Singular Modernity Research Articles

세계문학과 근대성의 문제

This paper aims to critically examine the problem of modernity in world literature and, more specifically, in the theory of world literature by Frederic Jameson, Neil Lazarus, and Nicholas Brown, who have formulated a new concept of modernity against Western modernity. For a long time, world literature has been regarded as a field in which the ideas and values of Western modernity were embodied. This led to the negative labeling of non-Western literature as less worldly and more local literature that falsely imitates the modernity of Western literature. So the problem of modernity, such as how to overcome Western modernity and rethink the concept of modernity radically, has become one of the essential issues in the recent theories of world literature because we can not achieve the further development of world literature without properly criticizing the existing concept of Western modernity. What is interesting in Jameson’s idea of singular modernity and Lazarus and Brown’s theory of world literature is that they criticizes the Western conception for modernity and suggests the new concept of modernity that pays attention to the proper problems of capitalism rather than the West. Moreover, their theory pursues for a new political reading on the modernity and universality of literature, overcoming the dichotomy between central and peripheral, western and non-western. Their theory of world literature has also significant implications for us who have been strongly influenced by Western modernity. It makes us realize that our own literature can be world literature when we thoroughly explore our own modernity and the problems of capitalism. It also recalls us the basic fact that world literature is a literature that can search for political possibilities in the modernity of our own world and its internal contradictions and cracks.

Clashing Globes: Images of the Earth and Heidegger’s Thinking of Modernity

Abstract: Visual representations of the whole earth permeate modern cultures, shaping how societies imagine globalization and planetary ecological derangement. To explore the complex ways in which these images configure human attitudes toward environments, this essay attends to a series of hegemonic representations of the earth from diverse situations and stages of modernity in conjunction with ideas drawn from Martin Heidegger’s ontological philosophy. I proceed from the insight that for Heidegger modernity is not a singular condition, but entails two contrary determinations of being: “machination,” in which detached subjects reshape an objectified world, and “enordering,” in which fungible and flexible resources circulate endlessly around a closed global space. Taking up these divergent concepts, my argument accentuates basic differences in how the earth has been disclosed in representation over the course of modern history. Through close analyses of world maps from the early modern Netherlands; chalkboard globes from nineteenth-century schoolrooms; and the contemporary geospatial application Google Earth, I show how global visions both articulate and complicate Heidegger’s thinking of machination and enordering. Far from being the culmination of a singular modernity, images of the earth reveal and reinforce a discordant global condition, riven by clashing, equally total disclosures of the world.

Metamodernismul în teorie și în practică: pentru o conceptualizare a modernității singulare în câmpul literar românesc

Metamodernism is a Eurocentric theoretical fiction, with no adherence to the social and cultural realities of post-communist Romania. This article provides a critique of the theory of metamodernism proposed by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker and used by Alex Ciorogar to describe the post-2010 Romanian poetry system. Even if the concept is inoperative for Romanian literature, it is a symptom of the overcoming of the postmodernist framework, felt by writers as anti-essentialist, light-hearted, and unconcerned with the problems of today’s society (climate crisis, immigrants, marginalized communities, economic inequalities between classes, etc.). What I notice in the footsteps of Jeffrey Nealon & Galin Tihanov is that the focus shifts from an autonomist “regime of relevance” to one that is socially, politically, and identity-building oriented. My analysis will propose a number of criticisms of the internal contradictions generated by the two Dutchmen’s theory: firstly, that the “Yo-yo effect” of metamodernism – a metaphor I coined to better understand the basic concept – does not fully explain the cultural landscape of the Romanian literary system. In addition, it is built on a sum of generalizations of modernism and postmodernism, which have not been unanimously accepted by the theorists. A second criticism of Vermeulen and van den Akker’s study is its Western-centric stance, which ignores the (semi-)peripheral specificity of cultures. If we absurdly accept the existence of metamodernism, it is only a combination of ideologies and styles of historical currents subsumable to modernity. Therefore, I will propose, following in the footsteps of Fredric Jameson and the Warwick Research Collective, the concept of singular modernity, and I argue why there cannot yet be a postmodernity in Eastern Europe. Discussing post-communist Romanian literature in terms of unfinished, combined, and unevenly developed modernity is much more productive because it takes into account both the material-social conditions of Romania and the cultural-artistic acquisitions thanks to the transfer of symbolic capital between central and (semi)peripheral systems.

Vamping the Stage: Female Voices of Asian Modernities ed. by Andrew N. Weintraub and Bart Barendregt

Reviewed by: Vamping the Stage: Female Voices of Asian Modernities ed. by Andrew N. Weintraub and Bart Barendregt Maho A. Ishiguro (bio) Vamping the Stage: Female Voices of Asian Modernities. Edited by Andrew N. Weintraub and Bart Barendregt. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017. Music and Performing Arts of Asia and the Pacific. vii + 363 pp., 35 b&w illustrations. ISBN: 9780824869861 (hardcover), $72.00; ISBN: 9780824881481 (paperback), $32.00. Vamping the Stage: Female Voices of Asian Modernities came out of two conferences that were part of the Voices of Asian Modernities Project curated by the University of Pittsburgh, Leiden University, and the KITLV. The book features 14 articles by both emerging and veteran scholars. The chapters, organized into four sections, are case studies about female performers in popular music industries who navigated Asian modernities particular to China, Korea, Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines, India, colonial Malaya, and Iran. Weintraub and Barendregt define modernity as “processes of profound social transformations and accompanying forms of politics (nation- state), economics (capitalism), technology (mass media), and culture . . . , as a project that is necessarily unfinished and in constant need of transformation. . . . We aim here to study modernity’s successive changes as people and societies have felt the need to make their present situation better” (10–11). In particular, the editors find the multiple- modernities approach, rather than a singular modernity that privileges the West as the reference point, as appropriate for their book, following Chu and Man’s statement (2010, 14) that “when ‘Asian’ is not as homogenous as the term implies, there should be different modernities across Asia” (11). As a whole, the book gives us a cohesive, comparative look into the female performers’ roles in popular- music industries from the early twentieth century to the present as “artistic pioneers” and “active agents in the creation of local performance cultures” (3). The following paragraphs will give snapshots of each chapter, followed by my personal recommendation of this book. Part 1, “Triumph and Tragedies of the Colonized Voice,” takes us to China, Korea, colonial Malaya, and diasporic Chinese communities in the early twentieth century when Asian female artists braved their way into newly developing modernities of these locales. Yiman Wang (chapter 2) discusses two Chinese female actresses during the time between the two world wars. Strategically using their vocal performances, language skills, and visual presentation and further taking advantage of the shifting cinematic technologies of the time, the actresses played pivotal roles in developing modern national cinema in China and facilitating diasporic cosmopolitanism in Europe. Tifen Beus (chapter 3) examines China’s first modernization movement, from which new symbols of modern women and discourses on gender were born. Tan Sooi [End Page 154] Beng (chapter 4) takes us to Malaya, where a group of Muslim women artists carved a new notion of womanhood in the entertainment industry. They practiced self- agency in entertainment industries and challenged the conventional status of women while continuing to adhere to Malay women’s customs, decorum, and Islamic values. Joshua Pilzer (chapter 5) discusses the entanglement between popular cultures, reputable art schools, and the sex industry during the time of Japanese imperialism in Korea. Part 2, “Modern Stars and Modern Lives,” sheds light on three female singers who lived through the changing sociopolitical climate of Japan, Indonesia, and India in the 1960s and 1970s. As these female singers experienced modernity, as defined in each of their locales, gendered attitude became an important framework they bent, defied, and yet continued to respect in order to receive public acceptance. In chapter 6, Christine Yano discusses Misora Hibari, who was heralded as the people’s voice in postwar Japan, and how she evolved as a singer from “a spunky orphan, the adult sufferer” to “the diva superstar” due to her versatility in expressing a wide range of emotions vocally in her performances (140). In chapter 7, Andrew Weintraub discusses the songs of Titiek Puspa, which were sung and recorded at a time of sociopolitical transition between the first two presidents in Indonesia with contrasting political ideologies on women’s positions in society. Weintraub gives particular attention to songs about various experiences of modernity, which Titiek sings from female perspectives. In chapter 8...

Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form

Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form

The Italian Opera Culture in Constantinople During the Nineteenth Century New Data and Some Ideological Issues

Among the Turkish lyrics of Giuseppe Donizetti there are texts of singular modernity that exalt the Christians and Muslims’ brotherhood and accurately manifest the Tanzimat ideological value. Donizetti and other Italian composers took part in a metissage project also involving the Levantine community but above all the Constantinopolitan Armenians who managed the theatres and edited noteworthy translations of dramma per musica. The Italian composers, moreover, in writing Ottoman lyrics with Latin letters, apparently only to simplify the singer’s reading, actually paved the way to the literacy process of modern Turkey. This essay aims to re-evaluate Italian opera’s role in the Westernist aspiration context of 19th century Turkey.

The Italian Opera Culture in Constantinople During the Nineteenth Century New Data and Some Ideological Issues

Among the Turkish lyrics of Giuseppe Donizetti there are texts of singular modernity that exalt the Christians and Muslims’ brotherhood and accurately manifest the Tanzimat ideological value. Donizetti and other Italian composers took part in a metissage project also involving the Levantine community but above all the Constantinopolitan Armenians who managed the theatres and edited noteworthy translations of dramma per musica. The Italian composers, moreover, in writing Ottoman lyrics with Latin letters, apparently only to simplify the singer’s reading, actually paved the way to the literacy process of modern Turkey. This essay aims to re-evaluate Italian opera’s role in the Westernist aspiration context of 19th century Turkey.

Reading Australian modernity: Unsettled settlers and cultures of mobility

AbstractWhat did Australian modernity look like? Over the last two decades, Australia's entrenched reputation for ‘cultural belatedness’ has been displaced by the study of ‘colonial modernity’. No longer beholden to the idea that a singular modernity was disseminated from core to periphery, scholars now speak of many localised modernities that arose across colonial and provincial sites. According to this new ‘multiple modernities’ paradigm, Australia was home to its own home‐grown incarnation of modern life. But what was distinctively ‘Australian’ about Australian modernity? Although widely discussed in recent historiography, scholars have yet to delineate its distinguishing features. This article posits mobility as a central component of the Australian modern. Drawing upon new scholarship in settler colonial studies and transnational history, it argues that early twentieth‐century Australia was home to intense cultures of both domestic and global mobility that were entangled with the geographies and anxieties of the settler colonial project. It shows how the nation's ‘unsettled settlers’ also became its chief agents of modernity, and in doing so draws together several strands in recent historiography. Although mobility also signified modernity beyond Australia, it was within this settler colonial nation tyrannised by distance that the modern appetite for motion reached especial heights.

The Scale of Global Modernisms: Imperial, National, Regional, Local

One of the Principal Challenges Facing the Study of Global Modernisms, as of Any Transnational Cultural Phenomenon, is the question of scale. In declaring the contemporary world to be “one, andunequal,” several recent theorizations of world literature rest on the foundational assumption of a unified—albeit uneven—planetary scale (Moretti, “Conjectures” 56; see also Casanova 62-74; WREC 6-12). As such they model the dynamic of literary circulation across world regions according to the geographic distances, as well as the disproportionate access to socioeconomic and cultural resources, that separate and distinguish the world's centers from their peripheries. These distances, and the inequalities they generate, are perceived as the necessary by-products of two spatial logics, that of the expanding world market and that of the modern Westphalian system of sovereign and competing nation-states. To posit the modern world as a singular system has the undoubted merit of acknowledging the structural connectedness of its operative inequalities, arising from the territorial partition of the globe by the imperial powers during the final decades of the nineteenth century and from its simultaneous unification in the wake of accelerating trade and new infrastructures of transport and communication. Nevertheless, the premise of a singular modernity (Jameson 142) has been repeatedly challenged (Chakrabarty 6-16; Mitchell; Scott 113-15; Orsini). It has been faulted for its developmentalist logic, involving an implied or explicit adherence to the related assumptions of linear or stadial historicism and spatial diffusionism, which together reduce the negotiated impact of modernity on the world's far-flung regions to a process of top-down modernization originating in and imposed by the West. The force of this critique is blunted once the world system (Wallerstein; Hopkins et al.) is grasped as a profoundly uneven totality, allowing us to view the multiply differentiated space-times that coexist in the global present as produced by the imbalances constituting the world system as such (in literary scholarship, see Anderson, “Modernity”; Moretti,Modern Epic50-52; Wollaeger 13-14; Lazarus 232-41, WREC 1-95; for corresponding debates in historiography and the social sciences, see Harootunian 62-63; Cooper 113-49; Chibber).

Revisiting Postmodernism

This interview was conducted with Fredric Jameson on 13 March 2014 in New York City and has been lightly edited for clarity. On the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of “Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” in the New Left Review, Jameson looks back at the essay and considers the current state of capitalism, theory, art, and culture in relation to the concepts he adopted in 1984. Jameson is Knut Schmidt-Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature, professor of romance studies (French), and director of the Institute for Critical Theory at Duke University. He is the author of many books, including The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981), A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (2002), and, most recently, The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On the Historicity of Forms (2015).

Introduction

Introduction Susan M. Griffin The Henry James Review publishes a yearly special issue centered around a topic that is—or could or should be—important to James studies but also one that is under active consideration across other fields and disciplines. “Centered around” rather than “focused on”; considered, not as a means of narrowing and finalizing, but broadly and in multiplying ways. The goal—the hope—is that, together, the essays will read as an extended and expansive conversation. So I am particularly delighted to find that not only are the pieces in “Fredric Jameson, Henry James” in conversation with one another, and then joined in conversation by Fredric Jameson, but that so many of the essays themselves perform their analyses through a kind of colloquy. As though the combination of James and Jameson were not complex enough, a surprising number of contributors to this special issue articulate their arguments through a third term—Howells, Conrad, Wells, Burke, Booth. Jameson, too, especially in the beginning of his essay, reads Henry James’s writing, characteristically, in relation to other authors—Pound, Faulkner, Proust, Balzac, Flaubert. I take this not as evidence that there is little to say about Jameson and James but as indication that situating James historically—a demand for any Jamesonian discussion—can be performed most fruitfully by way of recognizing the discourses, creative and critical, with which James engages. To give only perhaps the most obvious example: in 1884 James writes “The Art of Fiction” and, in doing so, enters into an ongoing discussion that will continue far into the future. Even limiting the account to 1881–84, we know that James wrote in direct response to Walter Besant’s own “The Art of Fiction” (1884), as well as Andrew Lang’s rejoinder to Besant, also titled “The Art of Fiction” (1884). Essays on the topic by Thomas Hardy (1881), William Dean Howells (1882), Robert Louis Stevenson (1882), and Henry Norman (1883) had preceded Besant’s. And James’s essay generates Stevenson’s reply in “A Humble Remonstrance” (1884). Then there are all of the other readers of these essays, who incorporate their terms and arguments into their own thought, writing, and reading. [End Page 197] In his response to the essays collected here, Fredric Jameson turns twice to autobiography: once, to “confess” that “James was one of the only three American writers who meant something to me in my intellectual formation.” In the second instance, Jameson re-engages with his teacher, Wayne Booth, and, more briefly, with Kenneth Burke. This is a taking up of conversations, sometimes fruitful (heated classroom discussions, clarifying disagreements), sometimes failed (as when Jameson does not read the second edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction and Booth misses the dedication to him of A Singular Modernity). Jameson explains that, in replacing Burke’s usage of “ideology” with his own more expanded understanding of the term, he, in a sense, replaces Burke himself. But what this does not mean, Jameson insists, is the erasure of Burke’s achievements and their ongoing use; it is not an end to reading Burke and writing with him. Then, too, there are the many Henry Jameses that appear in these pages: most pervasively the realist novelist, but also the novelist who needs romance, the global writer, the great man, the compleat man of letters. One of the primary means by which contributors bring Jameson and James together is through analyses of structure, though often in unexpected ways. There are discussions of architecture and sculpture; explanations that include diagrams; attention to circumlocutions and circuits; even an investigation of the refusal to be systemic. The call for submissions to “Jameson, James” claimed that “While he has not written directly on Henry James in a sustained way, James’s writing is, nonetheless, threaded throughout Jameson’s work: as example, as critical authority, as historical witness.” The essays in this collection trace some of those Jameses but do so not in order to simply reproduce either a Jamesonian Henry James. Nor for that matter, do they confine themselves to a Jamesonian Fredric Jameson, that is to Jameson’s own vision of himself and his writing. Re-reading his late fiction, Henry James...

The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms

The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms

Momok Ketimpangan: Waktu, Sejarah, Antropologi & Modernitas

This article critically observes the modern regime of time that led to the temporalizing of history. The employment of the master category of singular modernity encompasses its capacity for unifying all singularities, hence, betraying capitalism's and nation states' desire to transform plural histories into a single one. Anthropology too has been responsible for the production and maintenance of the temporal order of modernity. While capitalist and national expansions would use violent means to spatially establish themselves by destroying alternative modes of production and body politics, anthropology manipulates time with various devices of sequencing and distancing thereby assigning the conquered into the past. This article suggests that anthropology should no longer align itself with modernity and its notion of human progress. Rather, it should play out disqualified forms of interpretations, rescuing the multiple temporalities at work in the world, to blast the continuum of history. Key words: Time, History, Anthropology & Modernity

Redactionary Global Modernism: Kisses in Imperial Japan

Redactionary Global Modernism:Kisses in Imperial Japan Jonathan E. Abel (bio) Structuralism, Marxism, post-structuralism and the like are no longer the sexy topics they were. What is sexy instead is sex. On the wilder shores of academia, an interest in French philosophy has given way to a fascination with French kissing. —Terry Eagleton, After Theory Rodin’s “Kiss,” despite its realism, provides no libidinous thought. —André Bazin, “Marginal Notes on Eroticism in Cinema” I shall never forget my first experience in seeing kissing between man and woman. … I cannot express my feelings, but I could not help recalling what my mother said to me just before I started for America: “I have heard, my daughter, that it is the custom of foreign people to lick each other as dogs do.” —Sugimoto Inagaki Etsu, A Daughter of the Samurai (1926) At an exhibition of French modern art in Tokyo on May 31, 1924, Auguste Rodin’s Le Baiser (The Kiss) was confined to a “special room” and displayed behind a bamboo screen by order of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Headquarters.1 This reception of Rodin’s The Kiss in Japan is but one moment in the global offense taken, with the sculpture at the center of obscenity [End Page 201] battles nearly everywhere it went: in Brussels 1887, in Paris 1898, in Chicago 1893, in Lewes, England 1913, in Ottawa, Canada, 1919.2 As a moment in the world history of representations of the kiss more generally, Rodin in Japan serves to highlight several functions of the kiss in global modernity: the kiss connects individuals to others and to the world; the kiss is neither exclusively public nor private; the kiss often signifies through displacement and under erasure. The administration of Rodin’s The Kiss in Tokyo is a useful symbol of the modern story of the pregnant politics of proscribing public performances of sexual behavior in the center of metropoles in contrast to the overly sexualized liminal spaces in the peripheries of the city (such as 1920s Asakusa, where sex, stage, and screen shared a central role as similarly fringe cultures did in 1840s Monmartre, 1930s Alexanderplatz, and 1940s Times Square) and margins of empire. (At the far reaches of the Japanese empire “comfort women” would be expected to perform a public service far exceeding kisses, and as Japan itself would become a sexual center for the American military in the early postwar era.3) If kisses were part of a private world on the fringe of culture, they were also at the same time one of the many sites where the public discourse of the modern nation state (imperial or democratic) sought to influence its subjects. In Japan of the mid-1920s, even as Home Ministry censors began to crack down on cultural material featuring kissing, kissing could be read everywhere. The imperial state’s restrictions of access to and occasional suppression of images of the kiss allow us to see in stark relief not only the failure of a complete and absolute censorship in the age of mass production, but also how obscenity and sedition (the two main categories for censorship in modern Japan) were two sides of the same coin. As the kiss smacked of Zola-ist socialism in Paris, rubbed up against the tightly sealed prudish morals of Victorian England, and pecked at the bourgeois social fabric in Canada, the public kiss was glossed in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s as both the anarchic Western eroticism of ruthless capitalism and the cunning infiltration of Sovietism that could put the ruling classes in jeopardy. After censorship of kiss culture attempted to cultivate and maintain power for the imperial state, the assumption of this same power of the kiss was repurposed by the new regime of a “new Japan” under the Occupation. The history of the kiss in Japan is but one iteration of a world history of a redactionary modernism which both suppressed and publicized kissing. Of course, kisses mean different things as they travel across time and space; yet the kiss remains a convenient ontological flashpoint for comparisons of various acculturations within a wider framework of a “singular modernity.”4 And although, in terms...

Early Modernity and Emergent Capitalism

Early Modernity and Emergent Capitalism Daniel Vitkus (bio) The narrative of modernity cannot be organized around categories of subjectivity; consciousness and subjectivity are unrepresentable; only situations of modernity can be narrated. Frederic Jameson, A Singular Modernity Bruno Latour declares, in We Have Never Been Modern, that "Modernity comes in as many versions as there are thinkers or journalists. . ." (10). I suppose that the impossible task of this journal's forum on the question of (early) modernity is to contend with all of that intellectual baggage. The easiest solution is to reject the label of "modernity" (and, along with it, "early modernity") entirely. We could take all the definitions and debates and throw them into a massive data dump. But that would be too easy. The weight of our predecessors hangs on us, demanding that we respond, even if we reject the popular notion that would declare modernity to be a rationality, progress, Westernization and modernization that came to replace other and older ways of life. So what definition of "modernity" or "early modernity" can we employ, if any? What is modernity? Is it a style? a trope? a narrative? a shift in paradigm or episteme? Is it a historical "period"? If so, when did it begin? When did it end? or did it end? We could begin by accepting the notion that there is a historical "period" called "modernity" (and I do not like the term "period" because it implies a full stop, a rupture, a break, and an end), but if we were to do that, we would need to emphasize that this "modernity" is merely a conceptual framework, one of many possible frameworks, for understanding the past. A historical narrative that includes modernity is part of a story we tell about the past, but it is a narrative that is never completely disinterested or all-comprehensive. And yet the [End Page 155] telling and re-telling of the past, our painstaking efforts to sort through the many-layered historical record, and the endless debates generated by the impulse to recount and comprehend our shared origins—these are enabling, even necessary, labors. Inevitably, "modernity" is an artificial notion, but that does not mean that it is a useless one. History in its fullness is a vast and largely irrecoverable mass of events, thoughts, feelings, and experiences. And yet it is our job as scholars to make some sense of the past, examining and analyzing the existing archive in order to reconstruct the shapes of time and organize history in a meaningful way that helps us to understand our relationship to earlier times and societies. Since economic systems are the primary mechanisms of social reproduction that organize human societies, they comprise the appropriate objects of description for a basic understanding of long-term historical change. As Engels puts it, "according to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining factor in history is the production and reproduction of real life" (39). Following a long line of scholars, from Marx to R. H. Tawney to Immanuel Wallerstein to Robert Brenner, I contend that the shift from a feudal mode of production to a capitalist mode is the process that gradually initiates modernity. In other words, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we begin to perceive a wide-ranging social and cultural transformation that we can call "the early modern."1 And what began in the early modern period (with primitive accumulation and the origins of globalization) unfolded in the form of industrial capitalism and today has become postmodern consumer capitalism. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels pointed to the early modern period as the beginning of what would later become a world-wide capitalist system: The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development. . . . Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This...

Multiple modernities and mass communications in Muslim countries

The concept of multiple modernities is increasingly influential in mainly Western academic circles. Although the multiple modernities thesis challenges established West-centric understandings of the modern world, it also risks praising ‘the modern’ as the end of history and our preordained destiny. Multiple modernities’ global history cannot be separated from the colonialism, slavery, wars and exploitation that have formed our modern world and its inequalities. The multiple modernities thesis also illuminates a cultural and religious battlefield in which a Western concept of linear modernity, with a ‘developmental path’ that should be followed by all countries, is highly contested. The division of societies into the dichotomous categories of modern versus traditional – a legacy of the ‘grand narratives’ of classical social theory – also creates the foundation for other divisions, including the dichotomy of the modern Christian ‘Us’ versus the traditional Muslim ‘Them’. Such West-centric history-telling is part of a field of cultural authority in which the battle over the right to shape the past and present of various societies is taking place. There is no singular model of modernity; global modernization programs and processes have taken place in a variety of cultural and political environments, creating multiple models of modernity. This article critically explores the shortcomings of the West-centric theory of singular modernity. By focusing on the modern transformation of mass communication in Muslim countries, it argues that both traditional means of mass communication, such as manbars, and modern media, such as newspapers and tape recorders, have been used effectively for mobilization of masses by revolutionary Muslim groups. It also argues that Islam is not incompatible with modernity or democracy, and that Islamic groups have been an integral part of modern democratic developments in Muslim countries.

Multiplied Modernities and Modernisms?

AbstractThere are different forms of modernity or modernism since there is no such thing as the so‐called “singular modernity” or modernism. The paper illustrates how Chinese modernity or modernism has formed to deconstruct the “singular modernity” and Westcentric form of modernism. As an alternative modernity or modernism, the rise of Chinese modernity or modernism has not only contributed to the grand narrative discourse of global modernity or modernism but also paved the way for different forms of modernity or modernism in the current world.

On the Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms; or the New WWJD

AbstractIn this paper, I discuss the role of Fredric Jameson in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. In particular, I reflect briefly on the advantages and limits of Jameson’s “singular modernity” thesis as a paradigm for global for modernist studies.

Imagining a Space That Is Outside

Fredric Jameson, in dialogue with his Brazilian translator Maria Elisa Cevasco, begins this interview by discussing his earliest influences: Jean-Paul Sartre, G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, structuralism, dialectics, and psychoanalysis. Prompted by Cevasco, Jameson revisits his most famous categorical inventions: the political unconscious, transcoding, and cognitive mapping. Discussing the global situation today, he suggests that because of its location on the outside, a Third World power such as Brazil enjoys an epistemological advantage over the United States, which rarely thinks of its own outside and therefore has difficulties with cognitive mapping. The much needed counterweight to American power will have to come from the superior vantage point of such an outside position. Addressing the problematic of representation, the conjunction between art and politics, and the importance of periodization, Jameson describes his ongoing project: a grouping of books called “The Poetics of Social Forms.” This series actually culminates with his previous books Postmodernism and A Singular Modernity, and, as Jameson moves backward in time, will be preceded with three new volumes on realism, allegory, and myth. He describes his own cultural analysis as an attempt to uncover the contradictory situations that produced solutions in the form of culture, literature, art, philosophy, technology, politics, or history. He attributes the famous difficulty of his sentences to their trying to make connections among all kinds of problems, situations, or contradictions.

British Music and Modernism, 1895-1960. Ed. by Matthew Riley.

‘“Modernism” is indeed a grateful and comforting word, a veritable goat-and-compasses for the critic, embracing almost everything with equal benevolence, and reconciling the most seemingly implacable antagonists.’ Philip Heseltine's terminological scepticism—reviewing Eugene Goosens's Modern Tendencies in Music for The Sackbut, 1/2 (June 1920), 69—is a reminder that few items in the music historian's lexicon are as overworked or bluntly imprecise in the sculpting of historical or stylistic distinctions as the M-word. The divining of the presence of moderns (or modernists) is, after all, as old as the hills. If the word is to serve as more than a loose temporal-grammatical shifter—distinguishing now from then—it will be within narratives of historical rupture. Energetic separation is arguably a necessity of the historical process: ‘That person incapable of confronting his or her own past antagonistically really can be said to have no past’, in Schelling's formulation (cited by Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London, 2002), 24). Yet even the crisp fault lines of the break, Jameson remarks, typically dilate into more expansive periods (p. 27). Matthew Riley's collection charts one such moment-become-era: the book covers a chronological terrain spanning, roughly, middle-period Elgar to the twelve-note music of Humphrey Searle.