High Modernism Research Articles

Blurring the boundaries: everyday urbanism in Accra Airport City

ABSTRACT Airports have outgrown their dominant roles as transport hubs. The landside of airports is developed into airport cities which are used to brand, create identity and promote economic development for cities. While planned as a high modernist architecture, airport cities do not necessarily cater for the daily needs of the low-income working class in the enclave. Thus, they are compelled to cater for their everyday needs from neighbouring spaces which end up blurring the peripheries of the formally planned spaces. Using qualitative methods, this research shows how everyday urbanism is produced in the Accra Airport City enclave in Ghana. The findings reveal that the experiences of the low-income workers in the enclave show a tension between the formal hegemonic planning of the enclave and the informal strategies deployed by them to meet their everyday needs. They are constantly improvising and showing agility to survive in the restrictive environment.

Countering durian plantationocene visuality and the erasure of natureculture histories in Malaysia

ABSTRACT Large-scale durian plantations are now a major threat, causing deforestation and displacing the Orang Asli, the aboriginal peoples of Peninsular Malaysia, from their customary lands. This paper focuses on visual representations of the durian plantations and/or forest to discuss two contrasting views of the landscape. We analyse durian plantation corporate investment videos wooing public investors and videos of the Temiar Orang Asli’s resistance against forced evacuations by the durian companies in Gua Musang, Kelantan. The landscape presented in the corporate video is one that silently but violently erases the Indigenous Peoples of the land and their natureculture histories through high modernist ideology and aesthetics. Counterposing the corporate plantationocene visuals against the raw footage from the amateur videos shot on mobile phones, the Orang Asli galvanize emotionally moving countervisuality as witness to their resistance against the violence enacted by corporate occupation. By doing so, they are actively using visual documentation to tell their side of the story and to demand justice. Drawing from posthumanism, environmental humanities and critical visual studies, this paper presents a decolonial critique of the modernist/developmentalist discourse and highlights the violence of the erasure of natureculture in an extractive economy.

Pathei mathos and skandalon in Le Sacre du Printemps

In spite of abundant research on Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), an avant-garde ballet that premiered in Paris in 1913, there is no substantive examination of the ballet’s re-imagining of premodern rituality, aesthetics, and performance. In this brief essay, I interpret Igor Stravinsky’s musical score and Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography for Le Sacre in an exposition of two specific terms: pathei mathos (knowledge by ordeal) and skandalon (‘stumbling stone,’ a trap, scandal). As I demonstrate with my exegesis of each term, the celebrated radicality of Stravinsky’s composition and the presumed modernism of Nijinsky’s movement are in fact indebted to Greco-Roman antiquity and the Middle Ages. Ultimately, this essay shows how a high modernist ballet is in fact intimately tied to ancient ritual and medieval gesture.

Chinese modernist satire: Lao She’s Mr Ma and Son (1929), Qian Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged (1947), and Eileen Chang’s Legends (1944)

ABSTRACT Bringing into dialogue modern Chinese literary studies and modernist studies, this essay examines what I call the Chinese modernist satires of Lao She, Qian Zhongshu, and Eileen Chang. Chinese modernism is here understood as plural in itself, encompassing multiple origins, times, influences, politics, and loci. Viewed as part of a global/planetary modernism, early-twentieth-century Chinese modernism was neither imported nor belated. Like the Anglo-American exterior modernists, who worked under the shadow of their formidable high modernist precursors, Lao She, Qian, and Chang belonged to the younger generation of Chinese modernists; Mr Ma and Son (1929), Fortress Besieged (1947), and the short stories collected in Legends (1944) contributed to a distinctive strand of Chinese modernism, which, comparable to the exterior modernism of their British and American counterparts, is focused on satire and comedy. Building connections between the three significant writers in modern Chinese literature, the essay also demonstrates a variety within their Chinese modernist satire.

Machines in the Garden: De-Gothicizing the American Pastoral in Tales from the Loop

The television series Tales from the Loop, released in 2022, launches an ambitious attempt to revise the traditional gothic iconography of the violent intrusion of technology into pastoral spaces. Mapping out a spatially and temporally defamiliarized county in the American Midwest, home to an enigmatic high-tech research facility nicknamed The Loop, the series employs an idiosyncratic visual style and a narrative strategy inspired by high modernist fiction designed to foreclose specific thematic options. To the degree that these options provide the foundation for the polarized political discourses, in which the Rustbelt States of the American Midwest are currently framed in terms of right-wing nostalgia or neoliberal techno-optimism, the series’s uniquely creative illustration of Leo Marx’s evocative metaphor of the “machine in the garden” suggests ways of reframing that larger political discourse.

“Content Is Meaningless, and Structure Is All-Important”: Defining the Nature of Computer Science in the Age of High Modernism, c. 1950–c. 1965

The purpose of this article is to historize the definition of computer science, particularly the characteristic ambiguity of the discipline towards the computer. This ambiguity is foundational to computer science and has its roots in the response of university computer centers to the commercialization of computing in the mid-1950s. University computing experts developed an understanding of the activity of computing disentangled from the computer itself, a conceptual shift that went together with a parallel process of dematerialization of the notion of computer. These transformations were facilitated by the ascendance of a high modernist agenda in the sciences in the United States. University computing experts embraced the high modernist agenda and developed analogies across programs, notations, and a notion of the computer now understood as a model of computation. This immaterial conflation of notations, programs, and representations of the machine, would become one of the core tenets of computer science.

Imagining Gender, Nation, and Consumerism in Magazines of the 1920s

Imagining Gender, Nation, and Consumerism in Magazines of the 1920s

The making and re-making of high modernist towns in the Circumpolar North

In this article we explore the fate of high modernist architecture and settlement planning in the North, through the lens of mining towns in Sweden and Quebec. After WW2, cities across the world were subject to a wave of restructuring in accordance with high modernist ideals. The circumpolar north became the subject of some of the most radical examples, often described as utopian. In the Swedish Arctic, a renowned architect Ralph Erskine played a leading role. He combined functionalist principles, with ideas of creating settlements protecting inhabitants from harsh Arctic conditions, in harmony with the environment. Erskine's ideas were implemented to a different extent in Kiruna and Svappavaara in north Sweden in the 1960's and in Fermont, Quebec, in the early 1970's. Our aim is to understand the challenges of creating industrial settlements in the Arctic, with the capacity to attract employees that are needed for resource extraction and other industries. While Erskine's architecture in Svappavaara and Kiruna will be demolished, the wall shaped town in Fermont is still intact and expanding. By comparing and highlighting differences, we call attention to the threat of demolition of legacies of an era that has yet to be defined as cultural heritage.

‘A vision for the future’: Professional ethos as boundary work in Mozambique’s public sector

Global imaginaries of middle-classness, although resonating in very different ways in specific national contexts, more often than not conform to broadly capitalist-liberal aspirations, through globalised markers of consumption and individual social advancement. However, as this ethnographic material from Mozambique’s mining and hydrocarbons sector suggests, even under contemporary conditions of neoliberalism, alternative imaginings of middle-classness, based on technical competence, cosmopolitanism, work ethos and professionalism as contributing to a larger narrative of national progress persist as echoes of socialist technical assistance among the technocrats managing the sector. This article explores how professionalism is constructed across regime changes, from a socialist, high modernist socio-political project that has all but vanished today as a global emancipatory reference, to the current, neoliberal economic and political dispensation that requires of public administrators to promote a business-friendly climate. Professionalism, I show, cuts across generations despite considerable differences, indexing this class’s shifting claims on the state.

Modernisation in isolation: the nature and roots of Eritrea’s defining economic ideology

In 1994, with the establishment of the Popular Front for Democracy and Justice as Eritrea’s sole political party, the government of Eritrea proclaimed a bold new economic policy to create a private sector-led, export-oriented, free market economy. This appeared to be a marked departure from Eritrean political elites’ prior Marxist-Leninism and commitment to isolationist, state-led development. However, we argue that this new policy, rather than evidence of ideological vacuity, was consistent with a deeper set of ideological principles. This ideology assigns a pre-eminent role to the society's political elite, valorises almost autarkic economic independence, and reproduces a specific variant of radical ‘high’ modernism through mass mobilisation and root-and-branch transformation. However, in contrast to past high modernist development ideologies, Eritrea’s particular constellation of policies is part of a new pattern of illiberal modernisation ideology visible across a number of countries in 21st Century Africa, such as Rwanda and Ethiopia. We trace Eritrea’s history of adherence to international self-reliance and societal dominance through the long years of insurgent struggle that led to the establishment of the government of liberated Eritrea. This reveals how ideology is indispensable in understanding the state and policymaking and how particular political ideas constitute key defining influences on the Eritrean state.

Tech-based Prototypes in Climate Governance: On Scalability, Replicability, and Representation

‘[T]he “mainstream” of global governance has changed course’ and in so doing, might well have ‘outrun the standard tools of critical, progressive, and reform-minded international lawyers’, Fleur Johns wrote in 2019. It is especially the critical tools of ‘appeals to history, context, language [and] the grassroots’ in response to universalist planning that Johns sees absorbed in the turn to prototyping as a new ‘style’ of governance. In this article, we take on this observation and explore how the ‘lean start-up mentality’ that Johns described has taken hold of tech-based climate governance. We base our reflections on the ‘Tech for Our Planet’ challenge that took place over 2021 and was showcased at the UNFCCC COP26 in Glasgow. While a turn ‘from planning to prototypes’ is observable, we question how exactly this ‘change of course’ affects the high modernist style of global governance and its critique by international lawyers. The ‘digital solutions for climate challenges’ that were showcased in Glasgow are indeed based on localized experiments with data science, thereby seemingly overcoming high modernist impulses towards universalist ideals. Yet, these experimental prototypes are developed with the ambition of being replicable and scaled up, to become a stack of tools deployable in any given scenario. This form of scaling up neither breaks with modernist aspirations based on technologically-mediated replicability—of moving the same logic inscribed in code to different sites and contexts—nor with a modernist understanding of knowledge as universal in its application. In our analysis, the determining feature is then not so much a matter of planning or prototyping in ideal type forms, but of replicability of knowledge production and scalability of technological know-how that underpin both planning and prototyping. Prototyping in the start-up space does not depart from, but rather reinscribes, a modernist representation of the human subject that forces its epistemological lens onto a world of nonhuman objects amenable to governance. Critical international lawyers’ toolkits must therefore be reconfigured with a focus on a governance style of disembodied knowledge production that runs through both planning and prototyping.

High Modernist Hubris and its Subversion in South Africa’s Covid–19 Vaccination Roll-Out

The South African government presented its strategy for rolling out vaccinations against Covid–19 in 2021 as a comprehensive plan designed by technocratic experts working with the country’s leading scientists. This imagery built on the government’s prior claims that its responses to Covid over the previous year ‘followed the science’. In 2021, as in 2020, this framing functioned ideologically to justify projects of expanded government control over the economy and the health sector. This article shows how the objective of the vaccination roll-out ‘plan’ was not simply to vaccinate people, but to build key foundations of the proposed ‘national health insurance’ system, including patient registration and procedures for channelling patients (and corresponding financial flows) between public and private health care providers. But the imagery of planned efficiency projected through PowerPoint presentations masked the reality that there was no detailed plan and most of the proposed roll-out scheme was unworkable. We contend, following James Scott, that this was an example of high modernist hubris and aesthetics that confused visual imagery with operational order. Almost every aspect of the supposed vaccination ‘plan’ was subverted, as scientists excluded from government advisory structures disputed aspects of vaccine procurement and use, people ‘walked in’ to vaccination sites where health care workers implemented informal systems to manage them, provincial governments failed to conform with national instructions, and special interest groups lobbied for privileges. The result was that a somewhat disorderly but more effective vaccination roll-out replaced the dysfunctional, overly ordered system set out by government planners.

Dam building by the illiberal modernisers: ideological drivers for Rwanda and Tanzania’s megawatt mission

Globally, and especially in Africa, twentieth-century dams were typically imagined through high modernist ideology as the premier development project, but this ended with the decade-long hiatus in dam construction from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. However, dam-building is back. Does this mark the resurgence of a modernising ideology, of grand plans of mega-infrastructures implemented from an enlightened vanguard? This article analyses this question using Rwanda and Tanzania as case studies. It makes a twofold contribution. The first, to the literature on why the resurgence of dams is happening. Using theory, it shows how to understand the influence of ideology alongside other strategic factors and conceptualises the application of high modernism to dam building. This allows a more precise assessment of the influence of ideology on dam resurgence, with the cases of Rwanda and Tanzania demonstrating significant contrasts with past tendencies to aggrandise the infrastructure itself as the harbinger of progress. The second contribution to this special issue is on the ideology influencing a raft of 21st century illiberal states in Africa that have embarked on grand development missions. The article compliments other texts in this issue, demonstrating the presence of an evolved illiberal modernisers ideology that combines tenants of the past with more recent norms. Thus, an assumption of technologies’ ability to linearly generate development is combined with contrasting ideas about sustainability, the importance of the private sector’s role and hydropower’s limitations. This demonstrates the way today’s illiberal modernisers, engaged in global debates, adapt and update development ideology.

“The Greatest Revolution in Art”: Reinterpreting Roger Fry’s Byzantinism

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in formalism throughout the humanities. Within the field of art history in particular, the emergence of a new formalism has been accompanied by a renewed interest in its historical manifestations. The British art critic Roger Fry (1866-1934) is one of those early formalists whose work has moved to the center of attention again. After having long been dismissed for his high modernist fixation on form at the exclusion of meaning, recent studies have shown that Fry’s position is more complex and nuanced than has often been assumed. In this article, I will revisit Fry’s formalism with a particular emphasis on his lifelong interest in Byzantine art. Although it has widely been recognized that Byzantine art played a crucial role in Fry’s theories, and was regarded by him as an important precursor of the avant-garde of his day (most notably the Post-Impressionism of Cézanne), I argue that the nature of his Byzantinism has long been misunderstood. Rather than being merely of formal interest to him, I demonstrate that Fry’s interest in Byzantine art is deeply historical, and his Byzantinism is nothing but an attempt to salvage art’s spiritual aura in a disenchanted world.

When the means become the ends: Ghana’s ‘good governance’ electricity reform overwhelmed by the politics of power crises

ABSTRACT The 1990s good governance agenda created the ‘standard reform model’ for the electricity sector but after widespread adoption of its market and institutional policies, many developing countries’ electricity systems continue to suffer numerous crises. This article, using Ghana as a case study, analyses key drivers producing such crises. In the last decade, Ghana lurched from unprecedented shortages to electricity over-abundance, entailing spiralling debt. Rather than understand this through neo-classical approaches focusing on formal institutions and democratic pressures, this detailed empirical research outlines an alternative heterodox approach focused on political power and ideology. It demonstrates how intense competition entailed an all-consuming short-termist focus on elections. Alongside high modernist ideological beliefs in the power of megawatts to produce industrialisation, this created Ghana’s crises of absence and abundance. The article, therefore, finds that focusing on democratic institutions, the formal separation of policymaking and market motivations appears misplaced given the strength of countervailing political and ideological rationales that overwhelmed reforms. Alongside demonstrating the crucial importance of focusing on informal political power and policymaking beyond de jure institutions, this case study evidences flaws in the standard reform model, refuting its political compatibility and pointing to how it can increase opportunities for distorting the electricity-system.

A pragmatic high modernism? rural development and state building in the Ethiopian lowlands, c. 1960–2019.

Large scale agricultural projects driven by a high modernist ideology have been closely interlinked with the process of state building at the Ethiopian lowland frontier since the second half of the twentieth century. This paper provides a diachronic analysis of the political economy of agricultural development and the associated frontier effect in the western and north-eastern lowlands of the country across three different political regimes. A comparative assessment of these patterns suggests that the high modernist paradigm should be applied with some qualification to the agenda of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), the coalition that ruled Ethiopia from 1994 to 2019. The EPRDF was far more pragmatic than its predecessors; the oscillation between different degrees of state intervention was based upon past experiences of success and failure in the territorialization of state power in contested borderlands.

H.D., modernist fiction, and a queer quotidian

ABSTRACT This article proposes that H.D. imagines the possibilities of a queer quotidian in two short stories, “Narthex” and “The Usual Star,” written in the late 1920s. The queer quotidian is registered not just at the level of content but of form, and in ways that problematize high modernist aesthetics. In these stories, H.D. ironizes epiphany, critiques stream of consciousness, and explores the limitations of various narrative points of view and styles, suggesting that the self is a fiction and that perspective is inevitably a function of desire. Ultimately, the queer quotidian is ephemeral, to be experienced only in moments.

Re-gendering Smart Classicism: Franklin P. Adams, Dorothy Parker, and the Middlebrow Classical Verse Revival

This essay analyses a strain of modern classicism other than the high modernist classicism of Hulme, Pound, and Eliot. Its practitioners were middlebrow writers associated with the newspaper columns and ‘smart magazines’ thriving in New York City during the 1910s and 1920s. Led by the columnist, popular poet, and Algonquin Round Table fixture, Franklin P. Adams, ‘smart classicism’ took its inspiration from ancient Rome's elegists, satirists, and epigrammatists. Adams's smart classicist poems complicate current accounts of early twentieth-century American poetry, of modern(ist) classicism, and of the literary legacy of the smart writers and the Round Table. Dorothy Parker's poetic rejoinders to smart classicism re-gender the masculinist speakers and attitudes of Adams's light verse – and the verse of the ancient poets he emulates and translates. This contextualisation clarifies neglected aspects of Parker's poetic achievements: her erudition, critiques of literary gender politics ancient and modern, and role in articulating a female counterpart to the smart magazines’ suffering Little Man figure.

Science and Really Existing Socialism in Maoist China

Science and Really Existing Socialism in Maoist China

The Cambridge Introduction to British Fiction, 1900–1950

The Cambridge Introduction to British Fiction, 1900–1950