Len Platt

Postmodern literature and race

Postmodern Literature and Race explores the question of how dramatic shifts in conceptions of race in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been addressed by writers at the cutting edge of equally dramatic transformations of literary form. An opening section engages with the broad question of how the geographical and political positioning of experimental writing informs its contribution to racial discourses, while late segments focus on central critical domains within this field: race and performativity, race and the contemporary nation, and post racial futures, With essays on a whole race of contemporary writers, this volume makes an important contribution to our understanding of the politics and aesthetics of contemporary writing.

Modernism and race

The ‘transnational’ turn has transformed modernist studies, positioning race and raciologies, as opposed to ‘the West’, at the very centre of how we now understand modern literature. Modernism and Race is a major contribution to this important theoretical development. It includes an introduction by Len Platt which synthesises in a clear way why and how the idea of race has shaped critical understanding of modernism since the 1950s. The following essays, by leading scholars in the field, includes historical outlines, revaluations of canonical modernist figures like Joyce, Ford, Lewis and Eliot, and accounts of writers sometimes positioned at the margins of modernism — such as Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay and the Holocaust writers Solomon Perel and Gisella Perl.

Berlin/London: London/Berlin — Cultural Transfer, Musical Theatre and the ‘Cosmopolitan’, 1890–1914

During the period 1890–1914, a highly developed system of cultural transfer saw musicals being exchanged on a global scale. Traffic was continental - between such sites as London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin and Budapest - transatlantic and across the Empire. This essay focuses on one of the least explored legs of the network, London/Berlin. The aims are to contribute to contemporary debates about cosmopolitanism and its relations with formations of modernism, to shed light on how the culture industry was formulated at this early period and to examine relations between Britain and Germany in the ‘Age of Empire’, usually viewed in terms of an essential and almost unbridgeable Anglo-German antagonism, but which, against a more everyday reality, were considerably more ambiguous and nuanced.

Writing London and the Thames Estuary

Drawing on a broad range of cultural materials including novels, film, theatre and tourist literature, Writing London and the Thames Estuary by Len Platt traces the making of the Thames estuary as margin by the London metropolis.

The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literatutre

The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature offers a comprehensive survey of he field, from its emergence in the mid twentieth century to the present. It offers an unparalleled examination of all facets of postmodern writing that helps readers to understand how fiction and poetry, literary criticism, feminist theory, mass media and the visual and fine arts have characterised the historical development of postmodernism.

The Major Phase: Peak Postmodernism, 1973–1990

Rebranding Another big bang: on July 15, 1972, at 3:32 p.m. (according to Charles Jencks), several high-rise blocks of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louis, Missouri, were demolished, signaling (not for the first or last time) the failure of International Style modernist architecture to deliver what it promised – safe, healthful, inexpensive, and above all rational housing for the masses. Waiting in the wings to supplant modernism was a new mode of architecture, one hospitable to such un modernist qualities as popular appeal, historical allusion, legible symbolism, and pleasure: postmodernism. The outlines of this new mode could be glimpsed in a book of that same year, the manifesto Learning from Las Vegas by the architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. That, at least, is Charles Jenckss story about the (literal) implosion of modernist architecture and the timely rise of postmodernism. It is a compelling one, especially in light of the fact that Pruitt-Igoes prize-winning architect, Minoru Yamasaki, also designed New Yorks World Trade Center, the North Tower of which opened in December 1972; the dedication of the entire complex would follow the next year. Buildings whose destruction almost thirty years apart frames the postmodern era, both designed by the same architect – the coincidence is uncanny (Paperny, 2010; Williams, 2011, 94). As compelling as it is, Jenckss story is perhaps too good to be entirely true. For one thing, as Jencks admitted all along, the failure of Pruitt-Igoe is only one of a multitude of symptoms of modernist architectures exhaustion in the late sixties and seventies, if a strikingly iconic one. Moreover, the specific time of Pruitt-Igoes destruction – 3:32 p.m. – which contributes so much to the storys air of circumstantial precision, turns out to have been fabricated (Jencks, 2011, 27). In any case, the demolition of the complex, though begun on that day in 1972, actually continued into the next year, 1973 (Killen, 2006, 211).

Popular Musical Theatre, Cultural Transfer, Modernities: London/Berlin, 1890-1930

Between the years 1890 to 1930 a large number of popular musical theatre shows—musical comedies and operettas—were exchanged between London and Berlin. This essay represents the first attempt by scholars to examine this cultural practice. It outlines the implications of cultural transfer and exchange in terms of theatre history generally and the more detailed mechanics of show “translation.” Using the figure of adaptation to explore cultural relations between two important metropolitan sites, the essay also examines the wider historical implications of this vibrant exchange culture, which was contemporary with a period when Anglo-German relations were generally characterized by marked hostility.