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Behind the Masks of Modernism: Global and Transnational Perspectives is an anthology that studies global modernisms through the lens of masks. The manuscript explores regional, national and transnational modernisms as they are represented through literature, art, history, architecture, drama, and cultural studies. We are invested in recent studies of global modernisms and the “transnational turn” which de-centers modernism from its Western origins. In dialogue with other recent works on global modernisms such as Mark Wollaeger’s anthology, The Oxford Handbook to Global Modernisms, Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel’s Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity, Dilip Gaonkar’s Alternative Modernities, and Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large, our text uses the common trope of masks as a comparative scaffolding that explores how artists and writers produced their works in moments of emerging modernity, aesthetic sensibility, and deep societal transformation. From masking as a method of sustaining tradition in the midst of new technological advances, to the motif of theatre masks as representing one’s entry into modernity, to the masking of one’s relationship to authoritative national influences revolutionizing cultural education, our analyses of masks uncovers the dialogical nature of regional modernisms and highlights key differences that stem from local cultural spheres within a unified, cross-cultural discussion about a topic of interest across these differences.

African identities have been written and rewritten about in both British and African literature for decades. These revisions have opened up new formulations of what it really means to be British or African. By comparing texts by authors from African and British backgrounds across a wide variety of political orientations, the book analyzes the deeper relationships between colonizer and colonized. It brings issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality into the analysis, providing new ways for cultural scholars to think about how empire and colony have impacted one another from the late eighteenth century through the decades following World War II. In these comparisons, the book focuses on commonalities rather than differences. By examining the work of writers including Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, T. S. Eliot, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Zoe Wicomb, Yvette Christianse, and Chris van Wyk, the book demonstrates how Britain's former African colonies influence British culture just as much as African culture was influenced by British colonization. The book brings a uniquely informed perspective to the topic, having lived in South Africa, Tanzania, and Great Britain, and having taught African literature for over a decade. The book demonstrates expert knowledge of local cultural history from 1945 to the present, in both Africa and Britain.

From the rainforests of Costa Rica and the Amazon to the windswept lands of Tierra del Fuego, this book discusses natural settings within contemporary Latin American novels as they depict key moments of environmental change or crisis in the region from nineteenth-century imperialism to the present. By integrating the use of futuristic novels, the book pushes the ecocriticism discussion beyond the realm of “nature writing.” It avoids the clichés of literary nature and reminds readers that today's urban centers are also part of Latin America and its environmental crisis. One of the first books to apply ecocriticism to Latin American fiction, this text argues that literature can offer readers a deeper understanding of the natural world and humanity's place in it. The book demonstrates that ecocritical readings of Latin American topics must take into account social, racial, and gender injustices. It also addresses postapocalyptic science fiction that speaks to a fear of environmental collapse and reminds North American readers that the environments of Latin America are rich and diverse, encompassing both rural and urban extremes.

This volume explores how recent Brazilian lyric engages with its counterparts throughout the Western Hemisphere in an increasingly globalized world. The study focuses on the years from 1985 to the present and examines poetic output—from song and visual poetry to discursive verse—across a range of media. At the core of the author's work are in-depth examinations of five phenomena: the use of the English language and the reception of American poetry in Brazil; representations and engagements with U.S. culture, especially with respect to film and popular music; epic poems of hemispheric solidarity; contemporary dialogues between Brazilian and Spanish American poets; and the innovative musical, lyrical, and commercially successful work that evolved from the 1960s movement Tropicalia.

This book addresses the question of how Latino/Latina literature wrestles with the panethnic and trans-racial implications of the “Latino” label. Refusing to take latinidad (Latino-ness) for granted, the book lays the groundwork for a sophisticated understanding of the various manifestations of Latino identity. It examines texts by prominent Chicano/Chicana, Dominican American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American writers—including Julia Alvarez, Cristina García, Achy Obejas, Piri Thomas, and Ana Castillo—and concludes that a pre-existing group does not exist. The book instead argues that much recent Latino/Latina literature presents a vision of tentative, forged solidarities in the service of particular and sometimes even local struggles. It shows that even magical realism can figure as a threat to collectivity, rather than as a signifier of it, because magical connections—to nature, between characters, and to Latin American origins—can undermine efforts at solidarity and empowerment. In the book's reading of both fictional and cultural narratives, the possibility that Latino identity may be even more elastic than the authors may recognize is suggested.