“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.

In 1954, Turkish poet Cemal Süreya published an unusual poem in one of the influential literary magazines of the period. “Gül” [Rose] describes a person’s psychic state as he wanders through a disorienting urban landscape. With its use of decontextualized imagery and striking reversals, this poem scandalized Turkey’s mid-century literary scene: I’m crying right in the middle of the rose As I die each evening in the middle of the street Knowing neither what’s ahead or behind me Sensing how your...

The painting and printmaking of the Australian modernist artist Margaret Preston (1875–1963) blend European, Australian, and Japanese artistic techniques and subject matter, providing a critical index of the modern transformation of global geopolitical power. As an artist who trained in several cultural centers but who lived most of her life in Sydney, Preston developed an acutely critical disposition toward imperial geopolitical formations as the old faded and the new emerged in the mid...

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...

Sadriddin Aini (b. 1878), the “founder of Soviet Tajik prose,” published his final literary work, Reminiscences ( Yoddoshto) in 1949. [1] A poet, essayist, literary critic and fiction writer, Aini produced a large and varied body of work from the years just preceding the Revolution’s arrival in Central Asia up to his death in 1954. Writing in the Persian vernacular of the Ferghana Valley, where he was raised, he helped to create and codify Tajik as a literary language that could give expression...

It is a historic irony that the Bolsheviks, who had demolished the decrepit empire, were the only force able to reconstruct it. In order to survive, the empire needed a new sign by which to justify the new energy of its unificatory yoke. [1] The contemporary return to authoritarian politics and neo-imperial conquest in the twenty years since Soviet collapse has generated an urgent call to attend to what Abkhazian novelist Fazil Iskander described as the “new sign” of the Soviet Union’s...