Introduction

Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism examines how first- and second-generation postcolonial writers responded to the experience of modernism within the context of an increasingly globalized world. The introduction traces the critical reception of modernism over roughly the last forty years, highlighting Edward Said’s and Fredric Jameson’s highly influential critiques of it. In response, some scholars challenged the claim that modernism was necessarily complicit with colonialism and imperialism—as Begam and Moses did in Modernism and Colonialism (2007)—while others, following Mao and Walkowitz’s “The New Modernist Studies” (2008), reconceived the field, temporally and spatially expanding its boundaries beyond Europe and the 1890–1950 period. The canoncial realignments that the New Modernism Studies inspired have generally taken place under four broad rubrics: Geomodernisms, Transnational Modernisms, Global Modernism and Planetary Modernisms. This Introduction examines all these critical approaches, as well as David James and Urmila Seshagiri’s response to them in their influential essay “Metamodernism” (2014).