This article discusses the role of the occult in the making of modernity through the material practice of tarot reading, a relatively marginal form of magic that gained surprising currency in a vast array of modernist cultural spaces, ranging from psychological laboratories to the visual and performing arts, from the esoteric rituals of High Magic to the secular magick of popular entertainments. This is taken as a test-case to reconsider the much debated opposition between modernity and primitive enchantment in the light of more recent historiographic accounts of modernity as a multilayered phenomenon, fractured into alternative and competing cultural conceptions. While making room for the occult among these other modernities, we suggest that the temporal montage allowed by tarot cards was a strategy already devised to shuffle the times of modernism.

Keywords: tarot reading, visuality, occult, cinema

Modernism was marked by a deep concern with sexuality and gender identities. Ellis’s and Carpenter’s works were pioneering in their attempt to disentangle the hard knot of heteronormativity, while Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde were regarded by some as a threat to society because they had taken over “the traditional idiosyncrasies of the feminine rôle” (Lewis 1989: 244). This article will argue that the sexual politics embedded in the works of Virginia Woolf anticipate the discourse of sexual identity formulated by queer theory. Depicted as the object of both heterosexual and bisexual desire, the protagonist of Jacob’s Room (1922) explores the multifaceted nature of gender identity while Between the Acts (1941) deals with issues of gender and sexual desire within a well-defined cultural milieu.

Keywords: discursive practices, queer theory, sexual politics, Virginia Woolf

As Ian Baucom (2005) has pointed out, the 1781 massacre on the slave ship Zong and its representations are central not only to the “political and cultural archives of the black Atlantic, but to the history of modern capital, ethics, and time consciousness”. Contesting the notion that the legal documents produced in the Zong case are the only available testimony of the lives of the slaves thrown overboard, M. NourbeSe Philip’s recent work, Zong! (2008a), invites a dismantling of that archive, its deconstruction and explosion in order to find different ways of telling what cannot be expressed. In particular, the article will show how, by reconfiguring the role of gaps and silences, Philip engages history rather than merely representing it, thus urging for a more radically unsettling language to inhabit modernity.

Keywords: Zong!, poetry, Middle Passage, archive

This article proposes a remapping of modernism from the vantage point of ‘peripheral’ modernities. Caribbean writers and artists who migrated to Britain after 1948 brought the politics and poetics of a specific geography into (late) British modernism establishing a dialectical relationship with it. While contemporary reviews tended to pigeonhole them as followers of European movements, thus emphasising their belatedness, the literary production of the so-called exiles can be read differently. The notion of creolisation, which stresses the creative potential of the Caribbean region’s syncretism, mixing European and non-European expressive traditions, allows a more useful perspective on cultural contact. Through an engagement with the Bildungsroman, Lamming’s first novel appropriates this genre counter-discursively to accommodate ideas of collective identity functional to his anti-colonial stance.

Keywords: creolisation, West Indian exiles, decolonisation, Bildungsroman

This article explores Syrian-born author Mohja Kahf’s poem “Thawrah des Odalisques at the Matisse Retrospective” (2003) as a transtextual ‘intervention’ on the paradigmatic Modernist representation of reified female bodies. Kahf re-writes the subjectivity and agency of the women in Matisse’s paintings in a translational construction of a feminist, post-odalisque subjectivity. The archival practices that have construed the predicament of modernity, namely the museum and the canons of ‘modern’ art, come undone in a post-colonial and feminist critique of the dominant narrative of modern (Western) identity.

Keywords: Muslim women’s bodies, polyglossia, archive, Matisse

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s postcolonial counter narratives show a wider world, whose multiple identities and overlapping landscapes reveal the hybrid subjects and complex geographies of globalisation. In his novels Gurnah represents the diasporic conditions of modernity, exploring the issues of belonging and unbelonging and the anxiety of alienation and loss. By the Sea (2001) portrays migrant characters revealing both rootlessness and nostalgia for their homeland, Zanzibar, and effectively investigates the motifs of displacement and memory. It is a paradigmatic novel dealing with the contemporary postcolonial condition, representing transnational movements as well as the double consciousness of diasporic subjects. Ethnic solidarity as well as storytelling provide the means to overcome loneliness and fear.

Keywords: By the Sea, diaspora, Gurnah, migration

This essay shows how the London-born Anglo-Nigerian author Bernardine Evaristo contributes, with her Soul Tourists (2005), to deconstructing modern European nationalist and racially exclusivist models by means of anti-essentialist representational strategies. Centred around the voyage by car and across Europe which, in the late eighties, leads two black Britons, Stanley Williams and Jessie O’Donnell, from England to the Middle East, the novel becomes an imaginative vehicle through which Evaristo represents the black presence as intrinsic to Europe since the 16th century and foregrounds the substantial contribution of black and mixed-race men and women to the cultural development of Western civilisation.

Keywords: Bernardine Evaristo, Black British identities, European history, hibridity

The rise of the aesthetic language of modernism in India was intimately related to the early anticolonial struggle and the birth of the nation. Referring to the transition towards the postcolonial state, in Habitations of Modernity (2002) Dipesh Chakrabarty draws a direct link between modernity, politicality and citizenship. Such triangulation, echoing Western political theory, is at the core of this article: reading Mahasweta Devi’s creative writing against Chakrabarty’s work, I question the possibility of seeing citizenship as the passage to modernity. Devi’s short stories reveal how the acquisition of citizenship did not allow adivasis (indigenous people) to access the promise of ‘development’ that modernity signified during nationalism. Devi’s acute realism denounces the liberal ideal of the citizen as a colonial construct and strips the postcolonial nation of its modern attribution.

Keywords: modernisation, India, citizenship, subaltern

In 2004 Stephen Muecke announced that “indigenous modernity is indeed possible” yet “this modernity is quite different from European modernisation processes since it developed its own forms, later including modernist and postmodernist aesthetics” (2004: 5). Pushing Muecke’s contention further, it may be argued that Indigenous Australian new media artists are rewriting the Western history of time and modernity for contemporary audiences. The growing number of Indigenous Australian new media art projects counters the digital revolution rhetoric of the 1990s which assumed that new media were going to push aside and absorb old media. Conversely, Indigenous Australian new media artists unsettle the unmarked norms of modernity’s historicity (i.e. of what counts as part of its history) through a critical appropriation of “multimodal” discourse (Kress 2010).

Keywords: aborigenal art, Indigenous new media, convergence, multimodality