Peripheral Modernisms

This article examines antigrammaticality in the work of the so-called first “native” modern Hebrew poet, Esther Raab, focusing in particular on how Raab deploys the constraints of Hebrew’s highly gendered grammar in her poems. I begin by considering the broad implications of grammatical gender for how we think and act in the world, while also taking into account specific, concrete examples of gender policing that Raab recalled from her own early childhood. I then offer a close reading of a single, untitled poem to demonstrate how, from her position at the intersection of multiple margins, as a native-born female poet in a literary milieu dominated by immigrants, most of them male, Raab effectively subverts both gender and grammar norms in the construction of a nonconforming gender identity.

This essay presents an initial foray into the rich field of modern Arabic poetry after the canonization phase of modernism in midcentury Beirut. Though by no means offering an exhaustive account, the chosen case studies are claimed to cover major orientations in forms of second-wave modernism that swept across poetic writing in the last quarter of the twentieth century. As Beirut became the prestigious metropolitan center for modernist poetics, shifts of sensibility are viewed in relation to its dominant modes and in terms of an altered imagining of the center-periphery duality. I follow two trajectories: a mode of exile, for which the Iraqi poet Sargon Boulus is representative, and a mode of domestic development. For the latter, I look to the cultural fringes of the Arab world — the Gulf and the Maghrib — to analyze how the Beiruti paradigm moves into new territories of culture, society, and politics. Even within a monolingual transregional literature, I argue, setting a dialectic in motion with a centralized tradition generates in each reiteration unique patterns of continuity and change. Ideological faults are redressed and, by consciously forming fissures, Arab peripheries propose a reintegration of poetic modernity into a more historically grounded, inclusive, and synchronized project.

Contesting the use of the geospatial concepts of “periphery” and “center,” this essay argues that a mathematical metaphor, the Möbius strip, better expresses the continuously morphing, interrelated, dynamic mesh that we call modernism. One of the major but still understudied nodes on this strip was Kyiv (Russian: Kiev). Flourishing between 1905 and the early 1930s, modernism in Kyiv was distinctive by virtue of its historical-political circumstances and by its rapid acceptance, vitality, and astonishing efflorescence. After an overview of some of its most salient features, the latter part of this essay is devoted to the work of the self-proclaimed modernist stage and film director Les Kurbas and to two of his most important productions, Macbeth and Jimmie Higgins.

The modernist fascination with the Far East is a well-known phenomenon, driven among other things by the “decline of the West” zeitgeist. When adopted by peripheral communities involved in nation building, it often served other needs and, in the process, became distorted or disproportioned. This article focuses on the representation of the Far East in the Hebrew and Yiddish literatures of the interwar years. Its main argument is that the longing for the Far East in these literatures has contributed to their self-fashioning precisely as occidental and modern. Accordingly, this is an intriguing test case that sheds light on how one peripheral culture gazes at another, how one Other gazes at another — as opposed to traditional postcolonial research that tends to examine Self-Other or majority-minority relations. The article proposes the term “second-order modernism” to describe the fertile changes and disruptions inherent to the displacement of any modernist model onto a peripheral culture.

This article addresses Uri Nissan Gnessin’s modernist poetics through the notion of the contemporary. Examination of a selection of his early texts — a letter, a literary review, and the short story “Jenya” — written between 1900 and 1902 reveals his perception of Eastern European Jewish modernity as heterochronous and polytopic.

This article explores the poetry of a group of mid-twentieth-century Turkish modernist poets known as İkinci Yeni, or the “Second New.” Engaging with global approaches to modernism that relate it to capitalist modernity, and building on the specific historical dynamics of 1950s Turkey, I use the Second New as a case study to show how modernist literature from the periphery can be compared with more canonized Western models without relying on claims of European originality or literary influence. Through readings of Second New poets Edip Cansever and Turgut Uyar, I show how their poetry combines classic modernist tropes familiar from nineteenth-century European works (flâneurie, the crowd, metropolitan life and its psychic effects) with more distinctly twentieth-century tropes (neon lights, nylon, the atom bomb, Cold War consumerism) in a manner that reveals the particular contours of Turkey’s incorporation into global capitalism. This form of peripheral modernism from Turkey sheds light on the combined and uneven nature of modernist literature throughout the world.

Modern Turkish poetry has been occupied with an aesthetic need to fashion a style for the “modern,” understanding it as a universal condition of being determined by notions of the “secular,” the “national,” and the “local.” Since the Garip and İkinci Yeni movements beginning in the early 1940s, Turkish poetry has also favored a straight and linear understanding of modernist aesthetics as having a stable past and future and a place. I argue that contemporary women poets, including Elif Sofya and Asuman Susam, by exposing entanglement rather than straight and clear development, expand as well as challenge the modernist event in Turkey. Their revisions of modernist aesthetics and composition of affective histories have explored the porous and mobile dimensions of queer time and space. These poets have both complemented and complicated the temporal and spatial axis of traditionally established modernist inquiry, gesturing toward what I call “peripheral cosmological aesthetics.”

Global Modernists on Modernism: A Conversation for Dibur. Alys Moody and Stephen J. Ross are the editors of one of the most recent collection of modernist writings: Global Modernists on Modernism: An Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). This collection features translations of works associated with modernism in Latin America, the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, the Arab world, Turkey, Iran, the Caucasus, South Asia, China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, the South Pacific, the Malay Peninsula, and the Ashkenazi Jewish diaspora. As anticipated by its remarkable coverage, this volume is already having a transformative effect on discussions concerning modernism and its aesthetic, geographical, and cultural range. In their conversation for Dibur, Moody and Ross offer conceptual interrogations of various modes of rethinking modernism on a global scale, the Eurocentric power structures which, overtly or implicitly, come to undergird such approaches, and their broader methodology as editors.

At the Edges of Yiddishland: Editorial Praxes on the Jewish Translingual Threshold. As the editor of the “Modernism of the Ashkenazi Jewish Diaspora” module in Global Modernists on Modernism: An Anthology (2020), Resnikoff constellates the writings of six transnational Ashkenazi Jewish modernists who engage with Yiddish not only as a mother tongue but as an expanded conceptual poetic mode. The module includes work by Mikhl Likht, the New York–based Introspectivism group, Avot Yeshurun, and Dvoyre Fogel. Resnikoff contextualizes his praxes as a translingual (language-crossing) editor, translator, scholar, and writer working at the thresholds of late-Yiddish modernisms and their variegated afterlives in other tongues. He concludes the present essay with a short work of poetics as a test or case study for the speculative expanded-Yiddish language-scape that his editorial practice, writing, and translation together attempt to cast into relief.

Reports from an Outpost of Modernist Studies. Andrew Reynolds and Bonnie Roos are the coeditors of the collection of essays Behind the Masks of Modernism: Global and Transnational Perspectives (University Press of Florida, 2016). The essays in this diverse collection reconsider the meaning of “modernism” by taking an interdisciplinary approach and stretching beyond the Western modernist canon and the literary scope of the field. In this essay Reynolds and Roos describe some of the thought processes that contributed to their decision to publish their collection, the complexities that emerged from the blending of modernist studies with postcolonial approaches, and the rationale behind their use of masks as a unifying thematic thread.

Modernism and Its Concepts. In 2016, Eric Hayot and Rebecca L. Walkowitz published A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism, which was the first anthology about global modernism to invite essays organized by intellectual keyword, or concept, rather than by geography or national literary history. Sixteen leading critics working at the conjunction of modernism, comparative literature, and world literature agreed to participate in the venture. The result: drawing on archives beyond the European center, contributors showed how new global approaches are transforming the intellectual paradigms we have long associated with modernism and also bringing an idiosyncratic array of new paradigms into view. In an interview conducted in spring 2021, Hayot and Walkowitz reflect on whether they were imagining new durable concepts for global modernism or instead were imagining a new approach to the history of concepts and the way they have shaped the field and could shape it going forward. They choose the latter.

Central Issues in Studies of Modernist Peripheries. The essay reflects on key issues of definition in modernist studies and comparative modernisms by returning to the author’s edited volume, The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (2012). In particular, it assesses the continued relevance of center-periphery models of global study and the formal dimension of modernism while speculating on the future of modernist and literary studies in the university.

Global Modernisms Reconsidered. The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms is a collection of essays devoted to investigating the geographic and temporal scope of modernism. The assembled essays include historical surveys of specific modernist movements, comparisons between different national traditions, and theoretical reflections on the nature of global modernism. In my reflections on this collection, I consider how the volume sought to define the terms of relationality that would guide the field of global modernism in its subsequent years. I then proceed to make a case for the utility of world-systems theory for modernist studies, using as my primary example the Sestiger movement of 1960s South Africa.

Yiddish book art exemplifies how sacred Jewish forms shaped secular cultural expression for twentieth-century artists and writers in a variety of geographic and linguistic settings. Reading El Lissitzky’s Khad gádye (One kid; 1919) within the context of European modernism demonstrates how Jewish artists straddled multiple aesthetic affiliations, bringing sensitivity for iconic forms in conversation with abstraction and ethnography.