Experiments in Eden: Mid-century artist voyages into the Mesopotamian marshlands

Following the 1958 Revolution, many Iraqi artists were sent abroad to study in foreign art academies and train in the latest methods – especially printmaking. The popularity and necessity of print in transnational decolonial movements lent printing practices a popular edge while enhancing the artwork’s seeming accessibility and reproducibility. As artists navigated the regional contours of transnational modernism while exploring graphic artmaking methods in the 1960s, several turned to the country’s southern wetland landscapes as new sites and creative worlds. This contribution examines a few of these mid-century experiments with the Mesopotamian marshlands in order to explore how these works bloomed in the liquid nature of printmaking while simultaneously proliferating images of the southern marshlands increasingly under threat in rapidly modernizing twentieth-century Iraq.

World Literature and Socialist Internationalism in the Weimar Republic: Five Theses

Largely overlooked in the booming scholarship on world literature, literary globalization, and transnational modernism, a world literature of socialist internationalism was imagined, written, theorized, and practiced in the aftermath of World War I, representing the first attempt to actualize the idea of world literature under the auspices of a social and political mass movement. This article develops and illustrates five theses about this internationalist world literature. It thereby sketches aspects of the history of internationalist world literature in Germany between 1918 and 1933 and formulates historical, historiographical, poetological, and literary and cultural theoretical interventions into the field of world literature studies. In particular, the article develops the notions of the transnational literary counterpublic and of realist modernism while tracing ideas about transnational class literatures and nonnormative imaginaries of the proletariat.

Virginia Woolf’s Reception and Impact on Brazilian Women’s Literature

This chapter discusses Woolf’s reception in Brazil as revealed through the work of Brazilian women writers. As a theoretical framework, the chapter relies on a transnational approach including Jessica Berman’s Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics and Transnational Modernism; Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s ‘Under Western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourse’, Gayatri C. Spivak’s article ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ and Pelogia Goulimari’s Women Writing Across Cultures. The chapter traces the waves of feminism in Brazil over the decades, examines Woolf’s surge of popularity in Brazil following the publication of Brenda Silver’s Virginia Woolf Icon (1999), and analyses Woolf’s impact on multiple Brazilian women writers: Tetrá de Teffé (1897–1995), Lucia Miguel Pereira (1901–59), Clarice Lispector (1920–77), Carolina Maria de Jesus (1914–77), Ana Cristina Cesar (1952–83), Lygia Fagundes Telles (1923–), Hilda Hilst (1930–2004), Sônia Coutinho (1939–), Adriana Lunardi (1964–), Luiza Lobo (1948–) and Hilda Gouveia de Oliveira (1946–). By the twenty-first century, Woolf’s work has become truly global. Woolf died more than sixty years ago, but her texts are still alive, and she is still moving and inspiring other women writers, to the point that we can talk about a multiplicity of Woolfs.

Modernism on the Nile

Analyzing the modernist art movement that arose in Cairo and Alexandria from the late nineteenth century through the 1960s, Alex Dika Seggerman reveals how the visual arts were part of a multifaceted transnational modernism. While the work of diverse, major Egyptian artists during this era may have appeared to be secular, she argues, it reflected the subtle but essential inflection of Islam, as a faith, history, and lived experience, in the overarching development of Middle Eastern modernity. Challenging typical views of modernism in art history as solely Euro-American, and expanding the conventional periodization of Islamic art history, Seggerman theorizes a “constellational modernism” for the emerging field of global modernism. Rather than seeing modernism in a generalized, hyperconnected network, she finds that art and artists circulated in distinct constellations that encompassed finite local and transnational relations. Such constellations, which could engage visual systems both along and beyond the Nile, from Los Angeles to Delhi, were materialized in visual culture that ranged from oil paintings and sculpture to photography and prints. Based on extensive research in Egypt, Europe, and the United States, this richly illustrated book poses a compelling argument for the importance of Muslim networks to global modernism.

Broadcasting Nature Poetry: Una Marson and the BBC's Overseas Service

Although the nature poems of the Jamaican writer Una Marson are usually set against her transnational projects, they are inextricable from the cosmopolitan vision described in her radio broadcasts and journalism. Studies of transnational modernism have brought to the fore Marson's participation in pan- Africanist political and literary networks, her poems' mediation of the black West Indian woman's experience, and her work promoting West Indian literature in the metropolitan institution of the BBC. Analyses of Marson as a transnational igure, however, have obscured aspects of her literary production—speciically, her nature poetry. Placing Marson's West Indian nature poetry that was broadcast by the BBC in the context of the original programs reveals the efects of moving from print publication to radio broadcast. And, along with her editorials for the Jamaican literary magazine The Cosmopolitan (1928–31), Marson's BBC broadcasts (1939–45) make the case for the ongoing relevance of the pastoral tradition to public life.