Toward a locational modernism: Little magazines and the modernist geographical imagination.

摘要

This project puts into conversation three little-known modernist little magazines, Broom (1921--24), Laughing Horse (1922--39), and Orient (1923--28), in an attempt to restore the intercultural exchanges, now lost, that gave rise to early twentieth-century American modernism. It reads these magazines as forums in which a culturally and geographically diverse collection of artists responded to an unevenly developing, global modernity. It contends that these little magazines promoted an expansive network of relationships, a circulation of ideas, people, and works, across modernism's imperial centers---Berlin, London, New York---and its peripheries---India, Mexico, and the American southwest. It, thus, challenges modernism's traditional spatial dualisms (North/South, East/West, Center/Periphery, Local/Global) and exposes the fluidity of its borders.;Despite its emphasis on place, locational modernism is not localized modernism; it does not confine modernism to the spaces and geographies of a particular location. To the contrary, locational modernism examines how the "local" circulates, asking how do local artists, cultures, and histories travel within and across various systems of global exchange? In this it reminds us that neither the processes nor the products of modernism were or are uniform. Thus, despite using the singular form of this contested term, locational modernism assumes that modernism is, paraphrasing Gertrude Stein, always already plural. Rooted in locality, in place and space, modernist little magazines, it argues, are an essential part of current efforts to re-imagine modernist studies: quite simply, they remind us that geography matters to modernism.;To frame its argument, this project theorizes a locational modernism. Drawing on the work of Edward Said, Derek Gregory, Edward Soja, and Susan Stanford Friedman, it argues that an individual's conception of modernity, and, therefore, his participation (direct or indirect) in modernism is tied to his location: to the myriad physical spaces he occupies on Earth and to his interactions with(in) those spaces as mediated by his own geographical imagination (the culturally determined assumptions brought to bear on a place and its peoples). Specifically, it examines how little magazines represent modernism's dominant and deeply ambivalent geographical imagination, which simultaneously refutes and reiterates common Orientalist and Indianist stereotypes.