After Modernism (eBook)

While celebrating the centenary of the "e;annus mirabilis"e; of modernism, we now encounter modernism after postmodernist, poststructuralist, postcolonial, critical race, feminist, queer and trans writing and theory. Out of the figures, narratives and concepts they have developed, a less universal, more global, decentred, context-specific, interconnected modernism emerges.In "e;after modernism"e; the meanings of "e;after"e; include periodisation, homage and critique. This book attends to neglected genealogies and intertexts-"e;high"e; and "e;low,"e; yet offering unacknowledged ontological, epistemological, conceptual and figurative resources. How have artists of the Global South negotiated the hierarchical division of art capital into Western high art vs. Global-South culture?Modernity's location has been the Western metropolis, but other origin stories have been centring slavery, colonialism, the nation-state. If modernity did not originate once, why not multiple and still-to-come modernities? Instead of a universalizable Western modernity vs. local non-Western traditions, the contributors to this book discern multiple modern traditions. Rather than reifying their heterogeneity, the authors tunnel for lost transnational connections.The nation-state and the citizen have together defined Western modernity and the "e;civilized."e; Yet they have required the gender binary, gender and sexual normativity, assimilation, exclusion, forced migration, partition, segregation. In-between the public and the private, humans and the natural world, this book explores a multiple, relational modern subjectivity, collectivity and cosmic interconnectivity, whose space is indivisible, entangled, ever folding and unfolding. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal Angelaki.