Field Reports

Mukti Lakhi Mangharam

Contributors

Reports from a Global Field

Mukti Lakhi Mangharam

Understanding that modernity is always already global and colonial informs how Field Reports approaches modernism. Modernist studies is inevitably a comparative project because modernity has a shared material ground of an ever-expanding colonial-...

Notes from the Field of Arabic Literature in the Time of Genocide

Huda Fakhreddine

It is the twentieth month of genocide, our planet’s second rotation around the sun, drenched in Palestinian blood, 600 days of Palestinian slaughter, and nothing is new except the finality of the massacre. The world has sacrificed the...

Modern Transit: A History of Feeling in the Polish People’s Republic

Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

I’m sitting on my parents’ couch, working on the translation of an archival text by the Polish sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, who is most famous, perhaps, for his work on “liquid modernity” and globalization. Though much of his writing was in...

Scaling Modernism Otherwise in the Dalit Graphic Novel

Mukti Lakhi Mangharam

My final words of advice to you are educate, agitate and organize; have faith in yourself. With justice on our side I do not see how we can lose our battle. The battle to me is a matter of joy. The battle is in the fullest sense spiritual. There...

A River Unaligned: The Danube in Film and Cold War

Marijeta Bozovic

From its contested origins in Germany’s Black Forest to the Black Sea, Europe’s second longest river connects ten countries and its watershed four more. Navigable along the entire route, the Danube river serves as the artery and border of a...

Modernism’s Hauntological Architecture: A View from South Africa

Simon van Schalkwyk

The specter of modernism has haunted South African culture for quite some time. In Katharine Kilalea’s recent novel, O.K. Mr. Field (2018), it takes the form of “the House for the Study of Water,” a replica of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye...

Modernism after Modernism

Jeanne-Marie Jackson

In the introduction to his superb book Realism after Modernism , Devin Fore describes a “shared modernist aspiration to achieve conditions of perception and consciousness outside of what is customarily arrogated to the human.” [1] He...

Do Look Down: Surveying the Field from Aotearoa/New Zealand

Jacob Edmond

Fig. 1. Hirini Melbourne (1949-2003). Photograph courtesy of the University of Waikato.

What is this thing called modernist studies ? And what does it look like when viewed from the—for most—faraway islands of Aotearoa/New Zealand?...

A Case for “Site-Activated” Modernism: Elmina Asafo Aesthetics

Jeanne-Marie Jackson

Those of us who work in traditions considered “global” within US and, to varying degrees, European academies are often pulled in two professional directions. On the one hand, many of us feel rightly accountable to a kind of work most welcome in...

Hurricane Over the Expanded Field

Rachel Price

Three recent New York exhibitions highlight Latin American and Caribbean culture, crossing contemporary art and anthropology: Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art (Whitney Museum of American Art, July...

Cinema and the Invention of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s Capital of the Twentieth Century

Maite Conde

Turn-of-the-century Rio de Janeiro: this period was a time of radical changes for what was then Brazil’s capital. These changes intended to make the city Brazil’s “capital of the twentieth century” (to paraphrase Walter Benjamin). Rio’s...

The Arrested Flight of Surreality: The Belgrade Surrealist Circle (Field Report with Invitation)

Sanja Bahun

Cushioned in an archival box in the Museum of Applied Arts, Belgrade, Serbia , lies a remarkable surrealist photograph: Nikola Vučo ’s The Arrested Flight of Surreality ( Zadržano bekstvo nadstvarnosti , 1929, fig. 1). Posing as...

Whither Politics? Photography and Protest in the “Provoke Era”

Patrick Noonan

When the photography exhibit Provoke: Photography in Japan between Protest and Performance, 1960-1975 began its tour of Europe and the United States in January of 2016, its relevance to the contemporary moment was unclear.

Thick Time: William Kentridge, Peripheral Modernisms, and the Politics of Refusal

Andrew van der Vlies

In the final room of Thick Time , the William Kentridge show recently on at the Whitechapel Gallery in London , viewers encountered yet another of the installation environments those familiar with the South African artist’s work have...

Surviving Fascism? “Art and Liberty” in Egypt, 1938-1948

Anneka Lenssen

“Well this exhibition feels a little too timely,” my colleague Clare Davies posted to Facebook during a November 21, 2016 visit to Art et liberté: Rupture, guerre et surréalisme en Egypte (1938-1948) at the Centre Georges Pompidou in...

Between “Invisible Man” and “After the Fall”

Kate Baldwin

When race is pictured historically, it often is removed from leftist radicalism. (Ellison’s novel Invisible Man is about Harlem in the 1930s, a decade when even middle of the road intellectuals were at their most socialist.) Likewise,...

Dogs, Chickens, and Pig Shit

Carlos Rojas

It has been between 15,000 and 30,000 years since dogs began living with humans, and although it is appealing to imagine that it was humans who originally domesticated man’s best friend, it is actually more likely that the ancestors of modern...

Fielding Questions

Christopher Bush

The study of literary modernism has expanded so dramatically over the past few decades that I’ve heard more than one colleague ask in exasperation, “Well, then, what isn’t modernism?” As Stephen Colbert might ask: is this a great...

Field Reports

Mar 2, 2016 By: Mukti Lakhi Mangharam

Tags:

global modernism

“Field Reports” will approach modernisms as local responses to a capitalist and colonialist modernity as it voraciously expands all over the globe. Our blog posts will focus on a wide range of languages, nations, and regions, illuminating a global, interconnected, and uneven reality as well as the varied responses that arise in relation to it. Aimed at a non-specialist audience, individual posts might introduce tribal and indigenous poetry, protest literatures, a newly discovered archive, a recent cluster of groundbreaking articles or books, climate fiction novels, an art exhibition visited, or a major translation.