Modernist Intellectual Currents in Canada and the United States

In Canada and the United States modernism emerges from transnational engagements with global intellectual movements while also grappling with local intellectual, cultural, and political developments that reflect the changing place of these nations in the world. Canadian and US expatriates played crucial roles in the emergence of European modernist thought and aesthetics. Similarly, exchanges of ideas among Latin American, Caribbean, Canadian, and US modernists affected the trajectory of modernism in the Americas. ¹ While these international movements were taking form, US and Canadian artists and thinkers developed domestic versions of modernism. The forces that influenced their efforts included the following: an influx of immigration in the opening decades of the twentieth century, the rise of industrialization and mass production, an explosion of popular culture, and a shift in the global centre of military and economic power away from Europe. Along with common modernist concerns with representation, language, epistemology, and primitivism, US and Canadian modernisms are also shaped by the emergence of pragmatism, the anthropological concept of culture, cultural pluralism, and nativism.