis were other motivations: anti-German sentiment, anti-Semitism, and an obvious hostility to mass culture. The rest of my paper will highlight Roger Fry’s championing of a brand of English formalism against a psychoanalytically-oriented culture industry hungry for wish-fulfillment and fantasy, one Fry equates with female producers and consumers. I go on to suggest that psychoanalysis is worrisome for Fry, not only because it threatens to encroach upon the self-enclosed artwork by creating links to history, biography, and subjectivity, but because psychoanalysis represents another form of expertise that threatened the privileged position of the English art critic.
“the great work of the creation of beauty": W.E.B. Du Bois, Madam C.J. Walker, and the aesthetics of transnational activism
Elizabeth Sheehan, Oregon State University
This paper shows that ideas, images, and practices of beauty were pivotal to competing visions of transnational racial solidarity articulated and pursued by influential African American artists, intellectuals, and activists in the 1910s and 1920s. It argues that, while W.E.B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess (1928) claims racialized feminine beauty as a resource for cultivating a politicized cosmopolitan dandyism, the novel's attempt to disarticulate beauty from feminine self-fashioning undercuts the alternative visions of racial community and activism that emerged from African American women's beauty culture of the period. The novel thus illuminates a broader contest over what sorts of aesthetic forms and activities can underpin political projects and collectivities. By analyzing contrasting accounts of what beauty is and what beauty can do, the paper also raises questions about why certain discourses of racial activism remain largely unexplored despite the "transnational turn."
"Hunger and the Cultural Geography of the Periphery"
Tim Wientzen, Harvard University
In recent years as the field of modernist studies has inaugurated an interest in the transnational as a critical category, we have witnessed the extension of what Mao and Walkowitz call its “spatial axis.” Expanding the geographic range of modernism, that is, scholars have worked to understand the circulation and reception of texts, as well as the cross-cultural movement of modernism’s distinctive techniques. Yet the critical methodologies of reading modernism globally remain, in many ways, tied to the most literal forms of border crossing.
Focusing on Knut Hamsun’s 1890 novel, Hunger, this paper attempts to outline a method of reading the relationship between modernism and transnationalism that prioritizes shared cultural geographies of economic development over migration, circulation, and translation. With its strong emphasis on social anomie, the unconscious mind, and the shocks of metropolitan life, Hunger has long occupied a central position in genealogies of modernism. Yet, writing in one of Europe’s least developed countries near the end of a century that witnessed the deracination and mass emigration of over half a million Norwegian citizens, Hamsun makes an odd precursor for the formal projects of metropolitan modernity. In this talk, I suggest that Hamsun’s novel stands as a powerful (but often misread) example of a modernism that self-consciously speaks in an idiom of the periphery. Historicizing an experience of hunger common across the “developing” world in the late nineteenth century, this talk suggests that the formal experimentation of Hunger represents an effort to mediate conditions of modernization unique to the global periphery. Moreover, it offers a useful lesson in transnationalism as a reading practice, one sensitive to an experience of modernization that looked markedly different from without than from within.