Introduction: Modernism at Night

Abstract

Is Queer modernism simply another name for modernism?As Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz note in their introduction to the 2006 collection Bad Modernisms, “[T]here were numerous ways of being outside in the early twentieth century” (7). Efforts over the past several decades to imagine modernism as an expanded field have been remarkably successful. Female modernism, African American modernism, queer modernism, sentimental modernism, low- and middlebrow modernism, and colonial, postcolonial, and anticolonial modernism have all been integrated into a renewed understanding of modernism (or modernisms, as it is often written). In addition, the rethinking of modernism as a set of aesthetic movements in relation to a larger context of global modernity and modernization has turned the inside out. Since few modernists, on closer inspection, appear to have stayed high or dry, bad modernism, outsider modernism, and marginal modernism begin to look more and more like modernism itself.