This chapter looks closely at how literary societies in New York and Philadelphia served as engines of the creation of a particular kind of Black modernity, as expressed in the speeches, essays, and poetry of the members of such societies.

The rise of modern carnival in Rio de Janeiro, over the early twentieth century, provided an outlet for defusing the enormous social and cultural tensions of the modernizing metropolis. The so-called Great Societies of carnival, which have been little researched, functioned as zones of contact between popular culture and fine art practitioners, some of whom developed pioneering careers as carnival scenographers (carnavalescos). Contrary to received wisdom, exchanges and encounters between the worlds of art and carnival were numerous and varied. The 1913 Salon of the National School of Fine Arts marks a watershed moment, in which the restricted milieu of fine art openly embraced the urban culture of carnival, particularly in the work of painters Rodolpho Chambelland and Arthur Timotheo da Costa. These and other artists laid the groundwork for challenges to the prevailing institutional order, especially after 1916. Even earlier, over the early 1900s, a rebellious milieu of artistic bohemianism, revolving around painter Helios Seelinger, graphic artists Raul and K. Lixto, among others, sought to modernize artistic production in Rio by forging connections with music, dance, theatre, performance and carnival. Previously overlooked, their combined efforts represent an early modernizing current attuned to the adversarial attitudes of German Secessionism, from which they drew inspiration.

Nicolas de Warren examines not just a lesser-known text by Cassirer – Form and Technology – but also a symbolic form that has received little attention. This chapter reconstructs Cassirer's contribution to the animated debates about the value and dangers of technological power in Germany after the First World War. On the one hand, De Warren examines both the affinity and the differences between technical artefacts and language (as tools) and between technological and mythical consciousness (as magical), thus cutting out an indispensable role for the symbolic form of technology within the whole of human culture. At the same time, De Warren presents Cassirer's understanding of this form as indicative for his overall view of the relation between form and freedom, thus illustrating Cassirer's assessment of modern thought. Ultimately, technology is shown to have a moral status for Cassirer (only) in the sense that it strives toward the self-realization of human freedom.

The Conclusion takes up the afterlife of the understandings of the Bible’s relationship to history consolidated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It does this by exploring the writings of modern biblical scholar David C. Parker, arguing that they reveal how these contingent understandings and their political implications have become naturalized, and how theological integrations of the Bible’s divine and historical dimensions have become obscured. The Conclusion proceeds to consider how this evacuation of theological depth is at the heart of the story this book has sought to tell. Rather than see the history of the Bible simply as the battleground between transcendent and immanent accounts, the Conclusion underscores the need to address the larger theological and metaphysical frameworks in which forms of biblical transcendence and immanence are articulated. The Conclusion ends by highlighting how the book has shown that theologically and metaphysically thin conceptions of Scripture have been mobilized in the service of newly atomized ways of thinking about and ordering human life.

This chapter explores the early twentieth-century phenomenon known as the roman-fleuve (river-novel) and proposes a model for understanding its place within French literary history. The origins of the term can be traced back to Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe, a multi-volume novel recounting the fictional life story of its eponymous protagonist. Although there are notable stylistic and thematic differences between it and the novel cycles of the other three proponents of the roman-fleuve form—Roger Martin du Gard, Jules Romains, and Georges Duhamel—Jean-Christophe provides the yardstick against which these later literary creations must be measured. Utilizing Rolland’s protagonist as its central reference point, the chapter contends that the roman-fleuve’s overarching ambition is to rework the notion of the modern subject in function of an alternative understanding of the individual and the collective. In a tumultuous era marked by war and the crumbling of religious and metaphysical certainties, this reconception of subjectivity inaugurated an innovative literary exploration of Bergsonian intuition and the Nietzschean overturning of ready-made systems of thought. Lying between the sentimentality of the romantics and the materialism of the positivists, the roman-fleuve was a landmark, if short-lived, example of French literary creativity blossoming in the arid ground of modernity.

This epilogue briefly comments on the legacy of the men and women who form the focus of the study. Drawing upon the arguments made in the preceding chapters, it argues that the diverse thought of black thinkers and activists from the French Empire and United States has indelibly shaped our notions of race, citizenship and republicanism in America, France and the Western world. It reiterates the centrality of the belief that the guarantee of rights in the face of difference would emanate from the sovereign power of the republican nation-state rather than from any international institutions. This was the case even where the struggle against racism and imperialism was understood in global terms.

This essay argues that the association of secularism and modernity has obscured the transnational importance of religion in the new modernist studies. It reviews recent studies of religion in selected modernist writers, but argues for more interdisciplinary methodologies, including religious studies, postcolonial studies, and comparative studies. After mapping key debates about religion, it pairs comparative readings of religion and anti-colonialism in Tagore’s Gora and Forster’s A Passage to India, and in Huda Shaarawi’s Harem Years: Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist and H.D.’s The Flowering of the Rod, centered on unveiling. Whether spiritually or politically oriented, all envision forms of religious cosmopolitanism.

On April 2nd, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson entered the halls of Congress and requested a declaration of war against Germany; however, pressure to intervene in the Great War had begun in 1914. This chapter focuses on this pressure. Specifically, it examines the military preparedness movement, and the cultural and political anxieties that fueled this movement. Spearheaded by Theodore Roosevelt and Leonard Wood, the movement established volunteer training camps across the United States. While the movement never led to the universal military training that Roosevelt and Wood hoped for, it exerted significant influence in the United States. Through the camps, Roosevelt’s and Wood’s lecture circuits, and literature such as the poetry collection Rookie Rhymes, the movement popularized militarist attitudes, which functioned as a panacea for broader problems of gender, class, and modernity. Most notably, the movement shaped thousands of elite men who held important positions in politics, finance, the media, and other spheres of American society—before, during, and after the war. This chapter unpacks the movement’s influence, as it illuminates the significance of preparedness to the historical record of the First World War.

The Enlightenment was the defining cultural and intellectual movement of the eighteenth century. Also known as the Age of Reason, it is generally viewed by historians as the emergence of the modern West. Enlightenment thinkers championed rationality and upheld Newtonian science, with its emphasis on natural laws, as the preeminent description of the natural world. The rise of religious tolerance across Europe, challenges to the cultural authority of organized religion, and the emergence of rational forms of religion such as deism all combined to produce a more secular mindset among the educated classes. Those same individuals also dismissed magic as a delusion of the ignorant and superstitious, but more recent scholarship has challenged the narrative of “disenchantment” in which magical beliefs and practices supposedly disappeared as rationality increased. In fact, occult philosophies and traditions from hermeticism to alchemy had already put their indelible stamp on the development of “scientific” disciplines long before the Enlightenment began. By 1750, the complex relationships between science, religion, and magic had assumed a configuration familiar to many people today.

This chapter examines Caribbean writing of the 1950s–1960s in relation to modernism as a concept, movement, and literary practice. Based on writing by Caribbean intellectuals, including C. L. R. James, George Lamming, Wilson Harris, and Édouard Glissant, and building on work by critics Simon Gikandi, Charles Pollard, Mary Lou Emery, Maria Cristina Fumagali, and others, it identifies a project of questioning modernism that challenged Eurocentric notions of Enlightenment modernity while contributing to modernist aesthetics. Further, it suggests that Caribbean writers of that period anticipated and currently inspire revisions of mainstream modernist studies. Critical reassessments of the Windrush generation, including feminist critiques of canon formation (J. Dillon Brown, Peter Kalliney, Faith Smith, Leah Rosenberg, and Alison Donnell), help support the essay’s argument for the importance of earlier decades of Caribbean modernism along with translinguistic philosophical and artistic influences. Specific readings focus on interactions among literary and visual arts – especially in the work of Lamming, Harris, Kamau Brathwaite, Roger Mais, and Aubrey Williams. In the writing of Harris, Brathwaite, and Jean Rhys, the essay locates ‘tropes of brokenness’ as ground for new concepts of the individual, new portrayals of vision, and a Caribbean modernist poetics based on creolized and indigenous arts.

This chapter explores a mise-en-scène familiar to us from postapocalyptic movies and video games: that of a future American city emptied of human life and activity. After tracing this chronotope back to early nineteenth-century European romantic fantasies of the “last man,” the essay considers how it came to be applied, with variations, to American cities between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth. Examples include works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, H. G. Wells, Upton Sinclair, and W. E. B. Du Bois as well as those by largely forgotten authors, and encompass utopian and apocalyptic fiction as well as dystopian and postapocalyptic. Critics have largely characterized such visions of urban desolation as a negative, cathartic expression of some fear, whether of ethnic others, natural disaster, or nuclear warfare. This chapter, however, recovers the productive possibilities they offered. Vacated cityscapes empowered readers to reflect critically upon modern urban life, in particular new phenomena such as skyscraper architecture, technological infrastructure, the experience of surging crowds and webs of social interdependency, the suppression of nature, the impermanence of urban space, and racial segregation.

This chapter presents a historical outline of six key aspects of liberal political thought in Iran. Using a familiar schematic from mainstream histories of liberal thought, these are grouped into two broad categories of “liberal antipathies” (anti-traditionalism, anti-absolutism, and anti-imperialism) and “liberal prescriptions” (liberal nationalism, constitutionalism, and pluralism). These aspects, the chapter argues, combine to form the substantive core of much thinking and political action by Iranian liberals since the late nineteenth century. The common denominator linking these seemingly disparate elements into a coherent liberal project, the chapter shows, is an aversion to arbitrary exercises of power at the expense of individual liberty, the rule of law, and national sovereignty. Although by no means exhaustive, these aspects are introduced through the political thoughts and actions of Iranian reformers, intellectuals, politicians, journalists, and activists.

Chapter 1 is concerned with the ethnographical leanings of Synge’s work. It focuses on the material culture which Synge chose for the production of his plays, Riders to the Sea especially, and highlights the degree to which Synge’s plays were aligned with a narrative of modernity and progress. It effectively reads Synge’s plays as cultural performances of modernity. By transposing to the Dublin stage objects conjuring rurality and by giving centre-stage to a commodity-poor culture, the plays contributed to generating and articulating a fundamental difference between the modern, urban audience of the Abbey Theatre and the agrarian or fishing communities, which the plays represented. Thus, they participated in the construction and display of cultural difference, which is so central to modernity’s agenda. The chapter pays special attention to Synge’s quest for, or recreation of, the authentic, and argues that this should be situated within the broader context of the commodity culture emerging in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland. It also relates Synge’s work for the theatre to other art practices ‒ notably, photography and more specifically Jane W. Shackleton’s ‒ that were similarly informed by an equally strong ethnographical desire to document the lives of putatively primitive people.

Chapter 5 is concerned with the ways in which Synge’s plays engage with and interrogate the temporal disjunctions of Edwardian Ireland. It highlights the specifically performative means to which Synge has recourse and implicitly contrasts the plays with the ethnographic dimension of his prose record in The Aran Islands. The chapter explores the moments of disrupted linearity in plays such as Riders to the Sea, The Playboy of the Western World and Deirdre of the Sorrows and highlights the ways in which they give theatrical expression to the sense of temporal disjunction, which modernity fostered and which Edwardian Ireland’s colonial situation accentuated. Even though the narratives of Synge’s plays follow a linear pattern and, in that sense, appear to endorse the conception of chronology and time upheld by a dominant modernity, they also leave room for other, alternative temporalities to be explored. Through discordant bodily movements, linearity and its corollary, progress, can be questioned; alternative sequencing can be envisaged and different rhythms allowed to unfold concurrently. Now and again vignettes erupt in Synge’s plays which disrupt the linear flow of time and open up the possibility of other temporal configurations.

The European "modernism" of which Strauss was considered a representative in the 1890s and the "avant-garde" modernism that would exclude him in the new century differed significantly. Both are defined here as manifestations of, or critical reactions to, cultural and technological modernity. Varying shades of modernism are illustrated with reference to critical responses to Strauss and to his own 1907 essay "Is there an Avant-Garde in Music?" The length of Strauss’s career and the stylistic choices he made both reflect and problematize the once common notion that the history of the period’s music was simply one of evolutionary progress, which he first exemplified and then rejected. The varied and changing context of Strauss’s critical stance and compositional output resides not only in artistic ideas but also in politics and social practice in institutions like opera houses and concert halls and their audiences.

While the concept of progress that gave birth to the development episteme in Africa emerged from European post-Enlightenment traditions, the idea of development in Africa has been reshaped as much by the targets of development as by those who claimed expertise. The illusion of the omnipotence of the development episteme will only be exposed when we can see clearly the crumbling stones out of which it was built. Development is not the powerful edifice it claims to be; it is a holdover of colonialism that is quickly losing relevance in our current world. A decolonizing of the mind, not of Africans but of people living in the global north who see Africa as perpetually less than, is the wave of the future. Today the development discourse is a global debate in flux and Africans have more influence than ever over reshaping the development episteme. This final chapter discusses recent debates about progress, modernity, and development in Africa and offers some closing thoughts on what development might mean for Africa’s future.