"A wide-ranging collection that allows the mask—as artifact, metaphor, theatrical costume, fetish, strategy for self-concealment, and treasured cultural object—to clarify modernity’s relationship to history."--Carrie J. Preston, author of Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance "Covering an impressive range of geographies, cultures, and time periods, these carefully researched essays explore the fascinating role of masks and masking in mediating the relationship between tradition and modernity in both art and literature."--Paul Jay, author of The Humanities “Crisis” and the Future of Literary Studies Behind the Masks of Modernism reconsiders the meaning of "modernism" by taking an interdisciplinary approach and stretching beyond the Western modernist canon and the literary scope of the field. The essays in this diverse collection explore numerous regional, national, and transnational expressions of modernity through art, history, architecture, drama, literature, and cultural studies around the globe. Masks--both literal and metaphorical--play a role in each of these artistic ventures, from Brazilian music to Chinese film and Russian poetry to Nigerian masquerade performance. The contributors show how artists and writers produce their works in moments of emerging modernity, aesthetic sensibility, and deep societal transformations caused by modern transnational forces. Using the mask as a thematic focus, the volume explores the dialogue created through regional modernisms, emphasizes the local in describing universal tropes of masks and masking, and challenges popular assumptions about what modernism looks like and what modernity is.

"A wide-ranging collection that allows the mask-as artifact, metaphor, theatrical costume, fetish, strategy for self-concealment, and treasured cultural object-to clarify modernity's relationship to history."--Carrie J. Preston, author of Modernism's Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance "Covering an impressive range of geographies, cultures, and time periods, these carefully researched essays explore the fascinating role of masks and masking in mediating the relationship between tradition and modernity in both art and literature."--Paul Jay, author of The Humanities "Crisis" and the Future of Literary Studies Behind the Masks of Modernism reconsiders the meaning of "modernism" by taking an interdisciplinary approach and stretching beyond the Western modernist canon and the literary scope of the field. The essays in this diverse collection explore numerous regional, national, and transnational expressions of modernity through art, history, architecture, drama, literature, and cultural studies around the globe. Masks--both literal and metaphorical--play a role in each of these artistic ventures, from Brazilian music to Chinese film and Russian poetry to Nigerian masquerade performance. The contributors show how artists and writers produce their works in moments of emerging modernity, aesthetic sensibility, and deep societal transformations caused by modern transnational forces. Using the mask as a thematic focus, the volume explores the dialogue created through regional modernisms, emphasizes the local in describing universal tropes of masks and masking, and challenges popular assumptions about what modernism looks like and what modernity is.

This book is about the use of exoticism, particularly the use of masks and stylized movement, in opera and other musical theater genres of the twentieth century. The author explores in depth a topic that effects a wide variety of important composers, dancers, and dramatists, but has never been comprehensively studied.

Transnational in scope, this much-needed volume explores how modernist writers and artists address and critique the dramatic changes to food systems that took place in the early twentieth century. During this period, small farms were being replaced with industrial agriculture, political upheavals exacerbated food scarcity in many countries, and globalization opened up new modes of distributing culinary commodities. Looking at a unique variety of art forms by authors, painters, filmmakers, and chefs from Ireland, Italy, France, the United States, India, the former Soviet Union, and New Zealand, contributors draw attention to modernist representations of food, from production to distribution and consumption. They consider Oscar Wilde’s aestheticization of food, Katherine Mansfield’s use of eggs as a feminist symbol, Langston Hughes’s use of chocolate as a redemptive metaphor for blackness, hospitality in William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, Ernest Hemingway’s struggles with gender and sexuality as expressed through food and culinary objects, Futurist cuisine, avant-garde cookbooks, and the impact of national famines on the work of James Joyce, Viktor Shklovsky, and Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay. Less celebrated topics of putrefaction and waste are analyzed in discussions of food as both a technology of control and a tool for resistance. The diverse themes and methodologies assembled here underscore the importance of food studies not only for the literary and visual arts but also for social transformation. The cultural work around food, the editors argue, determines what is produced, who has access to it, and what can or will change. A milestone volume, this collection uncovers new links between seemingly disparate spaces, cultures, and artistic media and demystifies the connection between modernist aesthetics and the emerging food cultures of a globalizing world. Contributors: Giles Whiteley | Aimee Gasston | Randall Wilhelm | Bradford Taylor | Sean Mark | Céline Mansanti | Shannon Finck

A cultural history of the face in Western art, ranging from portraiture in painting and photography to film, theater, and mass media This fascinating book presents the first cultural history and anthropology of the face across centuries, continents, and media. Ranging from funerary masks and masks in drama to the figural work of contemporary artists including Cindy Sherman and Nam June Paik, renowned art historian Hans Belting emphasizes that while the face plays a critical role in human communication, it defies attempts at visual representation. Belting divides his book into three parts: faces as masks of the self, portraiture as a constantly evolving mask in Western culture, and the fate of the face in the age of mass media. Referencing a vast array of sources, Belting's insights draw on art history, philosophy, theories of visual culture, and cognitive science. He demonstrates that Western efforts to portray the face have repeatedly failed, even with the developments of new media such as photography and film, which promise ever-greater degrees of verisimilitude. In spite of sitting at the heart of human expression, the face resists possession, and creative endeavors to capture it inevitably result in masks—hollow signifiers of the humanity they're meant to embody. From creations by Van Eyck and August Sander to works by Francis Bacon, Ingmar Bergman, and Chuck Close, Face and Mask takes a remarkable look at how, through the centuries, the physical visage has inspired and evaded artistic interpretation.

Published to accompany an exhibition held at the National Portrait Gallery, London, 9 March-29 May 2017

Reading African art’s impact on modernism as an international phenomenon, The “Black Art” Renaissance tracks a series of twentieth-century engagements with canonical African sculpture by European, African American, and sub-Saharan African artists and theorists. Notwithstanding its occurrence during the benighted colonial period, the Paris avant-garde “discovery” of African sculpture—known then as art nègre, or “black art”—eventually came to affect nascent Afro-modernisms, whose artists and critics commandeered visual and rhetorical uses of the same sculptural canon and the same term. Within this trajectory, “black art” evolved as a framework for asserting control over appropriative practices introduced by Europeans, and it helped forge alliances by redefining concepts of humanism, race, and civilization. From the Fauves and Picasso to the Harlem Renaissance, and from the work of South African artist Ernest Mancoba to the imagery of Negritude and the École de Dakar, African sculpture’s influence proved transcontinental in scope and significance. Through this extensively researched study, Joshua I. Cohen argues that art history’s alleged centers and margins must be conceived as interconnected and mutually informing. The “Black Art” Renaissance reveals just how much modern art has owed to African art on a global scale.