1st Edition
The Politics of Intermedial Modernisms
The Politics of Intermedial Modernism challenges current conceptions of both modernist and intermedial studies by investigating the media practices of marginalized artists and networks in and beyond the time period (c. 1890 to 1950). This edited collection of essays asks three key questions: How does intermediality shape our understanding of modernism? How does modernism continue to shape our understanding of intermedia? What are the political stakes of engaging with materials intermedially? Taken together, the essays in this purposely interdisciplinary collection demonstrate that intermediality can be a fundamental condition and a critical method. The collection focuses on literature, art history, drama, music and media archaeology. It explores artists and coalitions that are often overlooked in approaches from a single discipline, method, or location to shift attention away from historical definitional debates about modernism and intermediality and enable the emergence of diverse voices and creative practices. Contributions to this collection highlight the political engagements of intermedial artists to address a lack of socio-political analysis in intermedial studies, especially in cultural “high” modernism. The interdisciplinary scope of this book invites a broad audience of academics teaching and researching in twentieth-century visual, literary, and sound cultures; media studies; performance studies, and undergraduate and postgraduate students working in these areas.
Introduction
Sarah Jensen and Elicia Clements
Part 1: Intermedial Crossings
1. Watching Dunham Dance: Langston Hughes at the Ballet
Rebecca Bradburn
2. El Lissitzky in the Intermedial Era
Jonathan Najarian
3. Zelda Fitzgerald’s Intermedial, Embodied Celebrity
Emily Christina Murphy
4. Intimate Disruptions: Visuality, Affect, and the Politics of Colour in Eileen Chang
Shiyi Zhu
5. Dorothy Day’s Intermaterial Modernism
Sean Weidman
Part 2: Intermedial Networks
6. Materializing the Immaterial: The BBC’s Intermedial Objects
Debra Rae Cohen
7. Mexican Muralism and the Collective Novel: Monumentality and Multiplicity in John Dos Passos’ U.S.A and Diego Rivera’s Secretariat de Educación Pública Murals
Geneva Gano
8. Lines in Motion: The Tableaux Animés of Isadora Duncan and Maurice Denis
Rachel Coombes
9. The Sapphic Conviviality of the “Academy of Witches”: Carmen Conde and Amanda Junquera’s Intermedial Collaborations
Angela Acosta
Part 3: Intermedial Afterlives
10. An Assurance of a Fuller Self: On Black Female Subjectivity in Mary P. Burrill, Firelei Báez, and Miatta Kawinzi
Erica N. Caldwell
11. Transnational Networks, Collaborations, and the Refunctioning of Indo-German Jazz: The Patronage of the Goethe Institut-Max Mueller Bhavan
Malvika Singh
12. Working In-Between Dreams and Reality: Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo and Modernist Intermediality
Alison Halsall
13. Ann Petry’s Transmedial Re-emergence: Hearing The Street in 2020
Sarah Jensen
Biography
Sarah Jensen is Assistant Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Toronto Scarborough, Canada.
Elicia Clements is a cross-appointed Associate Professor of the Departments of English and Humanities and Chair of the Department of Humanities at York University, Canada.
