Behind the Masks of Modernism
Description
Behind the Masks of Modernism reconsiders the meaning of "modernism" by taking an interdisciplinary approach and stretching beyond the Western modernist canon and the literary scope of the field. The essays in this diverse collection explore numerous regional, national, and transnational expressions of modernity through art, history, architecture, drama, literature, and cultural studies around the globe. Masks--both literal and metaphorical--play a role in each of these artistic ventures, from Brazilian music to Chinese film and Russian poetry to Nigerian masquerade performance.
The contributors show how artists and writers produce their works in moments of emerging modernity, aesthetic sensibility, and deep societal transformations caused by modern transnational forces. Using the mask as a thematic focus, the volume explores the dialogue created through regional modernisms, emphasizes the local in describing universal tropes of masks and masking, and challenges popular assumptions about what modernism looks like and what modernity is.
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Content
- Cover
- Behind the Masks of Modernism
- Title
- Copyright
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1. Rabindranath Tagore's Mysterious Faces and India's Encounter with Modernism
- 2. A Pedagogy for Modernity: Brazilian Modernism and Heitor Villa-Lobos Revisited
- 3. Unmasking the Journalistic Aesthetics of Spanish American Modernismo
- 4. From Pre-Columbian Masks to the Basque Cromlech: The Art of Unconcealment through Jorge Oteiza
- 5. The "Colder Artifice": Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen, and the Mask of Blackness
- 6. The Emotion as Such: Un/Masking the Poet in Mayakovsky's Work
- 7. Complicity: New Zealand's Modernization and the Postcolonial Trickster of Keri Hulme's The Bone People
- 8. Nyoro Masquerade as a Hunt for Modernity: A View from a West African City
- 9. Roots Reconfigured: Contemporary Chinese Masks in the Flux of Modernity
- Afterword: The Slow Burn of Modernity
- Bibliography
- List of Contributors
- Index
