39th Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
April 10-13, 2008
Buffalo, New York

This panel proposes to examine the modernist cultural production of marginal territories falling outside the Paris-London-New York nexus. While contemporary criticism has emphasized the global dynamics of modernist aesthetics, dominant understandings of modernist internationalism seldom do away with the preponderance of Anglo-French models of cosmopolitanism, whose encounters with non-Western cultures more often than not reproduced imperialist, orientalist dynamics. We will investigate alternative forms of engagement with modernism on the part of marginalized artists, in particular in a colonial context dominated by exclusive concepts of Eurocentric modernity. How did marginalized cultural production from the colonies undermine the imperialist patterns of appropriation of “primitive” art and culture by mainstream modernism? In what forms did vernacular modernisms, which distanced themselves from the mere imitation of Euro-American models, emerge? How did these alternative understandings of modernity engage with issues of cultural difference on the global level? How do their contributions help (re)conceptualize the relations, contradictions, and genealogies of modernism and the modern? To what extent does their critical focus on the vernacular provide a revision of modernism that would successfully reflect the ever-shifting global dynamics of the concept?

Please send 250-word abstracts and short CVs to: Edwige Tamalet Talbayev, UC San Diego (etamalet@ucsd.edu) by September 30, 2007.