Fionnghuala Sweeney, Kate Marsh (eds.): Afromodernisms: Paris, Harlem, Haiti and the Avant-garde (2013)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, africa, afromodernism, art, art history, avant-garde, black people, blackness, body, colonialism, dance, futurism, jazz, modernism, music, politics, racism, sexuality, surrealism
“This collection of ten essays makes a persuasive case for a black Atlantic literary renaissance and its impact on modernist studies. The chapters stretch and challenge current canonical configurations of modernism in two ways: by considering the centrality of black artists, writers and intellectuals as key actors and core presences in the development of a modernist avant-garde; and by interrogating ‘blackness’ as an aesthetic and political category at critical moments during the twentieth century. This is the first book-length publication to explore the term ‘Afromodernisms’ and the first study to address together the cognate fields of modernism and the black Atlantic.”
Publisher Edinburgh University Press, 2013
ISBN 074864640X, 9780748646401
264 pages
Review: Dominic Thomas (French Studies, 2013).
PDF (updated on 2020-6-9)
Comment (0)Cathy Gere: Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · antiquity, archaeology, art, femininity, literature, modernism, philosophy, psychoanalysis, racism
“In the spring of 1900, British archaeologist Arthur Evans began to excavate the palace of Knossos on Crete, bringing ancient Greek legends to life just as a new century dawned amid far-reaching questions about human history, art, and culture. With Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, Cathy Gere relates the fascinating story of Evans’s excavation and its long-term effects on Western culture. After the World War I left the Enlightenment dream in tatters, the lost paradise that Evans offered in the concrete labyrinth—pacifist and matriarchal, pagan and cosmic—seemed to offer a new way forward for writers, artists, and thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Giorgio de Chirico, Robert Graves, and Hilda Doolittle.
Assembling a brilliant, talented, and eccentric cast at a moment of tremendous intellectual vitality and wrenching change, Cathy Gere paints a portrait of the age of concrete and the birth of modernism.”
Publisher University Of Chicago Press, 2009
ISBN 0226289532, 9780226289533
277 pages
Reviews: Nicoletta Momigliano (Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2009), Mary Beard (The New York Review of Books, 2009), Nanno Marinatos (American Journal of Archaeology, 2010), Marnin Young (NonSite, 2011).
Comment (0)Svetlana Boym: Architecture of the Off-Modern (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, architecture, avant-garde, history of architecture, modernism, utopia
“Svetlana Boym’s Architecture of the Off-Modern is an imaginative tour through the history and afterlife of Vladimir Tatlin’s legendary but unbuilt Monument to the Third International of 1920. Generally considered to be the defining expression of architectural constructivism, the structure was envisioned as a towering symbol of modernity and a twisting, turning memorial and media center for the Bolshevik Revolution that would have dwarfed the Eiffel Tower. Boym traces the vicissitudes of Tatlin’s tower from its reception in the 1920s to its privileged recall in ‘the reservoir of unofficial utopian dreams’ of the Soviet era. Boym offers an alternative history of modernism, postulating the ‘architecture of adventure’ as a poetic model for ‘third-route’ thinking about technology, history, and aesthetic culture.”
Publisher Buell Center / FORuM Project, and Princeton Architectural Press, NY, 2008
ISBN 1616891033, 9781568987781
80 pages
Review: Brian Dillon (Frieze, 2008).
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