Modernity @ Zero Hour: 
The Question of the Universal
and the Origins of the Global Order

ACLA Nonsite Seminar
March 20 and 21, 2020

With the cancelation of ACLA 2020, seminar members have agreed to hold a virtual seminar using conferencing software, across two continents and four time zones, consolidated into two sessions. A small number of invitations for non-presenting participants is available; contact organizer at address below.

Modernity @ Zero Hour I
Friday, March 20, 10:30 AM –1:00 PM

Barrett Watten, Wayne State University: “Modernism @ Zero Hour: Anticipatory, Punctual, and Retrospective Universals”

Maggie Rosenau, University of Colorado, Denver: “Objectivity: A Moment of Intersection Between the Avant-Garde, Denazification of the German Language, and Literary Goals after the Zero Hour”

David Kellogg, Coastal Carolina University: “Modernist Non-Events: Trials of Modernism in Malaya and New York”

Herman Rapaport, Wake Forest University: “Dismantling Modernity”

Modernity @ Zero Hour II
Saturday, March 21, 10:30 AM –1:00 PM

Lauri Scheyer, Hunan Normal University (China), “Modernism and Black Nationalist Identity: The Diaspora Before and Since the Zero Hour”

Parvinder Mehta, Wayne State University, “Fractured Feminine Selves and Autospecular Affect: Global Modernism and the Postcolonial Artist as a Woman in Meena Alexander’s Writings”

Zhai Yitian, SUNY Buffalo: “Sexual Difference, YinYang, and the Critique of Universals in Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray”

Gary Huafan He, Yale University, “Entropy and Utopia @ Zero Hour: Modernity and the Manhattan Project” … More