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Periods are entities we love to hate. Yet we cannot do without them. . . . Consequently, the uses to which we put periods depend crucially on how we delimit them. . . . The art lies in the cutting.
Marshall Brown1
Coloniality, in other words, is the hidden face of modernity and its very condition of possibility.
Walter D. Mignolo2
. . . to announce the general end of modernity even as an epoch, much less as an attitude or an ethos, seems premature, if not patently ethnocentric, at a time when non-Western people everywhere begin to engage critically their own hybrid modernities.
Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar3
Einstein's theory of relativity forged a major paradigm shift in theorizing the relationship between time and space, one that systematized what some in the arts and philosophy of modernism were already beginning to articulate early in the century. More recently, cultural studies theorist Lawrence Grossberghas advocated what he calls "the timing of space and the spacing of time" as a precondition for a new "geography of beginnings."4 Regarding space and time not as absolutes but rather as cognitive categories of human thinking, I want to build on these theories of relativity to examine the spatial politics of historical periodization-the way that generalizations about historical periods typically contain covert assumptions about space that privilege one location over others. Fredric Jameson's imperative-"Always historicize!"-leads unthinkingly into binaries of center/periphery unless it is supplemented with the countervailing imperative-Always spatialize!5 Jameson's widely influential essay, "Modernism and Imperialism," introduces the spatiality of global imperialism into his discussion of literary history and argues for imperialism as constitutive of modernist aesthetics in the West. But for him, modernism was over and done with by the end of World War II, to be followed by postmodernism characterized by a shift into the multinational corporate flows of late capitalism and new forms of imperialism.6 Many others, including Walter Mignolo as evident in the epigraph, would agree with Jameson's insistence that Western modernity is inextricably tied to Western colonialism in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. However, I consider Jameson's spatialization of modernism incomplete.
A full spatialization of modernism changes the map, the canon, and the periodization of modernism dramatically. Moreover, rethinking the periodization of modernism requires abandoning what I...