Documentary Modernism: Worldly Sympathies, Ideal Collectivities and Dissenting Individualism
Irina Rasmussen
Chapter from the book: Helgesson, S et al. 2018. World Literatures: Exploring the Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Exchange.
Part of
Chapter from the book: Helgesson, S et al. 2018. World Literatures: Exploring the Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Exchange.
This chapter approaches the nexus of cosmopolitanism and nationalism as it is actualised in a range of aesthetic documentary projects from the 1920s and 30s. It argues that a range of varied documentary modernist projects implement cosmopolitan practices of collection, assemblage and reportage in order to remap the world in formations conductive to universal social justice. It shows, firstly, how the modernist production of cosmopolitan value in aestheticized documentary cultural forms energises the sociopolitical imaginary of the period and, secondly, how aesthetic modernisms’ response to the cosmopolitics of the interwar period anticipates contemporary debates in the early 21st century about globalisation and world literature.
Rasmussen, I. 2018. Documentary Modernism: Worldly Sympathies, Ideal Collectivities and Dissenting Individualism. In: Helgesson, S et al (eds.), World Literatures. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16993/bat.q
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Published on Nov. 22, 2018