Anticolonial struggles of the interwar epoch were haunted by the question of how to construct an educational practice for all future citizens of postcolonial states. In what ways, vanguard intellectuals asked, would citizens from diverse subaltern situations be equally enabled to participate in a nonimperial society and world? In circumstances of cultural and social crisis imposed by colonialism, these vanguards sought to refashion modern structures and technologies of public education by actively relating them to residual indigenous collective forms. In Indigenous Vanguards, Ben Conisbee Baer provides a theoretical and historical account of literary engagements with structures and representations of public teaching and learning by cultural vanguards in the colonial world from the 1920s to the 1940s. He shows how modernizing educative projects existed in complex tension with impulses to indigenize national liberation movements, and how this tension manifests as a central aspect of modernist literary practice. Offering new readings of figures such as Alain Locke, Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, D. H. Lawrence, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, and Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, Baer discloses the limits and openings of modernist representations as they attempt to reach below the fissures of class that produce them. Establishing unexpected connections between languages and regions, Indigenous Vanguards is the first study of modernism and colonialism that encompasses the decisive way public education transformed modernist aesthetics and vanguard politics.

In this first comprehensive study of Latin America's literary vanguards of the 1920s and 1930s, Vicky Unruh explores the movement's provocative and polemic nature. Latin American vanguardism—a precursor to the widely acclaimed work of contemporary Latin American writers—was stimulated by the European avant-garde movements of the World War I era. But as Unruh's wide-ranging study attests, the vanguards of Latin America—emerging from the continent's own historical circumstances—developed a very distinct character and voice. Through manifestos, experimental texts, and ribald public performance, the vanguardists' work intertwined art, culture, and the politics of the day to produce a powerful brand of aesthetic activism, one that sparked an entire rethinking of the meaning of art and culture throughout Latin America.

In Speaking for the People Mark Rifkin examines nineteenth-century Native writings to reframe contemporary debates around Indigenous recognition, refusal, and resurgence. Rifkin shows how works by Native authors (William Apess, Elias Boudinot, Sarah Winnemucca, and Zitkala-Ša) illustrate the intellectual labor involved in representing modes of Indigenous political identity and placemaking. These writers highlight the complex processes involved in negotiating the character, contours, and scope of Indigenous sovereignties under ongoing colonial occupation. Rifkin argues that attending to these writers' engagements with non-native publics helps provide further analytical tools for addressing the complexities of Indigenous governance on the ground—both then and now. Thinking about Native peoplehood and politics as a matter of form opens possibilities for addressing the difficult work involved in navigating among varied possibilities for conceptualizing and enacting peoplehood in the context of continuing settler intervention. As Rifkin demonstrates, attending to writings by these Indigenous intellectuals provides ways of understanding Native governance as a matter of deliberation, discussion, and debate, emphasizing the open-ended unfinishedness of self-determination.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the staff and students of two newly founded universities in the Pacific Islands helped foster a golden age of Oceanian literature. At the University of Papua New Guinea and the University of the South Pacific, bold experiments in curriculum design recentered literary studies around a Pacific modernity. Rejecting the established British colonial model, writer-scholars placed Pacific oratory and a growing body of Oceanian writing at the heart of the syllabus. From this local core, students ventured outward to contemporary postcolonial literatures, where they saw modernist techniques repurposed for a decolonizing world. Only then did they turn to foundational modernist texts, encountered at last as a set of creative tools rather than a canon to be copied or learned by rote. The Rise of Pacific Literature reveals the transformative role and radical adaptations of global modernisms in this golden age. Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward examine the reading and teaching of Pacific oral narratives, European and American modernisms, and African, Caribbean, and Indian literature, tracing how Oceanian writers appropriated and reworked key texts and techniques. They identify the local innovations and international networks that spurred Pacific literature’s golden age by reading crucial works against the poetry, prose, and plays on the syllabi of the new universities. Placing internationally recognized writers such as Albert Wendt, Subramani, Konai Helu Thaman, Marjorie Crocombe, and John Kasaipwalova alongside lesser-known authors of works published in Oceanian little magazines, this book offers a wide-ranging new account of Pacific literary history that tells a fresh story about modernism’s global itineraries and transformations.

In nineteenth-century imperial Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, new scientific fields like psychophysics, empirical psychology, clinical psychiatry, and neuroanatomy transformed the understanding of mental life in ways long seen as influencing modernism. Turning to the history of psychiatric classification for mental illnesses, Cate I. Reilly argues that modernist texts can be understood as critically responding to objective scientific models of the psyche, not simply illustrating their findings. Modernist works written in industrializing Central and Eastern Europe historicize the representation of consciousness as a quantifiable phenomenon within techno-scientific modernity. Looking beyond modernism’s well-studied relationship to psychoanalysis, this book tells the story of the non-Freudian vocabulary for mental illnesses that forms the precursor to today’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Developed by the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin in the 1890s, this psychiatric taxonomy grew from the claim that invisible mental illnesses were analogous to physical phenomena in the natural world. Reilly explores how figures such as Georg Büchner, Ernst Toller, Daniel Paul Schreber, Nikolai Evreinov, Vsevolod Ivanov, and Santiago Ramón y Cajal understood the legal and political consequences of representing mental life in physical terms. Working across literary studies, the history of science, psychoanalytic criticism, critical theory, and political philosophy, Psychic Empire is an original account of modernism that shows the link between nineteenth-century scientific research on the mental health of national populations and twenty-first-century globalized, neuroscientific accounts of psychopathology and sanity.

The republic of Turkey and the Soviet Union both emerged from the wreckage of empires surrounding World War I, and pathways of literary exchange soon opened between the two revolutionary states. Even as the Turkish government pursued a friendly relationship with the USSR, it began to persecute communist writers. Whether going through official channels or fleeing repression, many Turkish writers traveled to the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s, publishing original work, editing prominent literary journals, and translating both Russian classics and Soviet literature into Turkish. Writing in Red traces the literary and exilic itineraries of Turkish communist and former communist writers, examining revolutionary aesthetics and politics across Turkey and the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s through the 1960s. Nergis Ertürk considers a wide range of texts—spanning genres such as erotic comedy, historical fiction and film, and socialist realist novels and theater—by writers including Nâzim Hikmet, Vâlâ Nureddin, Nizamettin Nazif, Suat Derviş, and Abidin Dino. She argues that these works belong simultaneously to modern Turkish literature, a transnational Soviet republic of letters, and the global literary archive of world revolution, alongside those of other writers who made the “magic pilgrimage” to Moscow. Exploring how Turkish communist writers on the run produced a remarkable transnational literature of dissent, Writing in Red offers a new account of global revolutionary literary culture.

Uncovering the role of literature, late imperialism, and the rise of new models of internationalism as integral to the invention of Global English, this book focuses on three key figures from the “Vocabulary Control Movement” - C.K. Ogden, Harold Palmer, and Michael West - who competed for market share for their respective language teaching systems - Basic English, the Palmer Method, and the New Method - through battles over word lists and teaching methods in the 1920s and 30s. Drawing on archives from the Carnegie Corporation and considering language teaching in eight global sites, this book analyzes how a series of conferences in New York and London resolved their conflicts and produced a consolidated, international standard form of English. As a postcolonial approach to the development of the field of English Language Teaching, it reveals how these language debates were proxy battles over an idealized global subject: an urban, secular, consumer moving seamlessly between the tribal and global, speaking both mother tongues and an international lingua franca, Global English. Featuring analysis of the primary texts of each of the three key figures in this book as well as close readings of their readers, which featured adaptations of well-known literary texts from writers like Poe, Dickens, Wordsworth, Milton and Wells, it recovers a neglected history of English as it was redefined as an international language through anti-colonial resistance in the peripheries and transatlantic power struggles in the metropole during the interwar period.