| This paper will argue that cutting off modernism in 1940 as the Modernist Studies Association’s organizational statement does is like trying to hear one hand clapping. The conventional temporal borders of Modernism--1890-1940—contain a covert assumption of spatial borders as well that center Modernism in Britain, Europe, and the United States and thus eliminate from consideration the modernisms that flourished on different continents within different time frames. The paper posits instead a 19 th-20 th-century modernism that incorporates both the modernisms produced in the West and those produced elsewhere throughout the 20 th century.
The paper critiques both diffusionist and world-systems models of modernism/modernity as misleadingly Eurocentric, fostering an inadequate understanding of modernism/modernity in both the West and elsewhere. The diffusionist model assumes a western origin for modernism/modernity and its later spread in diluted forms into the colonies later in the century; the world-systems approach assumes relatively fixed categories of center, periphery, and semi-periphery. Both models ignore the significance of other locations and of interculturality for the formation of western modernity/modernism. They ignore as well ways in which locations outside the West serve as points of origin and centers of cultural production formed through interactions with cultural traffic on a transcontinental and transnational landscape.
With regard to 20 th century modernism, the paper argues that the dialogic interplay of tradition and modernity in colonial and postcolonial contexts has been constitutive of modernism in both the West and on other continents throughout the century. The paper also argues that modernism in its various locations in the 20 th century has indigenized cultural traffic from elsewhere as part of the process of “making it new.” For illustrative purposes, the paper will examine tradition and modernity as two sides of the same coin in both Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. Rather than the conventional reading of the West as the origin and site of modernity and the Rest as the site of resistant tradition or even of mere colonial mimicry, the paper will show that the interplay between tradition and modernity in each text is constitutive of its distinctive modernism and that both modernisms are defined centrally in relation to colonialism. With the spotlight on gender in particular, these texts read in tandem show the western text more “traditional” and the African text more “modern” in the subtle affiliations between the writers and their primary narrators.
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