THE AFTERS AND NOW OF MODERNISM

Abstract

This essay examines the implications for modernist studies of using the term after in After Modernism to suggest three meanings: after assuming an end-date for modernism based on linear periodization; after as in the mode of; and getting after as in a challenge. Using LeAnne Howe’s influential concept of tribalography in Native studies, the essay uses her emphasis on storytelling, entangled past–present–future, and connectivity to put the British multimedia artist Kabe Wilson in conversation with the Marhsall Islands poet-performer Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner. The essay argues that Howe’s tribalography, based in Native studies of continental North America, can be extended to encompass the archipelagic orientation of Indigenous peoples in Oceania, with its distinctive histories of colonialism, militarism, and environmental crisis. Race, racism, Indigeneity, and gender figure centrally in Wilson’s and Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s stories as their decolonial arts engage with the distinctive modernities of colonialism for Blacks in the UK and Indigenous people in Oceania.