It’s already become a standard joke that the first month or so of this year has surely been one of the longest decades any of us have lived through. But the alerts on our phones, the decorations in the stores, and the unflappable, implacable calendar remind us that 2020 is really just getting started. And maybe, just maybe, that will turn out to be a good thing IRL (vote early and often, Reader). I can say with confidence that there is a lot to look forward to within the friendly confines of the Print Plus platform.
Founding editor Debra Rae Cohen is a tough (okay, impossible) act to follow, but she will continue to bring the editorial goodness via the In these Times blog, which recently ran Damien Keane’s unnerving “Keyword: Pacification.” As announced in Debra Rae’s outgoing editorial post, Margaret Konkol has taken the helm of the Future Pasts blog (her first post will be going up soon), and Kate Stanley recently launched her tenure as editor of The Discipline blog with a searching meditation on the relationship between William James and AA. In the coming days, we’ll have a new blog from Phillip Maciak on visualizing the apocalypse in modernist-era fundamentalism (for the Visualities blog), and just last week we ran one from Simon van Schalkwyk on the spectral afterlives of modernist architecture in South Africa (for the Field Reports blog).
In addition to the numerous clusters we have in the works, look for our upcoming Print Plus-exclusive articles on posthumanism in the cinema of Marcel L’Herbier; anti-colonial resistance in futurist Korean poetry; and some new revelations from the archive about Adrienne Fidelin (perhaps best known as muse and model for Man Ray and Picasso, but so much more)—and that’s just for starters. And if for some reason you missed them, be sure to check out Imogen Cassels on Dylan Thomas’s early work; Kelly Sullivan on Elizabeth Bowen, architecture, and the Eastern Uprising; Kent Emerson on H.D. and interfaces; and Nico Israel’s tasty take on the United Nations’ mid-century modernist art collection, “Serving Man.”
Our January Print issue will soon be out the door and en route to your mailboxes, but even sooner you’ll be able to preview the issue here, with Marta Figlerowicz’s review of Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature (edited by Kara Watts, Molly Volanth Hall, and Robin Hackett) and Vike Martina Plock’s article “Erika Mann, the BBC German Service, and Transnational Broadcasting during World War II.”
The masthead of that January 2020 issue will show our revamped and expanded Editorial Board, which I’ll announce and crow about in this space next time around.
— Christopher Bush