Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital, and: Queer Frontiers: Millennial Geographies, Genders, and Generations (review)

"Inc." is the operative word, for me, in the first of these two admirable collections. Modernism, Inc.'s three sections let us explore, albeit somewhat loosely, "incorporation" in the body, memory, and capitalist production. Although cognizant of the global reach of capitalism and the conventional European centering of modernism, this book is American: it calls attention to nation-building discourses and culturally varied reactions to them.

The cultural texts represented in Modernism, Inc. are, by Scandura and Thurston's admission, predominantly "low-modernist." We examine performance pieces (Kathleen Stewart in "Machine Dreams" and Janet Lyon's visit to Josephine Baker's "Chez Josephine"); Scandura's use of post cards, brochures, and films to study the culture of divorce in Reno; and Cary Nelson's collection of poem cards passed among union laborers in protest. Even the Hoover Dam, its art and construction photographed by the U.S. Department of the Interior, becomes a modernist text for Daniel Rosenberg. Through generous and well-selected illustrations, these contributors join a growing emphasis upon visual aspects of modernism. I would have liked more illustrations from Lyon and from Paula Rabinowitz, whose excellent essay studies Georgia O'Keeffe, Emily Carr, and Frida Kahlo as "icons of feminism, modernism, and the nation."

Gertrude Stein, Eugene O'Neill, and Jean Toomer are as close as we get to canonized figures of modernism in this collection. Virginia Woolf, when referred to, is treated respectfully, and Eliot's "The Waste Land" remains an important icon, but getting around the latter's strictures for high modernism, or even those of Alain Locke for the Harlem Renaissance, seems a more common interest.

As demonstrated here, modernist studies have become richly cultural—a process that began with feminist and race studies and is now promoted by the new Modernist Studies Association. These essays sustain the now expected attention to gender, race, and class, often detecting unexpected hybridities. While formal analysis of poetry occurs occasionally, on the side, and individuals, such as black Bolshevist Andy Razef or Armenian poet Peter Balakian, are recovered, discussion centers largely on historical and epistemological issues. The goal is not so much to make modernism new as to incorporate it into cultural production.

Authors' memories mesh with modernist events and contexts—usually to good effect. But readers of this collection may ask how much self-referentiality is too much. I grew impatient with Maria Damon's self-contextualizing for Gertrude Stein, though I appreciated her project of situating Stein in the context of Jewish social science. Perhaps because of September 11, I couldn't share the editors' sense of being haunted by the ghost of John-John Kennedy. On the other hand, important markers of history, popular culture, and identity do turn up in this sort of telling, making it clear that modernism is a shifting, highly subjective entity.

All these features carry over into Queer Frontiers: Millennial Geographies, Genders, and Generations, whose controlling trope, for me, is the shifting nature of gay and lesbian history and identity. This book is largely the product of the 1995 Graduate Student Conference held at the University of Southern California—an occasion that invites consideration of generational succession from first- to second-wave queer studies. Geographically, the work favors California, particularly Los Angeles, whose rich archive of gay and lesbian activism is beautifully reported and illustrated. Karin Quimby and Walter Williams do a particularly fine job of "Unmasking the Homophile in 1950s Los Angeles." Richard C. Cante focuses on the Los Angeles Revolver video bar. New York is still on the map, as the site of Stonewall and of the St. Mark's Place bath house, the latter imaginatively reconstructed by architect...