Articles

On July 31, 1937, the Japanese national newspaper Asahi carried a photograph of a group of stylishly dressed women facing the camera, smiling, caught in movement. What appear to be patriotic slogans are pinned like sashes across their bodies; some of the women carry donation boxes (Fig. 1). The image is accompanied by a short news item about fashion models performing “patriotic service” ( hōshi). “Beguiling” in their elegant Western outfits or Japanese kimono, around forty of these “mannequin...

The English philosopher Roger Scruton observes that conservative thinkers who attempt to define and defend “conservatism” often find themselves trapped in a paradox. To the extent that they succeed in making their points through reason and argument, they ironically end up contradicting the conservative way of living in the world, which is supposed to be intuitive, unconscious, and natural, rather than reasoned, self-conscious, and philosophical. After all, Scruton writes, the classic tradition...

Sylvia Beach was a woman of property. Her “passion projects,” as Melanie Micir calls the rich variety of “queer feminist modernist practice[s]” that Beach and other creative women engaged in, included the founding of her Paris bookshop and lending library; her role as publisher, seller, and distributor of James Joyce’s Ulysses; and the writing of her memoir, Shakespeare and Company (1959). Beach took pride in giving the same name to her memoir that she had given to her bookshop. It was the pride...

Robert Duncan’s “Introduction” was the final piece that he composed for his 1968 collection of poetry Bending the Bow. The effort preoccupied him throughout much of 1967, a year in which Duncan, alongside many other creative practitioners, recognized that his art was undergoing a formal crisis that stemmed from an increasing awareness of US atrocities in Vietnam. Duncan’s effort to reckon with this crisis of practice yielded a startling manifesto that, despite being positioned as the...

Distant listening—a practice born with radio amateurism, known as DXing among American radio enthusiasts—was the term used to designate an essential dimension of radio during the interwar period: the capacity to listen to radio stations far away. What this involved was not just the fine-tuning of a wireless set, but educated guesses about foreign identification signals, languages and speech patterns, and frequent battles against unwanted noise and distortions. As the British radio pioneer Peter...

Between 1910 and 1914, as militant activists faced down physical violence from a variety of state agents in the final years of the campaign for women’s suffrage, the newspapers published by the militant suffragist Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) mobilized brutality as a framework through which to categorize the state’s actions. Their weekly newspapers, Votes for Women (1907–1915) and The Suffragette (1912–1915) argued that state-sponsored brutality against women was symptomatic of a...

This appears as an afterword to a special issue of the print journal Modernism/modernity (Volume 32, Number 3, September 2025): The Language Challenge: Modernisms in Multilingual South Asia, gueste edited by Preetha Mani and Jennifer Dubrow In the work I’ve been doing over the past ten years, I have discussed the emergence of historically new examples of multilingual literature, culture, and entertainment and called for new ways of counting, organizing, and valuing languages inside and outside...

Avant-garde art and transgender identification begin from a common crisis of representation: a sense that, in Jacques Rancière’s words, “[t]here is something unpresentable at the heart of thought which wishes to give itself material form.” In diverse instances of modernist cultural production and trans gender alike, such a recognition spurs attempts to reconfigure the contours of the sensible in ways that affirm the salience and shareability of this “something.” Yet avant-garde practitioners’...

In the years leading up to the recent centennial of Franz Kafka’s death, perhaps the most significant revelation to emerge about the paragon of twentieth-century literature is that he had a strong interest in drawing. Over one hundred pages of drawings by Kafka, most of them previously unknown, were made public in 2021 by the National Library of Israel in an online repository, and they have opened the door to new consideration of the place of visual production in Kafka’s life and work. An...

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse famously opens with six-year old James Ramsay, “sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army & Navy Stores.” With the awkward dexterity of a young child, James carefully guides his scissors around “a picture of a refrigerator,” endowing the image “with heavenly bliss” under the loving but watchful gaze of his mother. The scene has long captured critical attention, but less so the consumerist allusion to a popular shop on...

In 1946, the arts and culture journal Marg was founded under the editorial leadership of writer, arts patron, and cultural critic Mulk Raj Anand (1905–2004). Dedicated to the promotion and analysis of the arts, Marg featured modernist practices and heritage forms from around the world and from a diverse range of periods in illustrative displays, scholarly essays, and editorial content. Multiple discourses were brought into conversation with each other through a type of visual pedagogy. From...

When Wallace Thurman announced his engagement to Louise Thompson in 1928, after just two months of courtship, tongues wagged: Harlem’s audacious “young upstart” was to marry the typewriter of his forthcoming novel, The Blacker the Berry (1929). Alain Locke—the self-appointed “mid-wife” of America’s New Negro Renaissance, which Thurman represented—immediately wrote to tell Thompson “how much I envy any man who has you for both a wife and secretary.” Others cynically echoed Locke’s point...

Can modernism be happy? Or perhaps the question should be: can modernist studies be happy? These questions started to preoccupy me some time ago when I was seven weeks into teaching my undergraduate course in modernist literature at Western Sydney University. As we were about to turn our attention to Jean Rhys’s novel Voyage in the Dark (1934), I felt compelled to apologize to my students. I was asking them to delve into yet another textual universe of trauma, alienation, and unease. The only...

Calling for the suppression of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness in the August 19, 1928 edition of the Sunday Express, moralist-sensationalist James Douglas claimed that he “would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel. Poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the soul.” This, of course, is not news. As Laura Doan has argued, the provocative “poison” passage has been quoted or misquoted in countless accounts of The Well and its trials, with...

If an old-fashioned liberal humanist excuse were needed for revisiting Kipling’s “The Gardener” it could be found through combining Phillip Mallett’s contention that “Kipling is the greatest English writer of the short story” with Edmund Wilson’s roundabout confession that he is “not sure that [The Gardener] is not really the best story that Kipling ever wrote.” Greatness and hierarchies aside, the cultural materialist might find reasons enough for promoting a re-evaluation of the story in the...

We remain part creole, part colonial, seeking many-ancestoried conclusions. Our tides flow down the river, meet a holy but not wholly receptive sea. —Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Contradictory Omens, 1974

If one listens closely one will note too that a word is slurred in one position in the sentence but clearly pronounced in another. This is particularly true of the pronouns. A pronoun as a subject is likely to be clearly enunciated, but slurred as an object. For example: “You better not let me ketch yuh.” —Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression”

In 1910 Gertrude Stein wrote the lines, “She is forgetting anything. This is not a disturbing thing, this is not a distressing thing, this is not an important thing. She is forgetting anything and she is remembering that thing, she is remembering that she is forgetting anything.” The piece was “Many Many Women” (1933), a genre-bending work featuring a series of paragraphs all describing unidentified women referred to by the pronoun “she.” Hallmarking Stein’s trademark development of abstraction...

“On the double meaning of the term temps in French.” —Walter Benjamin

Herr [Gustav] Klimt indoctrinates Frau [Serena] Lederer into the art of Secessionist painting. This rapprochement between modern art and nouveau-riche Jews, this progress in the art of design, capable of transforming ghettos into affluent quarters, warrants the loveliest of hopes. —Karl Kraus, Die Fackel (November 1900)