'When Was Modernism?': Towards an Interstitial Cartography of Australia’s Modernity

Modernist writers struggled, in Ezra Pound’s words, to “make it new” (1925). “Modern” derives from the latin modo, which means current, yet the term modern is frequently used in literary criticism to refer to the avant-garde connotations of literary works of the period between the 1890s and the 1930s (Childs 2008). Thus, as Raymond Williams notes in the lecture “When Was Modernism?” (1987), the term “modern” has shifted from meaning “now” to “just now” as it was named and valued after the event to construct a vision of modernism that suited modernists themselves. Significantly, this prejudicial conception of modernism has also implied the exclusion of other modernisms according to a non-differential notion of time which does not recognize disjunctive, “borderline” temporalities of modernity. Yet, recent studies have questioned the closure and “purity” of modernism, opening the understanding of modernism to the acknowledgement of its entangled, hybrid histories (Mercer 2005). Following the latter line of thought, this paper hopes to demonstrate that the contribution of Australian Indigenous voices to modernism forces us to question previous temporal and spatial definitions of the term itself. Modernist forms have been appropriated in recent Australian Indigenous literary works, such as Kim Scott’s Benang (1999) and Lionel Fogarty’s collection of poetry Mynyung Woolah Binnung (2004), to explore the worst excesses of twentieth century Australian modernity, haunted by systematic practices of eugenics, sexual exploitation of Indigenous domestic workers, child removal and linguistic genocide. Hence, by attending to the proximity of the “masters, mistresses and slaves” of Australian modernity (Gilroy 1993), these works represent the uneven and unequal construction of modernity and enable the confrontation of that “difficult borderline, the interstitial experience between what we take to be the image of the past and what is in fact involved in the passing of time and the passage of meaning” (Bhabha 1996: 60).