The global circulation of ideas advances with the publication of the Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, vol. 5, no. 1, edited by Laurie Scheyer from Hunan Normal University. As with last year’s special forum on “Modernity @ Zero Hour,” this issue contains a set of papers—distributed through a capacious issue with numerous related themes—that developed in an online webinar, “Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour,” which took place during conditions of COVID in March 2021. The webinar itself, thanks to Zoom, was itself global and involved participants from seven time zones, from New Zealand to Moscow. It also could include a performance event, the in-time screening of Carla Harryman’s “Occupying Theodor W. Adorno’s Music and New Music: A Re-Performance,” originally proposed for the canceled EAM conference in Fall 2020. In this best of all possible worlds, our proposed event went forward; papers were presented, comments generated, drafts revised, and the results are now distributed to the world at large. Below I list the contents and link to the six papers that were the result of that effort, seen as part of a larger conversation in a global framework. Indeed my own contribution, “The Global Archive and the Future of Poetics,” looks at the form of the global exhibition after the German documenta, but it easily applies to what we are doing here.

Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures
vol. 5, no. 1 (June 2021)

Table of contents

Claudia Franken [here]
“Zero Hour in Arno Schmidt’s Triptych Leviathan;
or, An Adventure Allegorist at the Crossroads”

Christine Blaettler
“Cloud Aesthetics: An Epistemological Challenge,
Aesthetics from Below, and the Question of History”

Amy Abugo Ongiri
“Black ‘Crime,’ Public Hysteria, and the Cinema
of Containment: Black Cinema Aesthetics from Willie Dynamite
to The Interrupters and a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert”

James McCorkle
“Eco-graphy and the Performative Long Poem:
C. S. Giscombe’s Giscome Road and Nikky Finney’s Rice”

Thao Ho
“NOISY SOUNDS! It’s a Listening Affair: Jazz Aesthetic,
Improvisation, and Womanism in M. NourbeSe Philip’s
She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks”

Ben Libman [here]
“The Presencing Tendency: French and American Avant-Garde
Strategies under the Formal Subsumption of Art”

Andrew Haas [here]
“Continuities of Racial Fascism: Louis Till and Black Marxism
in the Pisan Cantos”

Barrett Watten [here]
“The Global Archive and the Future of Poetics”

Liang Luo [here]
“The Global White Snake as Digital Activist Project”

Cristina-Madalina Dinu
“A Comparative Study of the Ghost Literary Motif
in Snow in Midsummer by Guan Hanqing
and Hamlet by Shakespeare”

Sreeparna Das
“A Space Odyssey: Decoding the Reality of Dictatorship
in Carolina de Robertis’s Cantoras”

Ian William Curtis [here]
“A New Historic Youth”: Lettrism, Delinquency,
and the Fait Divers in Postwar France”

Notes on Contributors [here]

Links

Document 84: Modernity @ Zero Hour

Document 86: Thinking Zero Hour

Document 87: Symposium @ Zero Hour

Document 88: Crisis @ EAM

Document 91: Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour