Toxicity & the Avant-Garde
Modernism/Modernity Print+ Proposal, 2025
Editors: Sara Crangle (Sussex) & Juno Jill Richards (Yale)
Abstracts due: March 15, 2026
Full papers due: September 15, 2026
The historical avant-garde emerged from lineages Anglo-Eurocentric and patriarchal, was reared upon a steady diet of combative self-aggrandisement, and boastfully resisted sentimentality and its concomitant sensitivities. Where extant, vanguard vulnerability has often been a performance staged masterfully upon bodies deemed lesser, be it the homosocial passivity of decadent languor, the despised colonized and working-class masses, or the prone, naked female form hung from the ceiling of the Parisian Center de recherches surréalistes in the 1920s.
Taking the generative value of a vanguard ethos as read, this Modernism/modernity Print+ cluster will diagnose coercions and elisions endemic to its multiple genealogies, anatomising how the oppositional stance of avant-gardists corresponded with masculinist, homophobic, or racial toxicities, a multivalent term connoting infection, contagion, antidote. Contributions of up to 3,000 words will examine indicative modernist instances in which political or artistic idealism fell prey to the reactionary while keeping in view contemporary transnational debates about fascism and post-fascism. Ultimately, this conversation looks to better understand the dominance of the ultra-right today through a consideration of how this orientation emerged not just amidst self-declared conservatives, but as a long historical and enabling practice of liberal selfhood.
Redressing a gap in the expansionist turn in critical avant-garde studies, this developing cluster considers the consequences of what Renato Poggioli pathologized in 1962 as a vanguard “aggressive impulse” that “continually reappears in intermittent, spasmodic manifestations, with the insane ferocity of terroristic violence”. It revisits such Cold War-era claims through Cathy Park Hong's “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde” (2014), which attends to “the specious [vanguard] belief that renouncing subject and voice is anti-authoritarian,” alongside the “luxurious opinion” that anyone “can casually slip in and out of identities like a video game avatar, when there are those who are consistently harassed, surveilled, profiled, or deported for who they are.” Park Hong's celebrated intervention demands analysis of how racialized vanguardists past and present have been silenced, reduced, and censored.
Extending Park Hong's call for complex history taking to a broad political field, this Print+ collection focuses on processes insidious and bellicose by which avant-gardes can constitutively imbibe and propagate the very exclusions they critique. In so doing, contributors are asked to diagnose specific examples of noxious, virulent excisions or manipulations of memberships, messaging, and operations to recover, recognize, and reconsider methodologies of historical vanguard practice and criticism alike.
Themes or lenses to adopt might include: cultural repressions; shock as value; the politics of recuperation; elite capture; cyclicality; group dynamics; ecologies; intergenerational trauma; prescription versus action; temporalities of endurance, brevity, sustainability; capacities for change. The survivalist urgencies of indigeneity and the Global South are key: as Françoise Vergès maintains, decolonial feminism is a “contribution[ion] to the struggle, undertaken for centuries by part of humanity, to assert its right to existence.”
“Toxicity and the Avant-Garde” courts a microfocus strategically resistant to grand historical and aesthetic chronologies or the efficacies of a falsely universalized avant-gardism. This collection will examine case studies of vanguard pathologies through time and diverse perspectives, attending closely to regional site-specificity and the material contours of lived experience. Unique to vanguard studies, this special issue does not aim at a single antidote or a reparative critical model. Instead, this consideration looks to stay with the trouble of toxicity in its many ugly, wounding guises as a way to better understand the rise of authoritarian politics in our current moment.
For recent examples of essay clusters on the Modernism/modernity Print Plus platform, see: https://modernismmodernity.org/about.
Abstracts of 250 words accompanied by short biographies are due by March 15, 2026. Completed essays of approximately 3,000 words will be due September 15, 2026. Once essays are submitted, the entire cluster will undergo peer review.
Please submit abstracts and inquiries to sc299@sussex.ac.uk.
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