Critical attempts to study modernity and modernism beyond the hegemonic order established in its Western iterations have proliferated exponentially over the last few decades. In a world where established canons of modernism still make it difficult, rather ironically, to live up to the ambition to “make it new,” the concept of the periphery remains important. more

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. more