Call for Papers

Deadline: 15 February 2023

From the mid-1990s onwards new approaches to the study of Modernism and its cultural, geographical and chronological boundaries have been developed. This new trend in Modernism studies marks a turning point in thirty years of debates on the categories of High Modernism, Postmodernism and Late Modernism that also questions Western-centred notions of Modernism. The increasing awareness that modernity and Modernism are fraught with imperialist and (neo)colonial Western-centred perspectives has spurred numerous scholars to critically explore multiple perspectives on the boundaries of Modernism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and the transcultural, transnational and planetary extension of Modernism as a socio-cultural category (Greenblatt, Gunn, eds, 1992; Mao, Walkowitz, eds, 2006; Stanford Friedman, 2005 and 2006; Ramalho Santos, Sousa Ribeiro, eds, 2008; Somigli 2012; Connor, 2016; Havot, Walkowitz, eds, 2016; Kalliney, 2016; Moody, Ross, eds, 2020).

This conference seeks to bring together scholars from various disciplines and specialisations to reconsider the Modernist concept in the wake of the post-colonial and global turn in the humanities and social sciences. More specifically, it intends to investigate the category of Modernism from a global, interartistic, interdisciplinary perspective, as well as to discuss its contemporary uses and values within the on-going decanonization and decolonization of research and teaching agendas.

 

Keynote speakers of the conference will be:

• Sascha Bru (KU Leuven)
• Tsitsi Ella Jaji (Duke University)
• Xudong Zhang (New York University)

 

Interested scholars are encouraged to send their individual papers proposals, including a short bio and 300-word abstract, to modernism@ugent.be by 15 February 2023.

 

We invite proposals on:

• one of the topics listed below (A);
• one of the panels listed below (B). In this case, the proposal should include the title of both the individual paper and the relevant panel.

A) Topics

 

• Local/Regional/National Modernisms
• Transnational/Transcultural/Global Modernism
• Late Modernism
• New Modernisms
• Modernism and World Literature
• Literary Modernism and the other arts / Modernism and Intermediality
• Modernism and religion/spirituality
• Critical evaluations of the centre-periphery dichotomy
• Political Uses of Modernism / Modernism and Politics
• Modernism and socio-political critique
• Modernism, identity and intersectionality (gender, race, class, nationality)
• The Hypermodern Condition and Hypermodernism, Metamodernism
• Teaching Modernism today

B) Panels