Decentring the Avant-Garde presents a collection of articles dealing with the topography of the avant-garde. The focus is on different responses to avant-garde aesthetics in regions traditionally depicted as cultural, geographical and linguistic peripheries. Avant-garde activities in the periphery have to date mostly been described in terms of a passive reception of new artistic trends and currents originating in cultural centres such as Paris or Berlin. Contesting this traditional view, Decentring the Avant-Garde highlights the importance of analysing the avant-garde in the periphery in terms of an active appropriation of avant-garde aesthetics within different cultural, ideological and historical settings. A broad collection of case studies discusses the activities of movements and artists in various regions in Europe and beyond. The result is a new topographical model of the international avant-garde and its cultural practices.
Per Bäckström / Benedikt Hjartarson: Rethinking the Topography of the International Avant-Garde. Introduction Rethinking the Dichotomy of Centre-Periphery
Partha Mitter: Modern Global Art and Its Discontents
Éva Forgács: Romantic Peripheries. The Dynamics of Enlightenment and Romanticism in East-Central Europe
Daina Teters: Peculiarities in the Use of the Concepts Centre and Periphery in Avant-Garde Strategies
Laura Winkiel: Postcolonial Avant-Gardes and the World System of Modernity / Coloniality
Piotr Piotrowski: Avant-Garde Art in Post-Communist Central Europe
Impact of the Periphery on the Centre
Malte Hagener: Mushrooms, Ant Paths and Tactics. The Topography of the European Film Avant-Garde
Thomas Hunkeler: Claiming Dada for the French
Vojtěch Lahoda: Migration of Images. Private Collections of Modernism and Avant-Garde and the Search for Cubism in Eastern Europe
Thomas Hackner: Worlds Apart? The Japan-Europe Historical Avant-Garde Relationship
Central Role(s) of the Periphery
Lisa Otty: “An Eccentric Homespun Avant-Gardist”. Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘Northern’ Radicalism, and the Scottish Renaissance Movement
Hanna Horsberg Hansen: Sami Artist Group 1978–1983. Otherness or Avant-Garde?
Benedikt Hjartarson: Anationalism and the Search for a Universal Language. Esperantism and the European Avant-Garde
Konstantin Dudakov-Kashuro: Revising the Aporias of the Avant-Garde
Contributors
Index