Chief Isaac Oluwole Delano: A Legend and His Legacy

No honor befits a person who enjoys life without helping his country. What glory is entitled to a lazy person that the courageous man does not have? The head of a lazy person is not comparable to the nail of the strong; shame follows the pride of the lazy.2 Chief Isaac Delano discovered his intellectual mission during the colonial moment. The nature of the colonial state influenced his writings. The body of his work operated in a context of colonial-modernist state. The colonial power, in its imperialist/messianic philosophy and the quest to inscribe European ethos on other cultures, the colonized people of Nigeria, like others elsewhere, were told that the root to modernity was the European way of life. Tough it claimed to be liberal as it evolved from an already civilized society, “magnanimous” enough to spread the gospel truth of this civility and civilization to other societies still living far below their human potentials in their various crude and barbaric enclaves, it was not liberal enough to the extent of accommodating all indigenous cultural elements of the colonized people. Delano had to respond to the limitation of the colonial modernist project. Tus, for one to be qualified as being civilized—or call it “modern” if you like—is to be successful in the indoctrinated inevitability of combating every feature of one’s culture, values, and traditions to win the trophy of modernity.

Letter from Brazil

The research addresses a previously unknown segment of the journalist and art dealer Pietro Maria Bardi’s trajectory by highlighting the centrality of the publishing issue in his activity as an organizer of artistic culture. Starting from the letters exchanged with the publisher Valentino Bompiani from 1946 – date of Bardi’s arrival to Brazil, together with Lina Bo – to the early 1950s, the paper traces the common projects, between Italy and South America, in a transnational perspective, thus opening new insights into Bardi’s role within the coeval illustrated art publishing industry and better focusing the planning of his early Brazilian years at the head of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo’s modernist project.

Against the factory school of modern times: the need of a paradigmatic rupture

Despite the accelerating change at all levels of life, demanding a plethora of new intelligent systems, formal education continues to resemble a box, created during Industrial Revolution and only modestly changed since. The technicist curriculum and the public school remain a modernist project, boxing in students and constraining their imaginations. It is not worth investing in intelligent technologies if education is not taken into account, creating new flexibilities for people’s behaviours and attitudes. A paradigm shift in the area of education and teacher education is a must. The aim of this presentation is to share my concern about the inadequacy of the “black-and-white” mental organisation caused by the knowledge boundaries of various disciplines in hierarchical order, characteristic of the modernist curriculum implemented at schools, and the real need for a global and interdisciplinary methodological approach focused on the greatest problems of humanity.

Reading Ray: Avant-Garde and Transnationalism in Interwar Britain

The British modernist little magazine Ray: Art Miscellany (1926–1927) pioneered the combination of text and image in the vein of the Continental avant-gardes. Amid the surge of interest in periodicals within modernist studies, Ray has managed to escape broader attention. Its editor, Sidney Hunt, was an enigmatic figure and the magazine itself also eludes categorization, as it did not conform to the standards of English modernism, which were in the process of crystallising at the time of its publication and then dominated the scholarly consensus on artistic innovation during the interwar period. Focusing on the specificities of the magazine form and on Ray's explicitly interartistic and transnational ethos, this article locates Ray within the spectrum of British ‘modernisms’, while interpreting its manifest effort to introduce various European avant-garde movements to a British audience as part of a strategy to establish an alternative modernist project grounded in the ideals of the moribund Arts and Crafts tradition.

Stratégies transnationales dans l’œuvre de Mircea Eliade

"Transnational Strategies in Mircea Eliade’s Writings. In this article, we will consider the techniques through which an important hallmark of Romanian culture, Mircea Eliade, negotiated his transnational strategies, in a continual back-and-forth movement between his place of origin and a larger, cosmopolitan context. Paradoxically, as proven by Paul Cernat, it is not exoticism that will lead to his treatises on the history of religions, but on the contrary, the return to Sambo’s room, as described in The Forbidden Forest novel. Moreover, the European modernist project, defended by Eliade, is in itself an antinomic project: exceptional avant-garde techniques succeed regressive strategies. The latter are based on the modern hermeneutics of meaning, developed by Eliade in his approach to the history of religions, which is an all-encompassing way of interpreting religious facts as hierophanies. Keywords: terror of history, antimodernist strategies, hierophany, autochthonism, transnational techniques "

Adapting to Urban Pro-Sociality in Hamsun's Hunger

The rural-migrant protagonist in Knut Hamsun's Hunger (1890; Sult) fails to adapt to the urban environment because the moral algorithm that informs his collaborative choices is unfit for the city. He often responds poorly when overwhelmed by pride, shame, or other sensations that he struggles to make sense of. Such emotions are hypothesized to be neurocomputational adaptations crafted by natural selection to help us get ahead as collaborators. But with societal transformation, these feelings can become a poor match for a new reality. Reprogramming oneself can be challenging; Hunger's protagonist must suffer months of emotional and physical pain before he adapts. His journey, and Hamsun's modernist project, can be illuminated by recent research on status management and morality as cooperation. As literature, Hunger could fulfill several adaptive functions by mapping morals for urban pro-sociality at a time of great disruption. Similar moral adaptation could become necessary in our present era, too.

The Dialogue of Stories and Pictures

In Prince and Plague – a Relatively Late Avant-garde Project of 1931 Nikolay Rainov is one of the greatest experimenters of Bulgarian literature not just in terms of style but in terms of genre as well. His late modernist project Prince and Plague, with ‘fearful fairy tales’ and illustrations, is among the most daring ones of the fading Bulgarian avant-garde. Published in two carefully designed books with a thematic series of drawings and pictures, these works have not yet found their adequate interpretation. Announced as children books, they obviously seek for an audience more radical in its thoughts and senses. Art historians have often defined these works as ‘secessionist’ but no doubt they could be placed somewhere betweenthe extreme expressionism and the surrealism.

Becoming Masters of their Own Home (under the Leadership of the Party)

This chapter investigates the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) practical and ideological motivations for creating Zeku County and Amdo's other autonomous nationality administrations, within which—Party leaders repeatedly promised—minority communities would at last become “masters of their own homes.” In 1950s Amdo, nationality autonomy was considered the key mechanism by which non-Han people would be both administratively and psychologically integrated into the new state and nation. It was a central component of the Maoist “high-modernist” project, its aim to reterritorialize ethnocultural frontiers into component parts of a unitary nation-state, a process referred to as “minoritization.” The chapter then traces efforts by Guo Min's County Work Group to build a consensus among the region's divided headmen for founding Zeku County. This almost certainly was to be the first time in its history that the region would be territorialized and administered as a whole and distinct entity. Party leaders were aware that this not only demanded drawing boundaries and building administrative organs where none had previously existed—it also necessitated creating a county-level constituency from the disparate interests and loyalties of the region's divided population.