ABSTRACT
This chapter elaborates a geopolitical approach to modernism, one that seeks to explain how artworks imagine and describe world space as a networked political-economic system. It may seem a little late in the day for geopolitics. In the eyes of some, geopolitics has been superseded historically by globalization; there are entire areas of modernist scholarship that deprioritize the questions of political geography, historical antagonism, and territory that are often central to geopolitics. The idea that geopolitical thinking has been superseded by globalization is questionable and has been the subject of debate; Saul Cohen has made a convincing case that intensifying globalization makes for a much more complex geopolitical system. Scale, political-economic and cultural networks, and aesthetics become interlinked when we historicize both geopolitical thinking and modernist activity. The E.M.B. and Lessings novel capture in miniature the myriad ways art objects engage with geopolitical imaginations. Visual culture was key to the E.M.B.s efforts to transform Britains geopolitical imagination.
