“Global Modernisms’ Other Empires”

The Modernist Studies in Asia Network seeks proposals for short, persuasive essays addressing “Global Modernisms’ Other Empires” for a prospective peer-reviewed cluster on Modernism/modernity’s Print Plus platform. While the New Modernist Studies has productively expanded the locations and timelines of modernism, many figures, literary works, and images central to this expansion continue to be drawn from the British and French Empires. Yet, some of the strongest and most contested sites of imperialism in the modernist period involved locations and imperial aspirations beyond Europe’s core empires. This cluster invites papers which consider how literary modernism records the entangled imperial legacies of these empires or investigate how inter-imperial entanglements contribute the uneven or unequal effects of modernity on modernism’s global emergence.

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This cluster aims to expand understanding of the relationship between modernism, imperialism and the global by reconceptualizing how modernism engaged with entangled colonial networks in which Europe is influential, but not the sole player. Individual essays might focus on how the study of imperial modernisms engage postcolonial criticism to better understand literary modernism’s relation to the nexus of asymmetrical and multidirectional global power relations, or how the vestigial imperial ambitions of empires such as Japan, China, Ottoman Turkey, Russia, and the Portuguese register aesthetically. While we particularly welcome contributions that focus on modernisms with connections to the Asian continent, proposed papers need not be explicitly connected to Asia to be considered.

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Papers should be in the spirit of a conference roundtable (2000-3000 words). We particularly welcome submissions that draw on the unique possibilities afforded by the digital setting of the Print Plus platform. For more on the platform see: https://modernismmodernity.org/about

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Please send a titled, 300-word abstract and a brief biography to kestaudt@eduhk.hk by 1 December. Contributors will be invited to submit essays, after which the entire cluster will be sent out for peer review.