Uses of Modernism
20-22 September 2023 – Ghent University
From the mid-1990s onwards new approaches to the study of Modernism and its cultural, geographical and chronological boundaries have been developed. This new trend in Modernism studies marks a turning point in thirty years of debates on the categories of High Modernism, Postmodernism and Late Modernism that also questions Western-centred notions of Modernism.
The increasing awareness that modernity and Modernism are fraught with imperialist and (neo)colonial Western-centred perspectives has spurred numerous scholars to critically explore multiple perspectives on the boundaries of Modernism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and the transcultural, transnational and planetary extension of Modernism as a socio-cultural category.
This conference brings together scholars from various disciplines and specialisations to reconsider the Modernist concept in the wake of the post-colonial and global turn in the humanities and social sciences. More specifically, it intends to investigate the category of Modernism from a global, interartistic, interdisciplinary perspective, as well as to discuss its contemporary uses and values within the on-going decanonization and decolonization of research and teaching agendas.
