From Blackwell Publishing's Manifestos series to the Zapatistas' six declarations from the Lacandon jungle, the manifesto continues to generate cultural and political controversy. Short, spirited, and straddling the boundary between theory and practice, the manifesto communicates an experience of crisis and a conceptual break with the past. As its urgent tone pushes ongoing debates and practices to new realms of possibility, it seizes the present moment in order to intervene in history. This history-making self-consciousness reached its apogee in the first part of the twentieth century, when hundreds of political and aesthetic manifestos circulated throughout theworld as part of an immense cultural and geopolitical shift. As these manifestos declare a series of breaks from traditional aesthetic, cultural, and political forms, they enact the quintessential gesture of modernity: they proclaim themselves the arbiters of the new and the “now” and reject the past. This call to alter history now is the reason why manifestos provide a crucial interpoint for rereading modernist aesthetics through the lens of transnational racial politics.

Modernism, Race, and Manifestos makes the case that we should reappraise the formative role of manifestos in staging alternative modernist communities and producing counter-histories of modernism and modernity. They provide a useful framework for rereading other modernist forms (anthologies, experimental literature, protest novels, and essays) in terms of their shared attempts to interrupt received meanings.