Euro-American Modernity Research Articles

Reading with the Grain: The Ecologies of The Lowland

Contemporary US literature is as twisted as the genome of a white whale. The vocabularies of postmodernism and its various iterations have done their work, while writers on the cutting edge of their discipline (and often oblivious to, or dismissive of, narrow pigeonholes) reshape its contours only later to be assimilated by the critical establishment. When Rachel Adams speaks of an emergent “American literary globalism,” she breaks open calcified norms to understand contemporary writing in the United States as being more fluid and inclusive than in the past (even if such a theoretical gesture is not without limiting constraints). Largely diasporic and including practitioners that might write from anywhere and about anything, such work is often elastic and reactive in ways that correspond to a more global sensibility. “Relatively unburdened by the legacies of Euro-American modernism or the politics of the Cold War,” such work “reacts against the aesthetic sensibilities of high postmodernism while providing American literature with a new set of genealogical, geographic, and temporal referents” (Adams 251).

Roads to Health: Infrastructure and Urban Wellbeing in Later Medieval Italy by Guy Geltner

Reviewed by: Roads to Health: Infrastructure and Urban Wellbeing in Later Medieval Italy by Guy Geltner Sally Mayall Brasher Roads to Health: Infrastructure and Urban Wellbeing in Later Medieval Italy. By Guy Geltner. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2019. Pp. x, 320. $65.00. ISBN: 9780812251357) In Roads to Health: Infrastructure and Urban Wellbeing in Later Medieval Italy, Guy Geltner challenges the received wisdom regarding public health in the pre-modern world that suggests early urban governments were, at worst, self-interested and indifferent to the health of their citizens or, at best, simply unable to understand the correlation between health and public policy, at least until the Industrial Revolution or possibly at the earliest as a reaction to the Black Death. Geltner encourages the reader to reexamine these assumptions and their theoretical models as well as the selective evidence on which they are based. Using urban statutes and court and fiscal records from north and central Italy between 1250 and 1500, Geltner argues that civic authorities in these urban areas understood the need for promoting health and well-being among the citizenry as a means of maintaining political control. By considering both normative and descriptive sources, he is also suggesting that, in addition to being employed earlier than generally thought, communal health initiatives were also more effective than previously understood. Geltner frames his study using Michel Foucault’s theory of biopolitics as applied to the eighteenth century (regulating private behaviors for the public good). Geltner employs the term “health-scaping” to the actions of urban governments which he defines as “the physical, social, legal, administrative, and political process of providing urban environments with the means to promote residents’ health” (p. 20). He argues that if one looks broadly at the policies of the medieval urban governments, including monitoring activities and regulating behavior in areas such as waste disposal, animal conduct, and proto-industrial waste, it is possible to see a conscious effort at health-scaping and the creation of preventative public policy that was consistently and effectively enforced well before the Industrial Revolution. After a general introduction to the theoretical construct for his arguments and a consideration of the breadth of archival sources for public health regulation, the main body of the book outlines findings for three case-studies from Lucca, Bologna, and Pinerolo. The study primarily focuses on these cities’ roads officials, viarii, fango, and comparii, respectively, who were tasked with maintaining the infrastructure and policing communal activities along the public roads with regard to sanitation and safety. Geltner provides an exhaustive study of the statutes for the employment, regulation, and activity of these officials. Beyond prescriptive statutes, he also finds detailed records of assignments, building and labor expenses, violations, fines, and witness accounts, which testify to the commitment and effectiveness of the efforts of the officials. Geltner’s last chapter suggests the possibility of applying his methodology even further chronologically and geographically, citing, for example, ancient Roman policy efforts and those of other non-western civilizations in order to “fundamentally [End Page 193] alter the prevalent narrative of public-health history and thereby interrogate an entrenched paradigm of Euro-American modernity” (p. 144). While commendable, and opening many avenues for further exploration, some of the suggested analysis presents too great a methodological stretch for his argument. Also, Geltner’s focus on intentional efforts of the civic authorities in health-scaping overlooks the fact that this effort was also driven, in part, by popular communal demand. Individual citizens, tertiary religious orders, nascent private hospitals, and other civic constituents actively sought a civic response to communal need forcing the hand of civic authorities in many cases. These slight critiques do not detract from the overall importance of Geltner’s work, and Roads to Health is an important addition to the recent body of scholarship that is reassessing the evolution of health care and social assistance in urban areas of medieval Europe. In this highly readable study, Geltner successfully proves that health-scaping was indeed a civic value already fully entrenched in urban Italy in the high Middle Ages. Sally Mayall Brasher Shepherd University Copyright © 2023 The Catholic University of America Press ...

The healthscaping approach: Toward a global history of early public health

This article presents a modular, multidisciplinary methodology for tracing how different communities in the deeper past adapted their behaviors and shaped their environments to address the health risks they faced, a process also known as “healthscaping.” Historians have made major strides in reconstructing preventative health programs across the pre- or non-industrial world, thereby challenging a common view of public health as a product of Euro-American modernity and biomedicine. However, these studies’ general focus on cities and their reliance on archival and other documents that are more readily available in Euro-American contexts, limit the intervention’s potential for rethinking the earlier history of public health comparatively, transregionally and on a global scale. A broader definition of health, additional sources and alternative methodologies allow us to expand research in and especially beyond urban Europe, promoting a global turn in health historiography that operates outside the seductive teleology of modernization, colonialism and imperialism.

Ostępy języka. Modernistyczna proza Djuny Barnes w polskim tłumaczeniu

Backwoods of Language. The Modernist Prose of Djuna Barnes in Polish Translation No sooner than after eighty years since the moment of the original publication of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood was Polish literary market enriched by a translation of one of the most peculiar novels of the Euro-American modernism. Marcin Szuster’s translation under Polish title Ostępy nocy has already managed to earn much praise and also some prizes and open a first Polish discussion about the work of the eccentric American writer. The paper’s focus is to analyze the Polish translation of Nightwood with a special interest in Barnes’s style as it becomes a central character in the novel which connects, according to feminist critics (K. Kaivola, S. Benstock), to its emancipatory potential. In my paper I follow a claim that the complex style of this prose writing is a (conscious) manifestation of a woman’s voice (as an affect), behind which one can discover a body – one that experiences and is experienced (J. Taylor). The body, both a structural and a rhetorical category in feminist criticism, in Barnes’s prose can be seen as an element organizing time and space – therefore, ambiguity of her terms and complexity of style are forming a true translation challenge. Marcin Szuster as a translator needs to follow Barnes’s “distinctive point of view,” which is a “feminine” one and distanced by the length of gender, experience and time.

Sartre, Bad Faith and Authentic Decolonial Interventions

This article explores the concept of bad faith as conceptualized by Sartre within the context of the existential lived experiences of those Fanon (1965) refers to as the condemned, the racialized, and the dehumanized subjects of the world. I explore the logic of authenticity as a liberatory intervention in relation to decolonial interventions and anti-racist movements such as Black Lives Matter in the USA and across the globe and recently, the #EndSars movement in Nigeria. I will therefore argue that the repudiation of the entrenched universal logic of Euro-American modernity requires one to be authentic in their praxis in order to escape bad faith.

Underground and Over the Sea: More Community Prophylactics in Europe, 1100-1600.

Public health historians have repeatedly shown that the theory, policy, and practice of group prophylactics far predate their alleged birth in industrial modernity, and regularly draw on Galenic principles. While the revision overall has been successful, its main focus on European cities entails a major risk, since city dwellers were a minority even in Europe’s most urbanised regions. At the same time, cities continue to be perceived and presented as typically European, which stymies transregional and comparative studies based at least in part on non- or extra-urban groups. Thus, any plan to both offer an accurate picture of public health’s deeper past and fundamentally challenge a narrative of civilizational progress wedded to Euro-American modernity (“stagism”) would benefit from looking beyond cities and their unique health challenges. The present article begins to do so by focusing on two ubiquitous groups, often operating outside cities and facing specific risks: miners and shipmates. Evidence for these communities’ preventative interventions and the extent to which they drew on humoral theory is rich yet uneven for Europe between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. Methodological questions raised by this unevenness can be addressed by connecting different scales of evidence, as this article demonstrates. Furthermore, neither mining nor maritime trade was typically European, thus building a broader base for transregional studies and comparisons.

Afterword

Afterword Rodrigo Lazo Some years ago, before starting graduate school, I travelled to the Galápagos Islands. As someone originally from Ecuador, I was aware that the islands are a province of the "República del Ecuador" but also very far from the coastal and Andean regions that are the economic and political strongholds in my country of birth. Anyone who has managed to reach that archipelago knows that to experience the natural variety of the group it is necessary to navigate from one enchanting island to another. Galápagos tourism has always relied on local small boats and yachts taking tourists to the different islands, and it was aboard the appropriately named Albatross that I stumbled on a collection in the ship's tiny library containing "The Encantadas; or, Enchanted Isles." The sketches offered Galápagos lore shared by guides as part of the visit—stories of buccaneers and castaways. It also became quickly apparent that the sketches did not seem to be about the islands before me. As I stared at the volcanic formations and contemplated the friendly animal-life, the Galápagos looked nothing like "five-and-twenty heaps of cinders dumped here and there in an outside city lot" (Piazza Tales 179). Nor were they as elusive as Salvator R. Tarnmoor's delusional account conveys. While I do not regularly look for veracity in fiction—and Melville's invocation of sites and references in South America are not always invested in accuracy—the difference between what I apprehended in the Galápagos and the sketches prompted questions that continue to hang like an albatross around my neck: Why was a writer associated with US literary nationalism engaging with locations that were distant to his New England home and also distant from the part of Ecuador where I had been born? And what kind of referential weight did these sketches carry for Melville's work and, more generally, the way people in the United States view Latin America? With those questions foremost, I note that three of the five pieces in this special issue on Melville and the region we are calling "Spanish America" place "The Encantadas" at the center of their arguments and take a variety of approaches: philosophy and epistemology, questions of allegory, and a US-centric historicism. Those very different critical directions appear to pull away [End Page 103] from Spanish America and remind us of the complicated relationship of "The Encantadas" to the geographic destination that inspires its organization. Anna Brickhouse, for example, argues that the sketches dwell in "a space of philosophical rupture, a vantage point for meditation on the West: its enduring problem of evil, its invention of the human, and its perpetual creation of theodicies that justify the world's racial and geographical apportionment of suffering" (37–8). In connecting her interpretation to Western thought more generally, Brickhouse offers a more ample terrain than the very geographic location that draws the sketches. Taking a different approach, Yoshiaki Furui reads "The Encantadas" in relation to the temporality of the discourse of Manifest Destiny and the teleology of Euro-American modernity. These types of shifts should be no surprise given that, as I have noted, the Galápagos themselves are geographically and culturally distant from the mainland. Long uninhabited by humans, the islands are "Spanish" only in the poetry of colonial assumption. Both historically and in Melville's sketches, the Galápagos are distant geographically from the area we associate with Spanish America. As such, "The Encantadas" offers a series of literary and cultural dislocations and critical navigations that send readers in a variety of directions. The contributors to this special issue follow that spirit and see "Spanish America" as an opportunity for departure as much as a necessary critical stopping point when reading Melville. The special issue makes a convincing case for the importance of "Spanish markers" as a set of referents in Melville's writing. As Emilio Irigoyen shows in his textually attentive introduction, some of Melville's Spanish American images, words, and motifs return from one text to another. These range from humorously off-handed remarks by narrators to more serious contemplation about the implications of a hemispheric American...

“Religion” and “Politics”

Timothy Fitzgerald’s The Ideology of Religious Studies should not be read as something just about “religion,” but about the modern Euro- American “secularity,” which functions to mystify the colonial matrix of power of Euro-American modernity. Fitzgerald’s later work focuses on two mutually parasitic categories of “religion” and “politics.” As a case study of the Fitzgeraldian perspective, this article examines the construction of the religion-politics distinction in Japan since the late nineteenth century. In the latter half of the nineteenth century the aggression of Euro-American colonial power motivated Japan’s elites to institutionalize the nation based upon the Euro-American concepts of “politics” and “religion.” After Japan’s defeat in the Second World War in 1945, the US-led Allied Occupation redefined prewar Japanese state orthodoxy and institutions as “religion,” in order to eliminate them from the post-war Japanese statecraft.

Contemporary Discourse and the Oblique Narrative of Avant-gardism in Twentieth-Century Nigerian Art

The history of Twentieth Century Nigerian art is characterized by ambiguities that impede understanding of the underlying modernist philosophies that inspired modern art from the 1900s. In the past five decades, scholars have framed the discourse of Contemporary Nigerian Art to analyze art created during that period in Africa starting with Nigeria in order to differentiate it from that of Europe and America. However, this quest for differentiation has led to a mono-narrative which only partially analyze modernist tendencies in modern Nigerian art, thus, reducing its impact locally and globally. Adopting Content Analysis and Modernism as methodologies, this research subjected literature on Twentieth Century Nigerian art to critical analysis to reveal its grey areas, as well as draw upon recent theories by Chika Okeke-Agulu, Sylvester Ogbechie, Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor to articulate the occurrence of a unique Nigerian avant-gardism blurred by the widely acclaimed discourse of contemporary Nigerian art. Findings reveal that the current discourse unwittingly frames Twentieth Century Nigerian art as a time-lag reactionary mimesis of Euro-American modernism. This research contends that such narrative blocks strong evidences of avant-garde tendencies identified in the works of Aina Onabolu, Ben Enwonwu, Uche Okeke and others, which exhibited intellectual use of the subversive powers of art for institutional/societal interrogation. Drawing upon modernist theories as a compass for analyzing the works of the aforementioned, this paper concludes that rather than being a mundane product of contemporaneity, Twentieth Century Nigerian art was inspired by decolonization politics and constituted a culture-specific avant-gardism in which art was used to enforce change. Thus, a new modern art discourse is proposed that will reconstruct Twentieth Century Nigerian art as an expression of modernism parallel to Euro-American modernism.

Alternatives to Periodization: Literary History, Modernism, and the “New” Temporalities

Abstract Can literary history be done without the conventional reliance on linear periodization? What might a literary history of modernism look like without the usual periodization of roughly 1890–1940? This essay reviews the arguments for and against periodization and then argues that the new time studies—based in nonlinear concepts of time for the study of the contemporary—offers alternatives to the Eurocentric periodization of modernism. These new temporalities were anticipated by early twentieth-century Euro-American modernism, presented in the essay with an account of the dramatic debate between Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson in 1922 and a discussion of Virginia Woolf’s experiments with the relationality of space and time in her fiction. Multidimensional, layered, and disjunctive concepts of time are better suited for the study of planetary modernisms that incorporate the colonial and postcolonial modernities. Kabe Wilson’s multimedia installation based on a remix of A Room of One’s Own and selected criticism on modernism are used to illustrate alternatives to linear periodization.

The Path to Pistoia: Urban Hygiene Before the Black Death*

Abstract When the Black Death struck Western Europe in late 1347, city dwellers across the region were already practising public health, in part by building, maintaining and monitoring infrastructures whose prophylactic value emerged from the experience of intensified urbanization. The demands of a new urban metabolism, evident from the twelfth century, prompted numerous cities, including Pistoia, to develop preventative health programmes in anticipation of and in response to diverse threats. The latter certainly included famine, floods, pestilence and war, but Pistoians and others were no less concerned by routine matters such as burials, food quality, travel and work safety, artisanal pollution and domestic waste disposal. All of these were recognized as impacting people’s health, based on the medical and natural-philosophical theories prevalent at the time, and their management took into consideration not only climactic conditions and multi-species behaviour, but also the smooth functioning of sites such as wells, canals, bridges and roads. The political value that municipalities and other stakeholders began to place on the upkeep of these sites exceeded their economic function and thus questions the seminal role that scholars tend to attribute to the second plague pandemic in public health history. It also demonstrates how a key aspect of Euro-American modernity continues to shape interpretations of urban and health histories and suggests a broader path for historicizing community prophylactics.

Envisioning the Third World: Modern Art and Diplomacy in Maoist China

In the mid-1950s, China conducted robust cultural exchange with the Third World in tandem with a parallel political program to influence non-aligned nations in contestation to the Soviet Union and Western powers. This article examines this underrecognized facet of Maoist-era art through the international engagements of two Xi'an artists, Shi Lu (1919–1982) and Zhao Wangyun (1907–1977), who traveled to India and Egypt as cultural attaché of the Chinese state. By tracing the travels of the two artists in light of their artistic and theoretical formulations, this article argues that contact with decolonizing spheres of the Third World inspired Chinese artists to embrace forms of indigenous Chinese art like ink painting in rejection of Euro-American modernism. In solidarity with other non-Western art spheres that developed similar nativist responses to the hegemony of Western modernism, Chinese artists belonged to a global postwar movement to assert political independence through artistic autonomy and national style.

“Rather Unusual Stuff”: Nathan Jackson's Early Advent of a Tlingit Modern

Abstract This article considers the work of Nathan Jackson, the preeminent Alaskan Tlingit carver and revivalist of the postwar period, who engaged modernist forms and principles in his early career. His paintings, prints, and experiments in textile design combined Tlingit motifs with expressive color fields and abstract space. Developed under instructors associated with modernist movements such as the Indian Space Painters, Jackson's relationship with modernism represents an alternative to the neotraditionalism of his contemporaries. However, despite achieving initial acclaim for his experiments in printmaking and painting, Jackson came to reject this aspect of his training in favor of classical Tlingit forms and practices. Jackson's early oeuvre thus imbricates Euro-American modernism in the history of Northwest Coast Native art alongside the emulation of nineteenth-century forms, and his eventual rejection of modernist styles refutes the relationship between Indigenous and modern art as one of unidirectional appropriation.

African Miracle, African Mirage: Transnational politics and the paradox of modernization in Ivory Coast by Abou B. Bamba

Reviewed by: African Miracle, African Mirage: Transnational politics and the paradox of modernization in Ivory Coast by Abou B. Bamba C. Kevin Taber and Lauren M. MacLean African Miracle, African Mirage: Transnational politics and the paradox of modernization in Ivory Coast By Abou B. Bamba. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2016 African Miracle, African Mirage by Abou B. Bamba asks why the postcolonial boom years of the mid-century Ivorian "miracle" never quite became self-sustaining. Instead, the economic boom culminated in what the author labels a "mirage" propped up by "growth without development." The author offers several interconnected explanations that emphasize two different kinds of transnationalisms: transnationalism from "above"—or transatlantic (Franco-American) and tripartite (Franco-American-Ivoirian) relations and economic diplomacy—and transnationalism from "below," through the actions of Western-educated development scholars, among others, who were helping to frame the epistemology, discourse and, ultimately, practice of a modernist development model on the ground in Ivory Coast. Bamba also explores how existing theories of postcolonial economic (under)development do not sufficiently explain the waning of Ivory Coast's so-called "Thirty Glorious Years." The author responds to previous scholars such as dependency theorists, world systems theorists and Marxists, who tended to underemphasize the agency of those on the ground. In so doing, Bamba also problematizes assumptions about the importance of French neocolonialism. Bamba's book argues that the conventional wisdom overstates France's role as the (only) key player in economic diplomacy, development policy and geopolitics in Francophone Africa. What is obscured is the importance of Cold War geopolitics and tripartite relations that cross the Atlantic. Indeed, by focusing more specifically on the "dubbing" and diffusion of "American-inflected" regional development policy and practice by French scholars, policymakers and development experts (by way of the Tennessee Valley Authority), the author paints a vivid and well-documented picture of the Ivorian quest for modernist development outcomes against the backdrop of French-American tensions—a "hot peace" in the midst of the Cold War. These tensions were exacerbated by postcolonial concern over a number of factors: the increasing American political and economic interest in the region, Félix Houphouët-Boigny's positioning of Ivory Coast as a reliable capitalist ally of the US and worthwhile recipient of its foreign aid and investments, and the resulting potential for the weakening of French regional hegemony. These transnational political dynamics are examined through detailed case studies using largely archival data of three regional development initiatives in Ivory Coast: the building of the Kossou Dam on the Bandama River in Central Ivory Coast; the multifaceted development project in the southwest (the "San Pedro project"); and the attempted diversification of agriculture in the northern savannah provinces. Amid the triangular waltz of French, Ivorian and American development experts and policymakers surrounding these projects, Bamba makes one of the book's most compelling arguments concerning the "geopolitics of postcolonial expertise." This fascinating concept concerns the sociology of knowledge creation and dissemination and the resulting "technopolitics" among the three parties. The author highlights the privileged positioning of French research institutes, ethnographers, economists, soil scientists and the like—in particular, the "Orstomians" hailing from the Office de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique Outre-Mer (ORSTOM). Bamba also reveals the sometimes-successful, sometimes-hampered efforts of US development industry consultants to supplant French knowledge accrued through their longstanding practices of research in Ivory Coast and uncontested access to its "colonial library." Ultimately, "Euro-American modernity" was both method and motive. And, as a consequence, this becomes a story about overextension and the "temerity" of the Ivorian state in its quest for that particular brand of development. A series of questionable choices and structural factors are exposed: for example, overleveraging via international capital markets; overzealous pursuit of import-substitution in the agricultural sector; the ballooning of parastatal organizations intended as a safety valve for increasing calls for Africanization of the civil service among the growing cohorts of young, college-educated Ivorians; the worldwide energy crises and resulting drop in demands of the 1970s; and the vagaries of global markets for agricultural commodities. Yet, Ivorians themselves are not denied agency in this tale. On the contrary, the westward outreach of "Le Vieux...

THE CASE FOR PERIPHERAL AESTHETICS: FREDRIC JAMESON, THE WORLD-SYSTEM AND CULTURES OF EMANCIPATION

Since its 1986 publication, Fredric Jameson’s essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” (TWL) has been widely perceived as the master theorist’s colossal misstep; postcolonial scholars, following the Indian Marxist Aijaz Ahmad, have criticized TWL as a singular intervention that exemplifies metropolitan parochialism about third-world peripheries. Breaking with such consensus, this essay offers a postcolonial–materialist defence of the essay’s two central, conceptual categories: national allegory and third-world/peripheral aesthetics. I demonstrate that their theoretical basis lies in the differential calibration of modernism, and the public–private ratio, in the peripheries of the capitalist world-system. These abstractions are in fact engendered by the unevenly universalizing tendencies of capital itself. The first part of the essay illustrates how a reconsideration of TWL is vital to current theories of world literature, which borrow much and often without acknowledgement from older materialist frameworks of combined and uneven development, dependency and world-system analysis. In the second half, I argue that key mid-twentieth-century cultural landmarks, such as Mao Zedong’s Yenan lectures on literature, and Glauber Rocha’s “Aesthetics of Hunger” cinema manifesto, foreshadow TWL’s argument. Not only do these texts from Asia, Latin America etc. illuminate the anti-imperial, peripheral “roots” of Jameson’s formulations, they also trace a largely forgotten history, and corpus, of peripheral modernism, differing in key aspects from Euro-American modernism. The essay highlights the key concern of peripheral aesthetics, namely that culture is a site of emancipatory struggle.

Changing referents: learning across space and time in China and the West

Even as globalization has exposed the Eurocentric character of the academic theories used to understand the world, most scholarship continues to rely on the same parochial vocabulary it critiques. Against those who insist our thinking cannot escape the dominant terms of Euro-American modernity, this book shows how methods for understanding cultural others can take theoretical guidance from those very bodies of thought typically excluded by political and social theory. Examining a Chinese conversation over “Western Learning” from the 1860s to the 1920s, the book argues that we might follow these Chinese thinkers in viewing foreign knowledge as a theoretical resource—as a body of knowledge that formulates methods of argument, goals of inquiry, and criteria of evidence that may be generalizable to other places and times. The call of reformers such as Liang Qichao and Yan Fu to bianfa—literally “change the institutions” of Chinese society and politics in order to produce new kinds of Western knowledge—was simultaneously also a call to “change the referents” those institutions sought to emulate, and from which participants might draw their self-understanding. They show that the institutional and cultural contexts supporting the production of knowledge are not prefigured givens that constrain cross-cultural understanding but dynamic platforms for learning that are tractable to concerted efforts over time to transform them. These thinkers point us beyond acknowledgment of cultural difference toward reform of the social, institutional, and disciplinary spaces in which the production of knowledge takes place.

The Archaeology of the Colonial—Un-earthing Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth

The Archaeology of the Colonial—Un-earthing Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth Michael Wutz (bio) We need to stop assuming a one-to-one correspondence between the geographic origins of a text and its evolving radius of literary action. We need to stop thinking of national literatures as the linguistic equivalents of territorial maps. Wai Chee Dimock, “Literature for the Planet”1 Since the publication of her Pulitzer prize-winning debut collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), Jhumpa Lahiri has come to be seen as a preeminent interpreter of the postcolonial condition of the Indian diaspora. By chronicling the lives of, mostly, privileged Bengalis transitioning into the West, she has mapped the anxieties of a population caught in the dual allegiance of transcontinental citizenship. At the same time, critics have ascribed the appeal of her work, in the United States and abroad, to her skillful portrayal of dislocation and generational crises, which has been judged to carry the universalizing qualities of serious, ambitious fiction. As the editors of Naming Jhumpa Lahiri observe, Lahiri’s work “sheds light on both universal dimensions of human experience and more specific Bengali, postcolonial, Indian diasporic, South Asian American, and Asian American politics.”2 Exceeding this concentric reach, Lahiri has also been grouped with a cadre of contemporary writers that has slid out of—or rather, beyond—the loose mesh of the postmodern vocabulary. Rachel Adams has recently identified Lahiri as an avatar of a newly emergent “American literary globalism,” which she understands as a generalized [End Page 243] feeling of social simultaneity across national borders, boundaries, and oceans, and which succeeds the more narrowly-Western aesthetic imperatives of the postmodern: “Relatively unburdened by the legacies of Euro-American modernism or the politics of the Cold War, their fiction reacts against the aesthetic sensibilities of high postmodernism while providing American literature with a new set of genealogical, geographic, and temporal referents.”3 This configuration of referents—from genealogy and geography to time, especially the vast temporalities of geologic time—is indeed fully evident in Lahiri’s work and provides the framework for a sustained eco-critical reading of Lahiri’s collection of stories and novellas, Unaccustomed Earth (2008). While Adams is primarily interested in mapping a global sensibility in American fiction that is operative in the present, I want to extend those terms, both historically and geologically, into the past and future by combining them with the thematic foci Lahiri’s work has, so far almost exclusively, been identified with: postcoloniality and immigration. Those twin themes provide the narrative spark for the stories in Maladies, but don’t extend into historical or temporal reflection. The intergenerational vector of The Namesake (2003), Lahiri’s first novel, is driven by time and change, but historical or geological ruptures are largely absent from its texture. The Lowland (2013), Lahiri’s most recent novel, is rich with a colonial and ecological sensibility that suggests centuries of human intervention and biological niche-building, but doesn’t explore them against planetary and geological time. Only with Unaccustomed Earth does Lahiri locate the story of migration and resettlement within the immensities of a transhistorical scale;4 and only Unaccustomed Earth—as its earth-bound title already suggests—carries the imprint of a deeply felt environmental and ecological sensibility in its texture. The presence of natural history within a typically more narrow human history; an awareness of the agency of natural or nonhuman forces; a sense of human accountability for its impact on the earth; and an understanding of the dynamic processes of the natural world—Lawrence Buell’s criteria for the identification of literary texts as being properly imbued with environmental and ecological concerns are all fully realized in Lahiri’s collection.5 It is against this geological, geographical, and ecological background that I want to offer a reading of Unaccustomed Earth that revolves around the figurative axis of its title: the earth. I submit that Lahiri articulates a multi-leveled theory of postcoloniality through the trope of the earth itself, the terrific and terrifying terrain having offered humans habitation for millenia. As a layering of tensional plate tectonics, the imbricated strata of the earth’s crust become a figure for...

“Global”: A View from the Margin

“Global”: A View from the Margin

The “Global” Contemporary Art Canon and the Case of China

This essay reviews the book Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents edited by Wu Hung and published by the New York Museum of Modern Art in 2010, as part of an ongoing series aiming to introduce art critical texts produced in non-mainstream art locales to an English-speaking audience. Gathering a large number of translated critical essays, the book outlines the production of Chinese Contemporary Art since what is normally accepted as its onset in the late 1970s. This essay argues that this process of definition, legitimized by the prominent publisher of this book, amounts to a form of canonization performed at the expenses of other contemporaneous artistic forms—ink and academic painting—whose culturally and historically specific nature de facto excludes them from a concept of art globalization still largely determined and rooted by Euro-American modernism.

Art History, ‘National Art’ and Iranian Intellectuals in the 1960s

The 1960s were undoubtedly the most culturally productive period in the contemporary history of Iran. During these years, artistic trends as well as art historical practices attempted to present the idea of national art, while the intellectual atmosphere was charged with the conflicting ideologies of the Cold War. The Pahlavi state's cultural policies, based on its pro-Western and at the same time nationalist visions, were in contrast with most intellectuals' attitudes towards art, which mainly followed leftist ideologies. Within such an ideologically charged space, the idea of combining Euro-American modernism and traditional views formed the dominant discourse of modern Iranian art. This article maps the interconnections among artists, art historians and cultural custodians in 1960s Iran, and explores the ways in which nationalist, nativist, modernist and communist-Marxist ideologies influenced the artistic trends as well as art historical narratives. After focusing on the ways art history was introduced through Orientalist viewpoints in Iran, the article will shed light on the role of visual artists within the intellectual community of the 1960s. The idea of ‘national art’, epitomised in the movements of Saqqa khanih and Talar-i Iran, will then be analysed. Finally, the article will evaluate these artistic activities within their ideological framework.