empire
The aim of this cluster is to provide an alternative to the disciplinary reliance on Anglo-European imperiality as a structuring force for what is considered global within global modernisms. Collectively the cluster aims to expand understanding of the relationship between modernism, imperialism, and the global by reconceptualizing how modernism engaged with entangled colonial networks in which Europe is influential, but not the sole player.
“You too can make history . . . write it down. Make it—” is one of the ways that novelist Vyvyane Loh spotlights the individual’s point of view with the second-person pronoun in Breaking the Tongue. The incomplete sentence encourages the reader to speculate on what has been redacted. Notably, it recalls Ezra Pound’s famous maxim, “Make it new,” his interpretation of a historical Chinese text titled Da Xue. The redaction also encourages a modernist re-examination of imperial history to uncover some of the once-silenced voices of the colonized. This modernist re-examination is part of the broader project of contemporary novelists such as Loh and Tan Twan Eng, namely the belated deployment of modernist poetics tactics, to intervene in the representation of history in Southeast Asia.
The study of Hong Kong modernism often uses the term “modernism” without a clear definition. For instance, Liu Yichang yu Xianggang xiandaizhuyi (Liu Yichang and Hong Kong Modernism), edited by Leung Ping-kwan et al. and published in 2010, discusses Hong Kong modernism, arguing that it shares similarities with Shanghai modernism while differing from its Western counterpart. However, the contributors seem to consider the concept of modernisms to be self-evident and do not provide a definitive definition. Further study is needed.
Feather fashions were the subject of heated debate between the 1860s and 1920s, with feather-wearing women held largely accountable by anti-plumage trade campaigners for the decimation of exotic bird species. The UK Plumage (Prohibition) Bill of 1920, which sought to ban the importation of feathers used in women’s fashion, was the subject of Woolf’s “earliest feminist polemic,” her narrative essay “The Plumage Bill” (1920), which challenged the “injustice to women” implicit in the language of the plumage trade debate.
Doris Lessing’s early essay “The Small Personal Voice” is often considered the fullest elaboration of her realist aesthetics.
In September 1927, Edward McKnight Kauffer’s “One Third of the Empire is in the Tropics” poster set appeared on over 1,000 specially built poster frames across Britain and in capital cities across the British Empire (figs. 1 and 2). Commissioned by the Empire Marketing Board (EMB), an organization established by the British government in May 1926 to increase sales of Empire goods and products, it was the Board’s first modernist poster series.