Modernities in the Americas: from the avant-gardes to nowadays

Abstract

Revisiting today the question of modernity in literature, in the arts, in society and politics means using the plural. And choosing the plural means not restricting the scope to the multivocal, but often ambiguous, notion of modernism. Often enrolled to designate a cultural imagination of modernity, the term is under duress when it comes to accounting for divergent ways of apprehending the relationship to time, history and culture. “Modernity is not a movement like dada or like imagism. If li...