Making a vital contribution to the understanding of Latin American modernism, Esther Gabara rethinks the role of photography in the Brazilian and Mexican avant-garde movements of the 1920s and 1930s. During these decades, intellectuals in Mexico and Brazil were deeply engaged with photography. Authors who are now canonical figures in the two countries’ literary traditions looked at modern life through the camera in a variety of ways. Mário de Andrade, known as the “pope” of Brazilian modernism, took and collected hundreds of photographs. Salvador Novo, a major Mexican writer, meditated on the medium’s aesthetic potential as “the prodigal daughter of the fine arts.” Intellectuals acted as tourists and ethnographers, and their images and texts circulated in popular mass media, sharing the page with photographs of the New Woman. In this richly illustrated study, Gabara introduces the concept of a modernist “ethos” to illuminate the intertwining of aesthetic innovation and ethical concerns in the work of leading Brazilian and Mexican literary figures, who were also photographers, art critics, and contributors to illustrated magazines during the 1920s and 1930s. Gabara argues that Brazilian and Mexican modernists deliberately made photography err: they made this privileged medium of modern representation simultaneously wander and work against its apparent perfection. They flouted the conventions of mainstream modernism so that their aesthetics registered an ethical dimension. Their photographic modernism strayed, dragging along the baggage of modernity lived in a postcolonial site. Through their “errant modernism,” avant-garde writers and photographers critiqued the colonial history of Latin America and its twentieth-century formations.

In less than half a century, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia successfully defeated Fascist occupation, fended off dominating pressures from the Eastern and Western blocs, built a modern society on the ashes of war, created its own form of socialism, and led the formation of the Nonaligned Movement. This country's principles and its continued battles, fought against all odds, provided the basis for dynamic and exceptional forms of art. Drawing on archival materials, postcolonial theory, and Eastern European socialist studies, Nonaligned Modernism chronicles the emergence of late modernist artistic practices in Yugoslavia from the end of the Second World War to the mid-1980s. Situating Yugoslav modernism within postcolonial artistic movements of the twentieth century, Bojana Videkanic explores how cultural workers collaborated with others from the Global South to create alternative artistic and cultural networks that countered Western hegemony. Videkanic focuses primarily on art exhibitions along with examples of international cultural exchange to demonstrate that nonaligned art wove together politics and aesthetics, and indigenous, Western, and global influences. An interdisciplinary book, Nonaligned Modernism highlights Yugoslavia's key role in the creation of a global modernist ethos and international postcolonial culture.

Presenting a paradigm-shifting view of early Latin American modernism, this book looks at how a transnational intellectual community of writers and critics forged an anticolonial aesthetic based in abstract artistic forms.

A Companion to American Art presents 35 newly-commissioned essays by leading scholars that explore the methodology, historiography, and current state of the field of American art history. Features contributions from a balance of established and emerging scholars, art and architectural historians, and other specialists Includes several paired essays to emphasize dialogue and debate between scholars on important contemporary issues in American art history Examines topics such as the methodological stakes in the writing of American art history, changing ideas about what constitutes “Americanness,” and the relationship of art to public culture Offers a fascinating portrait of the evolution and current state of the field of American art history and suggests future directions of scholarship

The photographers discussed in this book probe the most contentious aspects of social organization in Mexico, questioning what it means to belong, to be Mexican, to experience modernity, and to create art as a culturally, politically, or racially marginalized person. By choosing human subjects, spaces, and aesthetics excluded from the Lettered City, each of the photographers discussed in this volume produces a corpus of art that contests dominant narratives of social and cultural modernization in Mexico. Taken together, their work represents diverging and diverse notions of what is meant by Mexican modernity. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, history of photography, women’s studies, and Mexican studies.

Where did literary modernism happen? This book answers this question, re-evaluating the parameters of modernism in the light of recent developments in literary geography and literary history through an examination of novels, poetry, theatre, and "e;little magazines"e;. Essays identify and appraise the local attachments of modernist texts in particular geographical regions and question the idea of the "e;regional"e; in light of the alienating displacements of transnational modernity.

A Planetary Avant-Garde explores how experimental poetics and literature networks have aesthetically and politically responded to the legacy of Iberian colonialism across the world. The book examines avant-garde responses to Spanish and Portuguese imperialism across Europe, Latin America, West Africa, and Southeast Asia between 1909 and 1929. Ignacio Infante critically traces the hegemony and resistance to the colonial regimes of Spain and Portugal across particular avant-garde networks, expanding our understanding of Western colonial and imperial ideologies of the early twentieth century. The book extends geopolitical dimensions of the historical avant-garde into a wider transnational and planetary framework, including divergent experiences of modernity, forms of experimental poetics, and understandings of history. It sheds light on topics, such as the relation between Portuguese futurism and European colonialism in West Africa, the Latin American avant-garde’s critique of European historicism, the development of Brazilian modernism in relation to the European avant-garde, the comparative poetics of modernism in the Philippines, and the 1929 Barcelona World’s Fair. Grounded in extensive archival research, A Planetary Avant-Garde provides a new understanding of the historical avant-garde from a global and multilingual perspective.