Modernism

The later history of the movement involved its circulation into new cultural settings around the world, where it met other forms of modernity and became at once an influence and an object of resistance. The Harlem Renaissance, an efflorescence of African-American literature after World War I, emerged out of local and national contexts—specifically, the consolidation of cultural possibility in New York after the Great Migration northward. It generated experimental forms (for instance, in Jean Toomer's Cane), but it also accommodated traditional styles, as in sonnets of Claude McKay. The Harlem Renaissance was not a product of high modernism; rather, it was a parallel movement, intersecting and diverging, that obliges us to recognize a wider, more differentiated history of cultural modernity.

Late-twentieth-and early-twenty-first-century scholarship has shown how modernism played a double-sided role in the national independence movements before and after World War II. The European provenance of celebrated masterworks could make them appear distant and oppressive, tainted by the imperial past. But within the context of the traditional curriculum of the colonial schools, Modernism was also taken as a force of resistance to a canon still derived from nineteenth-century achievement. In the work of Chinua Achebe in Nigeria or Ngugi wa Thiong'o in Kenya complicated double inheritance appears: modernism is at once acknowledged and appropriated, but it has no special privilege alongside other literary aims. It combines with storytelling traditions and national aspirations (Gikandi, 1987). Other studies have shown that in the Caribbean the formal techniques refined by modernism converged with styles of experiment associated with the hybrid history of the islands (Gikandi, 1992). The "creolization" of everyday speech created regional contexts for modernist art, and the conditions of social conflict brought resistance to the elite prestige of European high modernism.

Modernism came to no definite end. The call to "make it new," the use of formal discontinuity, the willingness to compose and present difficult works of art, all continued through the end of the twentieth century. But in the last half of that century, the assimilative power of culture diminished the challenge of such work. A movement that had offered an oppositional principle and a call for transformation found itself part of the routine of shock, celebrity, and fashion.