34 - Indigenous Modernism

Summary

While new modernist scholars are generally keen to recover and integrate the tradition’s marginalized voices, its implements for doing so remain relatively crude. As some critics have argued, the “pluralizing of modernisms” is not sufficient without a more granular accounting of the mutually constitutive developments of race/racism and modernism writ large. More supple instruments for reading race into modernism have thus acknowledged settler colonialism and racial capitalism as the underlying, instigating features of both modernity as a historical process and modernism as the intellectual and cultural responses to inhabiting its conditions and institutions. Summoning Indigeneity into modernism’s operations frameworks forces us to read against the typical grain of alterity, resistance, or transcendence. This chapter surveys the state of such field-shifting projects while arguing for further innovations that would more radically place – and deconstruct – the idea of “Indigeneity” within the crucible of modernism.