ABSTRACT
The reconceptualization of modernism is an ongoing and collective project. Until the end of the last century, Anglo-American and European writers and artists dominated the landscape, with the rest of the world reduced to a mere standing reserve upon which canonical geniuses drew for inspiration. For almost 100 years, modernism was confidently identified by scholars and critics with a handful of (mostly male) practitioners: Ezra Pound, Pablo Picasso, Tristan Tzara, André Breton, Arnold Schoenberg, Martha Graham, Sergei Eisenstein, James Joyce, Serge Diaghilev, Constantin Brancusi, Samuel Beckett, and Virginia Woolf. Reduced in its early days to the ‘men of 1914’, it was later reduced even further to what Hugh Kenner called simply The Pound Era (1971). Not coincidentally, modernist studies lost their verve as modernism itself was increasingly isolated and removed from the expansive gestures of late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s academic and political cultures in the West.
