The porous and the partisan: modernist continentality and the red thread

Kolocotroni, V. (2024) The porous and the partisan: modernist continentality and the red thread. In: Hoffmann, J. (ed.) Modernism and its Continents. Series: Hopkins studies in modernism. Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore. (Accepted for Publication)

Abstract

Two years after visiting James Joyce in Paris to discuss the prospect of filming an adaptation of Ulysses, in 1931 Sergei Eisenstein traveled to Mexico to shoot the epic ¡Que viva México!, a major undertaking he was never to complete in his lifetime. Wandering around the halls and staircases of Mexico City’s Secretariat of Public Education marveling at the sprawling murals of Diego Rivera and their paratactic narrative of Mexican and world revolution, the Soviet filmmaker still thought of the Irish writer, seeing on the walls the blue colour on the cover of Joyce’s ‘persecuted chef d’oeuvre’ and the vigor and vitality of his sentences. Eisenstein’s cross-reading of Rivera’s ‘incessantly flowing’ indigenous forms with Joyce’s ‘no commas, no stops’, repurposing genre, language and continental situation into a purposeful vanguard synchronicity, points to a gaze that is both porous and partisan. Zooming in on two more episodes of mediation and cross-purposing of continental specificities, featuring Walter Benjamin and Asjā Lacis in Naples in 1925 and Isadora Duncan in Moscow in 1921, this chapter will trace the role of the porous and partisan gaze in threading geographical, political and cultural difference into vanguard visions, and argue for its usefulness as a critical lens through which to reflect on the modernism-generating power of those visions as well as their blind spots.

• Item Type: Book Sections
• Status: Accepted for Publication
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Kolocotroni, Dr Vassiliki
• Authors: Kolocotroni, V.
• Subjects: D History General and Old World > D History (General) > D901 Europe (General); D History General and Old World > DK Russia. Soviet Union. Former Soviet Republics; N Fine Arts > NX Arts in general; P Language and Literature > PR English literature
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies > English Literature
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press