Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (review)

In their new collection of essays, Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel suggest that "so much depends . . . on place, proximity, [and] position" (1). In response to Homi Bhabha's "call to understand modernism as an intersection of multiple and nonsynchronous temporalities," the editors coin the term "geomodernism" to describe a way of studying modernism and modernity through the privileging of position and location (4). Geomodernism allows modernist texts, films, photography, and art to be compared across temporal, social, and political lines. The objective of the collection, then, is to gather a wide array of texts that would correspond and communicate based on shared foundational forces such as race, geographic location, and modernization as a historical entity while actively looking at varying modernist projects alongside other frequently undervalued global projects in an attempt to "'un-discipline' modernist studies" (7). Geomodernisms continues the necessary work of de-centering Western modernism and opening the dialogue for the comparative analysis of global modernist movements.

Many of the books on modernism/modernity focus on singularly specific racial, national, or temporal movements; however, Doyle and Winkiel's project is organized in such a way as to encourage the reader to make connections within the essays and across the geomodernisms offered in order to "stimulate new conversations about aesthetics within the world of late modernity" (4). The book is divided into three sections. The first section, "Modernisms' Alternative Genealogies," provides six essays that present new perspectives as to where and how modernism developed in order to trouble and disrupt assumptions that have traditionally controlled reevaluation of modernist origins. The first three essays focus on Atlantic modernism and its unbreakable ties to race. For example, in his essay "Africa and the Epiphany of Modernism," Simon Gikandi focuses on the desire of Western culture to discover primitive culture in its attempt to break free from Western civilization; however, Gikandi posits that "[i]n the end, modernism sought energies in the strangeness and distance of the other but it could only bring this other back in the terms that seemed to fit into its essentially Eurocentric framework" (49). Conversely, the final three essays move us to Brazil, Lebanon, and India, where modernity is developed primarily outside of the Eurocentric trajectory of influence. The essays included in this section expose the deep-rooted Western belief that Western supremacy created "the history and consciousness that generated modernity and eventually modernism" and that, historically, this Western dominance suppressed already established and emergent non-Western, nonmainstream "goemodernist imaginings" (original emphasis 9). When read together, these six essays provide a rich introduction to Doyle and Winkiel's project.

The second section, "Modernisms' Contested States," contains five distinct essays, each focusing how the modernization of the state affects modernist aesthetics (7). These essays investigate how geomodernisms arose from the anxieties caused by political, social, and economic changes. Both Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang's and Gerard Aching's essay focus on how "geomodernist discourses have formed in response to revolutionary state upheavals" (10). Investigating the criticism of José Martí, Aching explores how "Martí's critique of the imitative practices that informed the idealization and promotion of a Eurocentric, Spanish American raza also provides a modern shift in thinking about 'race' and its connections to nationhood and regionalism" (154). In contrast to Chang's and Aching's essays, Patricia E. Chu's and Janet Lyon's essays, and to some extent Winkiel's essay, focus on how certain modernist works have formed in resistance to national modernization. Although the five essays seem disparate, they may be read comparatively, providing more lines of inquiry from which one might address the modernist relationship of politics and art.

The final section, "Modernisms' Imagined Geographies," collects five essays, which embrace the collection's project of spanning geography and temporality in order to suggest a means to map out the disparate directions and outcomes resulting from uncovering (geo)modernisms' many possibilities. For example, Eluned Summers-Bremner connects T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland and Langston Hughes's Montage of a...