Virtually from its very beginnings around the turn of the twentieth century, the wide-ranging and overtly international cultural phenomenon commonly referred to as ʹmodernismʹ in Europe and the United States both in part arose from and developed some of its most distinctive features specifically through a sustained, if decidedly uneven, engagement with the Asian ʹOrient.ʹ For numerous writers of the period, different sites throughout Asia in general, and in East Asia in particular, served at once as idealized locations and as concrete sources of exemplary (as well as often explicitly redemptive) literary and cultural traditions and practices. These traditions and...

In my contribution to this volume I address the question of Pacific Rim modernisms by way of a short meditation on time and space, history and geography, and the question of how comparisons work. Specifically, I wish to consider how two Asian Pacific authors have ventured to map out connections across the Pacific, reaching both within and without. As for what makes these endeavours ʹmodernist,ʹ if indeed they are (and this will be a matter for us to consider in the course of this essay), I will only venture to intuit a set of questions that seem to me to...

In 1868, French art critic Ernest Chesneau recorded the following apocalyptic vision:

Imagine … that civilization were to accomplish over the course of the centuries one of those formidable turns of the wheel of which the history of humanity cites many examples; that it might let our Occident fall into the Void, as it has let fall such refined peoples as the Persians, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, even the Greeks: what testimony about ourselves would we bequeath to these unknown races who would then take up the sceptre of the world? … Based on the monuments of our art, they...

The exhibition ʹLost Paradise: Symbolist Europeʹ held at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1995 was a large-scale attempt to capture the entire history of symbolism. It went beyond the narrow definition, following symbolism’s trail to expressionism and to early modernism.¹ In the field of French art, as its aficionados would agree, the borders of the subject progressively move toward the informal in the works of the master symbolist Gustave Moreau (1826–98). The impulse to shift to the abstract had already begun by the end of the nineteenth century, and some of Moreauʹs disciples even became important members...

Modern Korean poetry has been continuously innovative due to two driving forces: realism and modernism.¹ Though, at the turn of the twentieth century, the Korean dynasty lost its national sovereignty through the Eulsa Treaty in 1905 and the annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910, modern Korean poetry was nonetheless able to expand its influence over the public because of the pressure of Japanese imperialism in Korea. Modern Korean poetry is generally said to have begun with the poem ʹFrom the Sea to Youth,ʹ published in 1908 by Choe Nam-Sun. This poem is rightly considered an example of the self-awakening...

Quickly, as if she were recalled by something over there, she turned to her canvas. There it was – her picture. Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the...

A rim implies both an outer edge and a connection; when coupled with the Pacific, the word conjures up an oceanic space linking hemispheres. Despite globalization, it can be difficult to conceive of Australia as part of its immediate neighbourhood of Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, let alone the Pacific Rim. Instead, images of the nation as a small embattled outpost of displaced Europeans marooned in uncertain tides are the common currency of neo-conservative alignments.¹ It is against such diminished horizons that this essay is positioned, tracing far-flung exchanges between Australian Aboriginal cultures and several early twentieth-century modernists, both...

In the 1930s and 1940s, Australian women writers published novels, poems, and short stories that pushed the boundaries of their national literary culture. From their location in the Pacific they entered into the global circulation of the transformative aesthetic, cultural and political positions attributed to modernism. In the Australian context, the writers used this new imaginative space to interrogate the pressing questions of modernity, as well as contest received notions of literary history. My interest in Australian women prose writers of this period acknowledges a vital but regionally focused engagement with the many expressions of ʹWestern modernism,ʹ but more importantly...

Until a decade ago, surprisingly little was published in English on the subject of modernism in Japanese fiction. Aside from a handful of translations and studies on individual writers, no comprehensive survey of the topic or anthology of translations provided a systematic introduction to Japanese modernist authors and styles. Equally curious is the fact that, even where distinguished examples of Japanʹs modernist fiction were available after their introduction to the English-speaking world in the late 1950s and early 1960s – one thinks here of such modernist classics as Kawabata YasunariʹsSnow Country, Tanizaki Junʹichirōʹs ʹTattooerʹ andPortrait of Shunkin,or...

ʹThe cultural effects of European expansionism,ʹ writes James Clifford inRoutes, can ʹno longer be celebrated, or deplored, as a simple diffusion outward – of civilization, industry science, or capital. For the region called ʺEuropeʺ has been constantly remade, and traversed, by influences beyond its borders.ʹ But it is not only Europe that is constantly being remade, for, as he suggests, ʹVirtually everywhere one looks, the processes of human movement and encounter are long-established and complex. Cultural centers, discrete regions and territories, do not exist prior to contacts, but are sustained through them, appropriating and disciplining the restless movements of...

At the climactic moment in Japanʹs first full-fledged ʹtalkieʹ movie,Madamu to nyōbō(The neighbourʹs wife and mine, 1931), the protagonist, Shibano Shinsaku, a playwright experiencing writerʹs block, sings the chorus of a cheery, quick-paced jazz song called ʹSupdīo hoiʹ (Speed, Hey!). Won over to the partying spirit of the jazz-performing neighbours, to whose Western-style house he had originally come to complain about the excessive noise, Shinsaku now chants lustily in unison with the rowdy band, ʹsupīdo, supīdo, hoiʹ (ʹspeed, speed, hey!ʹ). By doing so, he inspires himself to meet the deadline for a play commissioned by a Tokyo theatre....

In an illuminating article concerning what she calls the ʹpolitics of posing,ʹ Sylvia Molloy reminds us that, for a long time, Hispanic American decadent literature had been read ʹas frivolous and therefore reprehensible posturing.ʹ She quotes Max Henríquez Ureña, who, in reference to Rubén Daríoʹs adopted pose, states: ʹAll this is aposethat he will overcome later, when he takes on the voice of the continent and becomes the interpreter of its anxieties and ideals.’¹ That the notion of posing has, in fact, been perceived as directly related to modernist decadence is illustrated by Pedro Henríquez Ureñaʹs statement that...

Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries (YHCHI) is the name of the collaborative duo responsible for some of the most innovative electronic literature online. Situated in Seoul, South Korea, Young-hae Chang and Marc Voge push the boundaries of their art form and our expectations of it. But why should they be included in a collection on modernism? As previous essays in this volume have shown, modernism is an assemblage of pluralities that spans geographic and temporal boundaries. This fact is made vitally and visually evident by the latest iteration of modernism: the contemporary movement I call ʹdigital modernism.ʹ¹ In this essay, I...

In this essay, I will be pressurizing the contradictory and capacious meanings of ʹPacific Rimʹ as a cultural-production framework more than I will ʹmodernismsʹ as such, which others (from Fredric Jamesonʹs temporal remapping of capitalist totalities to Evelyn Chʹienʹs modes of mongrelized modernity inWeird English) have already done in thick descriptive, de-situated, and speculative ways.¹ As a contributor to forces of ʹminority becomingʹ in the region, I have published a global-local manifesto of sorts calledPacific Postmodern– wherein the paradoxical mix of place-based and Indigenous longings in Hawaiʹi as across Oceania meet a will to pidginized code-switching and...