We are soliciting short contributions (ca. 3,000 words) on the topic of ‘Transnational Modernist Periodical Networks’, for a prospective cluster on Modernism/modernity’s Print Plus platform. We aim to bring together contributions from specialists working on a variety of national and regional modernisms (North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa). The cluster will build on probing recent discussions surrounding the idea of Global Modernism on the platform (e.g. Alys Moody and Stephen J. Ross’s ‘On Global Modernism and Academic Precarity’, and Claire Barber-Stetson’s ‘Modern Insecurities, or, Living on the Edge’), in order to assess the implications the transnational paradigm holds for modernist periodical studies.
In light of the publication in 2016 of Eric Bulson’s Little Magazine, World Form and the forthcoming Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Global Modernist Magazines series, edited by Bulson, Andrew Thacker, and María del Pilar Blanco, we are seeking lively contributions that push at the boundaries of the emergent field of transnational modernist periodical studies.
Possible topics may include:
- The relationship between transnationalism and the periodical form.
- The relationship between immigration, exile and diaspora and the emergence of transnational periodical networks.
- To what extent does the analysis of transnational periodical networks challenge the conceptualisation of the centres and peripheries of modernism?
- What are the dominant absences that we encounter in studying these networks?
- How do we negotiate the issue of the local in discussions of the transnational?
- What are the creative, political, artistic tensions between localism and globalism in transnational periodical networks?
- What issues of funding, distribution, and readership can we identify by looking at modernist periodicals transnationally?
- What are the limits of the transnational paradigm? How transnational/global were these periodical networks in actuality?
- To what extent do modernist magazines and their editors function as agents in cultural diplomacy (state-sponsored and otherwise)?
- How well does translation work in these magazines act as a cultural and political mediator
- How does re-evaluating transnational periodical networks challenge existing understandings of individual and group reception histories?
- How does the periodical as object of study make visible transnational artistic/literary networks, and what are the connections between these transnational networks and issues of translation and multilingualism in modernist magazines?
- How does transnational periodical studies open up new modes of collaborative work?
Please send a 300-word abstract alongside short biographical information to [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected], by 1 June 2020. Selected contributors will be invited to submit essays, after which the entire cluster will be sent to Modernism/modernity for peer review. We aim to submit the cluster in the fall of 2020.