Transnational Modernity Research Articles

Cross-cultural Identities: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of the jota in The Three-Cornered Hat (1919)

This study proposes that the inclusion of the Aragonese jota (a type of folk dance) in The Three-Cornered Hat contributed to interwar transnational modernism. The modern ballet, which opened at the Alhambra Theatre in 1919, featured choreography by Léonide Massine, music by Manuel de Falla, libretto by María Lejárraga, and designs by Pablo Picasso. The jota amplified theories of Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, who identified cross-cultural exchange as a tool to strengthen a shared identity across the European continent, as well as theories of Gesamtkunstwerk put forward by Richard Wagner, who greatly influenced Falla.

Review: Housing and the City and Social Housing in the Middle East: Architecture, Urban Development, and Transnational Modernity

Review: <i>Housing and the City</i> and <i>Social Housing in the Middle East: Architecture, Urban Development, and Transnational Modernity</i>

Caterina Bernardini. &lt;i&gt;Transnational Modernity and the Italian Reinvention of Walt Whitman, 1870-1945&lt;/i&gt;.

A review of Caterina Bernardini, Transnational Modernity and the Italian Reinvention of Walt Whitman, 1870-1945.

Transnational Italian Studies

Transnational Italian Studies

Transnational Modernity and the Italian Reinvention of Walt Whitman, 1870-1945. Caterina Bernardini

Transnational Modernity and the Italian Reinvention of Walt Whitman, 1870-1945. Caterina Bernardini

Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Eikoh Hosoe: Surrealism and the Specter of Death in the 1980s

Throughout the late twentieth century, Eikoh Hosoe (b. 1933) and Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955–1989) used photography to merge transnational modernisms with cultural and aesthetic aspects of the places where they forged their practices—Japan and the Black Atlantic world. Each worked from a position of postimperial dislocation, using visual and performative strategies to negotiate the trauma of modernity and the persistence of disease. In sharing an array of formal and procedural symmetries, these underexamined artists challenged the boundaries of how photography was understood while also elaborating the expanding boundaries of what is increasingly understood as global Surrealism.

Une tour sur la montagne: L’architecture d’Ernest Cormier et sa vie avec Clorinthe Perron

Une tour sur la montagne: L’architecture d’Ernest Cormier et sa vie avec Clorinthe Perron

Near Symmetries: The Transnational Modernism of Edward Wolfe and William Plomer

Focusing on the transnational lives of William Plomer (1903–1973) and the artist Edward Wolfe (1897–1982), this paper considers the formative influences of their South African heritage on their creative development, as well as the impact of European modernism on their work. In particular, a connection is made between Wolfe’s immersion in modernism and the Bloomsbury Group, and his subsequent influence on the writing of Plomer’s controversial novel, Turbott Wolfe (1926), including its suppressed homoerotic elements. Finally, the paper argues that Turbott Wolfe is shaped both by Plomer’s liminal position within South Africa’s segregationist colonial culture, as well as by his exposure to a metropolitan modernity marked by waning confidence in the teleology of empire.

Transnational Portuguese Studies ed. by Hilary Owen and Claire Williams

Reviewed by: Transnational Portuguese Studies ed. by Hilary Owen and Claire Williams Mark Sabine Hilary Owen and Claire Williams, eds, Transnational Portuguese Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020). xxiv + 386 pages. Print and ebook. The responsibility shouldered by contributors to Liverpool University Press's Transnational Modern Languages series should not be underestimated. By gathering a multi-perspectival corpus of scholarship on cultural traffic that focuses on the permeability of borders, and acknowledges the multi-layered and intersectional nature of purportedly unitary ethnic identities, the series hastens the overdue embedding of the 'transnational turn' in a discipline founded—like it or not—in the epistemology of cultural nationalisms and colonialism. As Hilary Owen and Claire Williams assert in their cogent introduction to this volume, the challenge that transnational research methodologies present to the 'conflation of language, territory and identity' upon which the study of Modern Languages was originally predicated offers 'a transformative means of re-thinking' the pedagogic, social and political agency of the modern linguist (p. 5). It offers this, one might add, at a time when the value of a multilingual practice of scholarship, and of cultural analysis more generally, is increasingly scorned or contested. The current 'boom' in transnational enquiry responds to and informs both contestation of the hegemony of Eurocentric and often racist models of research and cultural value, and the demands of an increasingly multipolar world order. The studies Owen and Williams have gathered justify their contention that research subsumed under the rubric of Portuguese or Lusophone Studies offers especially 'powerful and engaging possibilities' for 'Modern Languages as transnational cultural enquiry' (p. 6). Portuguese Studies' status as a discipline has been determined by the language's global diffusion—centuries before the age of nationalism—and by its historical and geographical proximity to Spanish. Consequently, it has long presented as 'always already requiring a multiply-hyphenated "transcultural" and "transnational" methodology' (p. 7), even as its practitioners have, paradoxically, claimed a discrete 'national-looking' language base, so as to resist conflation with Spanish, or 'Hispanic', Studies. [End Page 99] Moreover, for some decades, historians examining Portugal's colonial expansion have foregrounded how that project's fragility—in the face first of established African and Asian empires, and later of ascendant European rivals—often engendered intricate repartitions of economic and political power that, in turn, brought forth new or hybridized cultural practices and identities. If Portuguese Studies' longstanding examination, and frequent celebration, of hybridities and transculturation qualifies it to offer leadership to sibling Modern Language disciplines, however, its practitioners also need to confront the legacy, in Portugal and elsewhere, of a 'dynamics of ignorance' about all things extra-national promoted by isolationist authoritarian regimes, as Ellen W. Sapega notes (p. 223) in a timely and meticulous study of Portuguese memorialization of the Second World War. They need also acknowledge—as Anna Klobucka's reading of Gilberto Freyre's quasi-anthropological travelogue Aventura e Rotina reminds us (pp. 50–56)—how imperialist, racist and (European) male-supremacist preconceptions and metanarratives often linger within the purview of linguistic and cultural scholarship, even when scholars identify Lusophone communities as inherently transculturated, and their task as inherently translational. Of the volume's four themed sections—'Spatiality', 'Language', 'Temporality' and 'Subjectivity'—the first two present transnational approaches to their titular concepts that are particularly effective for countering imperialist or exceptionalist narratives of a 'Portuguese-speaking world'. Zoltán Biedermann's 'Global Navigations and the Challenge of World-Making' opens up the ideological loading of 'unquestioned […] spatial notions' (p. 24)—'territory', 'nation', 'expansion'—that have long underpinned representations of Portugal's imperial enterprise as a 'linear process of diffusionist-cum-universalist power-building' (p. 40). Biedermann's call for an excavation and acknowledgment of early-modern Portuguese subjects' attraction to and interaction with 'powerful, prosperous and self-confident' extra-European cultural centres (ibid.), and the substantial input of these into the cultures and praxis of colonial and postcolonial world systems, is echoed in José Lingna Nafafé and Toby Green's fascinating critique of the concept of lusofonia, tracing the roots of an instrumentalization of language for imperialist ends back to the writings of Padre António Vieira, but revealing the extent...

Transnational Russian Studies. Ed. Andy Byford, Connor Doak, and Stephen Hutchings. Transnational Modern Languages series. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020. xviii, 354 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Photographs. Figures. Tables. $29.95, paper.

Transnational Russian Studies. Ed. Andy Byford, Connor Doak, and Stephen Hutchings. Transnational Modern Languages series. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020. xviii, 354 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Photographs. Figures. Tables. $29.95, paper. - Volume 81 Issue 3

The Dialectics of Barbarous Civilization: Black Transnational Modernism in Claude McKay’s Banjo

This essay examines Claude McKay’s Banjo in terms of its dialectical critique of civilization. With its radical questioning of the meaning of modernity, McKay’s novel of Black life in Marseille aligns with the transnational cultural phenomenon of modernism. Reading Banjo alongside Walter Benjamin’s seminal concepts such as the dialectical image reveals how the novel’s oft-criticized “crude realism” and plotless structure are its integral elements.

Experiments in Eden: Mid-century artist voyages into the Mesopotamian marshlands

Following the 1958 Revolution, many Iraqi artists were sent abroad to study in foreign art academies and train in the latest methods – especially printmaking. The popularity and necessity of print in transnational decolonial movements lent printing practices a popular edge while enhancing the artwork’s seeming accessibility and reproducibility. As artists navigated the regional contours of transnational modernism while exploring graphic artmaking methods in the 1960s, several turned to the country’s southern wetland landscapes as new sites and creative worlds. This contribution examines a few of these mid-century experiments with the Mesopotamian marshlands in order to explore how these works bloomed in the liquid nature of printmaking while simultaneously proliferating images of the southern marshlands increasingly under threat in rapidly modernizing twentieth-century Iraq.

World Literature and Socialist Internationalism in the Weimar Republic: Five Theses

AbstractLargely overlooked in the booming scholarship on world literature, literary globalization, and transnational modernism, a world literature of socialist internationalism was imagined, written, theorized, and practiced in the aftermath of World War I, representing the first attempt to actualize the idea of world literature under the auspices of a social and political mass movement. This article develops and illustrates five theses about this internationalist world literature. It thereby sketches aspects of the history of internationalist world literature in Germany between 1918 and 1933 and formulates historical, historiographical, poetological, and literary and cultural theoretical interventions into the field of world literature studies. In particular, the article develops the notions of the transnational literary counterpublic and of realist modernism while tracing ideas about transnational class literatures and nonnormative imaginaries of the proletariat.

Reconstructing Slave Stock

This article examines a neglected example of slavery visualisation by Guyanese artist Stanley Greaves (1934–present). The work is called Slave Stock and is a unique example of abstract constructive sculpture made in 1965 while Greaves was studying at Newcastle University in the UK, where his tutors included Pop artist Richard Hamilton. After winning prizes in Newcastle and Guyana after Greaves’s return in 1968, Slave Stock entered the latter’s National Collection but was mysteriously destroyed sometime in the nineteen seventies. In 2018, over fifty years since its original conception, Greaves reconstructed this major lost work. Drawing on correspondence with the artist, this written reconstruction of Slave Stock locates its production and reception in relation to Greaves’s trajectory, encompassing his early artistic development in the context of British colonial education and Guyana’s ongoing independence struggle, as well as his engagement with transnational modernisms and wider histories of slavery visualisation and memorialisation.

Pursuing Universalism Through the Particular: Zionism and Transnational Modernism in Arieli's "In the Light of Venus"

Two methodologies dominate recent scholarship on early twentieth-century Hebrew literature—discourse analysis and the transnational approach. These approaches' proponents disagree about this literature's political character. While pointing to how the discourse analysts' work accords more effectively with historical research and how early twentieth-century Hebrew literature can be better understood in relationship to its political function, this article stresses how scholarship employing a transnational approach nonetheless contributes to more effective understanding of this literature. In fact, through analysis of Levi Aryeh Arieli's 1911 novella In the Light of Venus, this article will explore how the national, the transnational, the aesthetic, and the political are interwoven in early twentieth-century Hebrew literature, with these elements finding variant expression in different Hebrew works, even the works of individual authors. Despite this crisscrossing, Zionist objectives proved highly significant to Hebrew writers looking to contribute to the development of textual and spatial locations where Jews, especially Jewish men, could fully express their cosmopolitan character and universal beliefs and desires. Thus, while Arieli draws on the transnational literary milieu to aesthetically depict the modern individual's quest for religious experience, his engagement with gender and sexuality to promote Jewish gender and sexual norms considered best able to aid in promotion of Zionism aims in Palestine constitutes his novella's center of gravity. Such a reading offers a new way to look at Arieli and his literary work, as well as early twentieth-century Hebrew literary works with overlapping aesthetic and political aims.

Japan's Carnival War: Mass Culture on the Home Front, 1937–1945 by Benjamin Uchiyama

Reviewed by: Japan's Carnival War: Mass Culture on the Home Front, 1937–1945 by Benjamin Uchiyama Ethan Mark (bio) Japan's Carnival War: Mass Culture on the Home Front, 1937–1945. By Benjamin Uchiyama. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2019. xii, 280 pages. $99.99, cloth; $31.99, paper; $80.00, E-book. Over the last several decades, the study of prewar Japan has come a long way. A growing scholarly focus on the workings of culture, power, and empire has prompted a healthy skepticism toward the binaries, boundaries, and constants that informed earlier, exceptionalist understandings of Japan's state and society. As heavily loaded political and moral territory, however, wartime Japan has remained particularly challenging terrain for such reappraisals. The tenacious idea of the cultural experience of the period as somehow essentially different and separate from what came before or after—the war years, in common parlance, as a "dark valley," or what [End Page 236] Donald Keene, speaking of wartime literature, once called "the Barren Years"—has often resulted in a narrative and epistemological segregation that has reinforced such assumptions. Penetrating into this conceptual and chronological breach, Benjamin Uchiyama's Japan's Carnival War: Mass Culture on the Home Front, 1937–1945 performs a valuable service by putting a spotlight on wartime mass culture that illuminates its distinctive qualities and nuances while also staying alert to transwar continuities. Above all, Uchiyama is concerned to highlight the war's ambiguous mix of violence, sacrifice, discipline, and obedience with pleasure, consumption, irreverence, and even wild abandon; and how these seemingly contradictory aspects did not exist in mutual isolation, but as part of a singular—and sometimes synergistic—wartime package. In painting this unusual picture of the Japanese home front, Uchiyama draws upon two conceptual frames. The first is that of "total war system theory" pioneered by historian Yamanouchi Yasushi in the 1990s, which "avoids normative assumptions implicitly inherent in much scholarship of the Second World War by provocatively arguing that all the major belligerent parties of that conflict shared the experience of war mobilization" (p. 9) and "reminds us that total war was an affair of both state and society." Uchiyama maintains that total war system theory is much more helpful for thinking comparatively about wartime Japan and the Japanese home front than the recent revival of the "fascist" label, which is overburdened with political baggage, a lack of engagement with total war as a transnational modern phenomenon, and an instinctively narrow comparison of wartime Japan with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy with little attention to the "liberal" democratic home fronts of wartime America and Britain. (p. 10) Nevertheless, Uchiyama argues that cultural mobilization is an area where total war system theory comes up short, reproducing a conventional, "triumphal narrative of the state overpowering the people to do its bidding" (p. 10). In contrast, he argues, "when we look closely at war mobilization in Japan, one sees less a 'system' than a haphazard process" (p. 12). Seeking to write a cultural history of wartime Japan and total war that accounts for such complexity in practice "without erasing the very real repression and extraordinary violence of total war or degenerating into a simplistic tale of popular 'resistance'" (pp. 13–14), Uchiyama finds a solution in the ambiguous "third space" (p. 19) defined by structuralist literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin's classic notion of the "carnivalesque." Bakhtin's carnival emphasizes individual and group consciousness as an irrepressible, unstable field of ideological plurality, play, and discordance, thriving from the bottom up to some extent regardless of—or even synergistically in direct relation [End Page 237] to—top-down attempts at social repression and demands for harmony or uniformity, while never actually posing a direct threat to the system. "Carnival shakes up but does not destroy the official order of things. Thus carnivalized cultural constructs and attitudes were always ambivalent and always contradictory," argues Uchiyama (p. 17). "The key is to think of wartime in terms of carnivalesque duality, between official and unofficial, and the sacred and profane" (p. 14). In doing so, he usefully calls for extending the late Miriam Silverberg's innovative, dualistic characterization of the Japanese masses of the prewar period as...

Social Housing in the Middle East: Architecture, Urban Development, and Transnational Modernity. Kivanc Kilinç and Mohammad Gharipour, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2019). Pp. 330. $85.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780253039842

Social Housing in the Middle East: Architecture, Urban Development, and Transnational Modernity. Kivanc Kilinç and Mohammad Gharipour, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2019). Pp. 330. $85.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780253039842 - Volume 52 Issue 3

The Transnational Investigation of Organised Modern Slavery: A Critical Review of the use of Joint Investigation Teams to Investigate and Disrupt Transnational Modern Slavery in the United Kingdom

In 2015 the United Kingdom (UK) introduced the Modern Slavery Act to help improve the response to the threat posed by the trafficking of human beings both within the UK and across its borders. Herewith, this paper presents a rapid evidence assessment of the development of joint investigation teams and their role in human trafficking investigations from a UK perspective. There is little publicly available information about the role of joint investigation teams and this paper addresses that knowledge gap by analysing existing policy-oriented data and situating the findings within the context of other international responses to human trafficking.

Introduction: Transnationalizing Russian Studies

This is the introduction to the volume Transnational Russian Studies (Liverpool University Press, 2019), edited by A. Byford, C. Doak and S. Hutchings. In it, the authors argue for an approach to research and teaching in Russian Studies that is based on a transnational conception of Russia's language, culture, and history. ‘Russia’ and ‘Russianness’ are discussed not as static or unitary entities confined within national borders, but as shifting and dynamic concepts that are perpetually in flux as Russia engages with the wider world. The transnational lens allows us to explore Russia’s distinctive history of nation-making, empire-building and diasporization and at the same time lets us reconsider how that history has shaped the critical paradigms in the field of Russian Studies. Ultimately, the piece suggests not only ways in which the transnational paradigm illuminates Russian Studies, but also how Russian Studies can speak to the paradigm of the transnational. Publisher's Note: This introduction is part of the Transnational Modern Languages Collection, published by Liverpool University Press, and is also hosted at: https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/pages/TML-intros

Angela Andersen. Review of "Social Housing in the Middle East: Architecture, Urban Development, and Transnational Modernity" by Mohammad Gharipour and Kıvanç Kılınç.

Angela Andersen. Review of "Social Housing in the Middle East: Architecture, Urban Development, and Transnational Modernity" by Mohammad Gharipour and Kıvanç Kılınç.