Introduction: Modernism after Postmodernity

Abstract

Since the waning of the debate about and the rise of glo balization as master signifier of our time, the discourses of modernity and modernism have staged a remarkable comeback. Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard's provocative quip that any work of art has to be postmodern before it can become genuinely modern has come true in ways he could hardly have fore seen. There is much talk these days of modernity at large, second modernity, liquid modernity, alternative modernity, countermodernity, and whatnot. Modernity and its complex and conflicted relationship to modernism are being reassessed in architecture and urban studies as they are in literature, the visual arts, music, anthropology, and postcolonial studies. In a certain way, this is not so surprising. This journal has always argued against a sim plistic linear chronology of the modern and the postmodern. Rather than oppose postmodernism to modernism in a reductive binary or as separate stages on a progressive time line, we saw North American postmodernism as an attempt to rewrite and to renegotiate key aspects of the early-twentieth century European avant-gardes in an American context in which the rela tions between high and low culture, as well as the role of art in society, were coded quite differently than they were in Europe, either in the interwar or in