A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism is an exciting roadmap for 21st-century ways of reading the aesthetics of a world always already globalized. Its creative mixture of old and new modernist vocabularies-e.g., form; slum; alienation; puppets; war; libraries
suggests innovative ways of reading the global in the local, the cross-cuts of multidirectional mobilities, the perpetually indigenizing processes of all modernisms. Resisting ... Read morediffusionist, regional, or additive approaches, the book shifts the paradigm for reading globally. A must read in the field!
Susan Stanford Friedman, author of Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time This brilliant collection of essays responds to perhaps the most urgent need in the scholarship on modernism-a guide and a set of terms that take us beyond the high modernist norm and induct readers into a world in which modern art and literature operated in a truly global public sphere. Written with clarity and intelligence, the book makes modernism appear new, again.
Simon Gikandi, Robert Schirmer Professor of English, Princeton University The global turn in modernist studies constitutes not so much an expansion as an explosion. With received coordinates - geographic, temporal, national - obsolete, the field is unmappable. But if everything is modernism, nothing is. Enter A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism to articulate nodal points in a global network of modernism, making possible acts of provisional yet critical definition that serve not as gatekeepers but portals to a newer modernist studies.
Mark A. Wollaeger, Vanderbilt University Show Less