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-capitalism that traverses and connects the globe but that nevertheless manifests differently in singular locations. Colonial-capitalism produces a world-spanning interrelated singularity that renders the Anglophone world, including its imperial centers...

He is a walking paradox: a loner who desires the crowd, “a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito,” a spectator who casts off his air of detachment, a skeptic who can experience states of childlike wonder, “an ‘I’ with an insatiable appetite for the ‘non-I.’” More gaze than body, he is a phantom of the arcade, “a mirror as vast as the crowd itself . . . a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness” (Baudelaire, “Painter,” 9). Who is this person? “Observer, philosopher . . . —call him what you will,” the flâneur is the modern man par excellence, an urban stroller who will always be encountered, en passant, in the act of capturing “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent”—that is, the contradictory, enigmatic, and elusive condition otherwise known as modernity (13). This origin story has long dominated critical discussions of flânerie, a term I take to signify a way of moving through urban space as well as a first-person narrative form that documents that movement. The flâneur’s vein of solitary, melancholic, and aimless walking—typically coeval with the modernization of a global city—has become synonymous with strolls through nineteenth-century Paris. Even recent efforts to chart the spread of flânerie into other global cities have rehearsed this particular story, looking to Parisian flânerie as the initial tradition that contemporary walkers rail against or continue in. The rhyme between Paris, flânerie, and modernity has endured for many reasons, but it generally attests to the success of Charles Baudelaire and his afterlife in the writings of Walter Benjamin. Rare is the treatment of streetwalking that does not acknowledge Baudelaire’s legendary typology of the flâneur in “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863). And if Baudelaire’s efforts were not enough, the association between the flâneur, France, and modernity was enshrined a century later, when Benjamin hailed Paris as “the promised land of the flâneur” in his unfinished yet exhaustive index of the city, The Arcades Project.

In an essay on Herman Melville, D. H. Lawrence describes the Pacific Islands as “a vast vacuum, in which, mirage-like, continues the life of myriads of ages back.” Modernist studies has yet to awaken from this dream of Oceania as the hazy antithesis of modernity, a place “not come to any modern consciousness”: although the tide is turning, the Pacific has typically been treated not as an active site of cultural production, but as a tropical backdrop for the adventures of the likes of Gauguin, Stevenson, and Melville (Lawrence, “Herman Melville,” 114). Uncalculated as this scholarly exclusion may be, it cannot but reinforce the sense that modernism and modernity demand an unmodern Other, figuring Pacific peoples in binaries that the new modernist studies has worked to undermine. Yet Pacific Islanders have long been actively involved in writing their modernities, both with the oral and other narrative forms developed across generations, and with the written religious, mythical, historical, and autobiographical texts published from the nineteenth century, in Indigenous and introduced languages. By the mid-twentieth century, adapting to the modes taught through colonial education systems, more Oceanians began to write poems and short stories in English, and in the 1960s and 70s a surge of anthologies, collections, series, and little magazines turned relatively isolated literary endeavors into a movement. Literature in the decolonizing Pacific was both an outpouring of expressive traditions in a new media, and the precipitation of new traditions—what the Samoan author Albert Wendt described as “the creation of new cultures which are free of the taint of colonialism and based firmly on our own pasts.” Literature became part of a decolonizing voyage of exploration, a “quest . . . for a new Oceania” (Wendt, “Towards a New Oceania,” 58). If, as we claim here, this writing constitutes an identifiably modernist movement, the literature of the 1960s and 70s cannot be reduced to a set of stylistic commitments or strict formal concerns. It is a movement at a grassroots, sea routes level; the aesthetic movement of transnational communities separated by dramatic linguistic diversity, vastly different socioeconomic positions, and deeply varied access to education, but unified by the desire to write into being new local and regional identities. Writers whose works would dominate the literary scene were joined by contributors whose names are less well known, men and women inspired to join the currents of literature flowing through the Pacific. Their contributions vary widely in style, form, theme, and complexity, from direct transcriptions of oral legends to works of erudite allusion and intricate imagery. “Self-expression,” writes Wendt, “is a prerequisite of self-respect,” and from urban university graduates to villagers in their first writing workshops, Pacific Islanders found new ways of prioritizing self-expression in a region awash with foreign ink (Wendt, “Towards a New Oceania,” 53).

Serialized in the first years of Japan’s modern Shôwa period (1926-1989), Hayashi Fumiko’s wildly popular Diary of a Vagabond ( Hôrôki) recounts, in playful turns both confessional and elusive, its author’s formation in the provincial mining communities of southern Japan and the booming Tokyo metropolis of the 1920s. A testimony of personal life events written in an accessible vernacular style identifiable as feminine in voice, Hayashi’s Diary adapts a narrative genre that had been deployed to...

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.

The development of the new modernist studies of the past fifteen years has involved what we could term, to borrow a phrase that has circulated in the social sciences since the nineties, a “new institutionalism.”

If later testimonies are to be believed, around 1927 Peruvian poet Carlos Oquendo de Amat (1905-1936) published in Lima, under the title Celuloide ( Celluloid), a magazine devoted to film news and reviews. Literary historians, however, have surmised that the magazine must have only been a project which never came to fruition, as no copy of the publication, nor contemporary evidence of its existence, has to this day been found. The legend of this magazine has undoubtedly become enrooted in Peruvian literary history because it would have been a project becoming of Oquendo de Amat, the author of 5 metros de poemas ( 5 Meters of Poems) a “cinematic” poetry book (the only one he published in his short lifetime) . This book-object is a collection of eighteen poems printed on one side of several contiguously glued sheets of paper, folded in accordion-like fashion, which can be read more or less as a conventional poetry book, or unfolded to be “viewed” as a continuous canvas, not unlike a movie reel. The legend of the elusive Celuloide has also taken hold because of the common conception of the attraction that cinema held over Peruvian and, in general, Latin American avant-garde poets. And yet Oquendo, who was born in the Andean city of Puno before moving to the capital as a child, infused a handful of the poems of his cinematic book with content which clearly referenced Andean, rather than urban, life. The book has thus traditionally been read under the lens of two of the most important isms of nineteen-twenties Latin American literature— indigenism and vanguardism. Because of its cinematic format, it has been hailed as one of the most paradigmatic examples of the unlimited interest and fascination which Latin American avant-garde writers placed on modern technology. As Mirko Lauer reminds us, however, in the case of the Peruvian avant-garde this fascination was also “a symptom of disagreement between Peruvian culture and the set of technologies that had started to define modernity in the Northern hemisphere since the late eighteenth century.” If this disagreement was evident in the urban cultures of the capital of the country, it became even more visible in the Andean provinces, where modernization provided a sharper, more poignant contrast with the rural world of 1920s Peru.

In twenty-first century poetry about the millennial wars in Iraq, the deities and heroes of ancient Mesopotamia are congregating. Dunya Mikhail’s “Inanna” imagines the eponymous Sumerian goddess decrying the sight of “antiquities / scattered / and broken / in the museum.”