Aphorisms and archipelagos: Relationality in modernist studies

Abstract

Modernist studies, these days, is on the move. Global, planetary, transnational, postcolonial, and geomodernist rubrics map new routes of aesthetic interconnection and change as the geographical and temporal reaches of modernism are extended. Monographs and collections speak of mobility, dynamism, and hybridity across the local and the global, as texts trace out identities and contexts that are, as Jahan Ramazani puts it, ‘discretely located and thoroughly enmeshed, networked, cross-racialized’ (16). Eric Hayot and Rebecca Walkowitz, to take one example, write of ‘shifting concept[s] of fixity and centrality’ (3) in their New Vocabulary for Global Modernism (2016), and embrace modernism as a series of changing frames that react to local conditions, international systems, and a plurality of other spatial and temporal scales (8). Their book presents the moving parts of modernism through different lenses, allowing its global reach to present new terms and revitalise old ones, as changing local and international relations present different views.