Conference report written by Ekaterina Morozova
The second symposium of the Global Modernism Network, organised by Eva Ulrike Pirker, Birgit Van Puymbroeck, and Mantra Mukim, took place at Vrije Universiteit Brussel on 19 – 20 June 2025, under the title Of Intermediality. Extending the dialogue opened in Paris, where the network’s inaugural meeting circled the theme Of Precariousness, this gathering turned its attention to the ways in which different media intersect and converse within literary spaces.
Framed by the EUTOPIA alliance, the symposium brought together scholars from across the globe: from VUB, Stellenbosch University, CY Cergy Paris, the University of Warwick, King’s College, London, and Washington University in St. Louis, each approaching the question of intermediality through distinct regional, historical, and aesthetic lenses. Their aim was to show how literature enters into dialogue with other forms: music, radio, visual arts: prints, painting, sketches. What emerged was a network of connections, not only between media, but between geographies and histories, too.
Much of the discussion turned toward the legacies of colonialism and their interrelation with modernist form and authorship, how these legacies continue to shape what counts as world literature, and who is allowed to speak within it. Case studies ranged widely: from South Africa to the South Pacific, from the Black Atlantic to India and Japan. Running through them all was a shared attention to the way modernist aesthetics remain charged by questions of identity, representation, and knowledge-making — then and now.
The symposium did not seek to flatten these complexities. Rather, it opened up space for them: for interconnection, contradiction, and layered inquiry. What began as a conversation about media widened into an exploration of power, place, identity, and perception, setting profound opportunities for future research in the World of Global Modernism.
The first day of the symposium offered six presentations, beginning with Uhuru Phalafala’s Jazz as Abstraction of Extraction: Improvisation at the End of the World. The scholar focused on the question of how art and different media can serve as instruments for building intergenerational, relational identity, using examples from South African culture. Exploring the world of music and ritual as a point of departure for tracing lineage and heritage, she offered beautiful examples from Jol’iinkomo: a convergence of poetry, music, and visual art — a practice of singing and producing as a way of being.
Moving from music and ritual to another form of intermedial connection, collage, Peggy Pacini presented her project : Semina: Wallace Berman’s Art of Dis-/In-semination. She raised questions about the kind of space visual artist Wallace Berman tried to create through his handmade magazine Semina — a now rarely seen production of imaginative space, printed in just 200 copies per issue. The magazine brought together photographs, poems, fragments of prose, drawings, and collages by various artists. It was presented as a space in which Berman explored the tension between word and image, challenging narrative through materiality and intertextuality.
The question of the complex and productive relationship between visual art and text was followed by Suzanne Scafe’s presentation, Frank Bowling’s Modernist Manifesto. Focusing on visual techniques and raising questions about the kinds of narratives they produce, while also interrogating how we speak about art, which is meant to be experienced visually, Scafe approached Bowling’s modernist techniques through a postcolonial reading. She argued that by attending closely to Bowling’s methods of layering and ‘pentimenti’, painting over a previous image, and to the representation of light in contrast to, or in interplay with, darkness, one can trace in his abstract works an ongoing engagement with the history and politics of the Black Atlantic.
The discussion of form and collage continued with Nick Lawrence’s presentation, Ashbery, Debord, Fanon: The Content of Appropriated Form. Raising the question of the relationship between political climate, revolution, and collage in art, Lawrence examined John Ashbery’s second volume of poems, The Tennis Court Oath, within the charged political energies of late-1950s Paris. He drew connections to the influence of cut-up techniques, Guy Debord’s experiments with cutting up maps of Paris in search of subversive itineraries of the dérive, and Frantz Fanon’s anticolonial interventions, particularly his advocacy of the therapeutic function of violent resistance to colonial rule. Lawrence argued that understanding the political context as a kind of ‘medium’, in this case, the ongoing Algerian Revolution, the collapse of the Fourth Republic in May 1958, and the 1962 Évian Accords, may offer a relevant way of reading Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath, its jump-cutting experiments, and the broader transmedial restlessness that characterised the period.
David Reckford’s project, Today in the United States of America, or Any Place Else for That Matter: Ted Berrigan, the New York Poets, and their Small Magazines of the 1960s, turned to questions of collaboration, poem-paintings, and the poetic enterprise within artistic communities in New York around 1960. Focusing on C magazine, founded by Ted Berrigan, the presentation explored the interdependence of artistic practice and community formation, political positioning, and collaboration. Many of the artists published in C were relatively unknown before appearing in its pages. The magazine’s varying visual styles, particularly in its covers and curated collections, were presented as part of a broader intermedial reading, highlighting its function as a collaborative artwork in itself. Reckford concluded his talk with the announcement of his forthcoming book.
The final presentation of the day was given by Eva Ulrike Pirker, who introduced her project Homes and Exiles: South African Artist Selby Mvusi’s Journeys across Disciplines and Media (1929–1967). Pirker highlighted Mvusi’s remarkable range of artistic expression: writing, painting, sculpture, architecture, and music, laying a strong foundation for an intermedial reading of his work and opening up questions about the relatedness of these artistic forms. Mvusi’s tendency to work across media was linked to questions of belonging and artistic engagement, shaped by his movement across countries and his experiences of exile and separation. Pirker also drew attention to Mvusi’s worldmaking practice and his precarious position within the art historical narrative of Global Modernism, particularly at a moment when African and African diasporic modernist figures are being ‘rediscovered’ across the global museum and gallery landscape.
At the end of the first day, participants were offered a non-academic perspective through an excursion to BOZAR and the exhibition When We See Us, curated by Koyo Kouoh and Tandazani Dhlakama. The visit provided an opportunity to reflect on the intermedial questions raised throughout the day, this time surrounded by artworks rather than discussion. The exhibition celebrated the ways in which Black artists have long explored the human body and figuration, offering a moving and resonant close to the first day of the symposium.
The second day of the symposium opened with Anca Parvulescu’s project Have You Seen a Man without a Face? Facialisation and Global Modernism in Kōbō Abe’s The Face of Another. Through an analysis of Abe’s novel, Parvulescu raised philosophical questions around facial alienation and the ethics of the face, themes with clear resonance in contemporary society. The project sought to trace a dialogue between Abe’s text and Kōjin Karatani’s Origins of Japanese Literature, particularly concerning the “invention” of the face in modern Japanese literature. Referring to the traditional significance of the face in Japanese culture, Parvulescu presented modernist literature as offering an infrastructure for the global circulation of the face as a system of signification.
The discussion of Japanese art was followed by Cedric Van Dijck’s presentation New Life: Hope Mirrlees and Tsuguharu Foujita. Van Dijck explored the connections and influences between the poet Hope Mirrlees and the visual artist Tsuguharu Foujita, who had relocated from Japan to Paris. He positioned the radical visual and material features of Mirrlees’s poetry within the context of Foujita’s art (itself shaped by Egyptian and Assyrian visual traditions) opening up rich possibilities for intermedial and intercultural readings. The presentation marked the beginning of a larger project that seeks to propose new ways of reading the poem’s formal and thematic experimentation in relation to cross-cultural encounters: French, Japanese, Assyrian, Egyptian, and visual.
The conversation on intermediality continued with Birgit Van Puymbroeck’s presentation Angela Carter’s Come Unto These Yellow Sands: Life Writing and Ekphrasis. Van Puymbroeck explored how three dimensions of art: text, painting and sound, come together in Carter’s radio play, which gives voice to Richard Dadd’s painting and invites an intermedial reading. By examining the functions of ‘dramatic ekphrasis’ in Carter’s work, the project tried to challenge the visual bias present in much of the research on intermediality and life writing, highlighting both the complexity of intermedial processes and the radio play as an underexplored yet highly relevant form.
The intermedial questions concerning the interrelatedness of visual art and literature were further explored in Jarad Zimbler’s presentation Make Me a Mask: Wood, Bronze, and Words. Approaching intermediality as a mode of practice rather than a set of references, Zimbler examined the relationship between sculptural objects and verbal art within African contexts and postcolonial studies. Rejecting the notion of literary descriptions as mere representations of wooden masks and bronze heads, the project reflected on the otherness of the plastic arts in relation to literature, proposing instead that literature can be understood as a form of carving in its own right. This was exemplified through a reading of Masks by Edward Kamau Brathwaite.
The next presentation turned to the question of the “influence” of European modernism on Oceanic literature, with Caitlin Vandertop’s Cannibalising Modernism in the Oceanic Novel: Modernist Texts and Indigenous Materials. The project examined the uneven relationship between modernist cultural forms and Indigenous ‘materials’, and how this dynamic continues to shape our understanding of cultural influence. Focusing on The Crocodile by Vincent Eri, the first author to be studied as a Papua New Guinean novelist, Vandertop raised questions about the intersections of European modernism and the modern labour regime in Papua New Guinea. The presentation highlighted the division between those whose hands are ‘free’ and those burdened with social-reproductive labour. Vandertop also discussed Eri’s own anxiety regarding his novel’s role in the textualised export of Indigenous materials, pointing to the persistent inequalities that shape the relations of world-literary property.
The final presentation of the second day, and of the symposium,was delivered by Mantra Mukim, who introduced his project Fugitive Poem: Bharat Bhawan Archive, Bhopal Gas Tragedy, and World Poetry. Continuing the symposium’s engagement with questions of inequality and cultural production in the aftermath of historical trauma, Mukim presented the intermedial poetry of five poets invited to the World Poetry Festival in 1989, held in the wake of the Bhopal gas tragedy. The archival material consisted of the original poems (with translations from various languages into English provided by the scholar), each accompanied by the poets’ own drawings. Through this project, Mukim offered a promising basis for intermedial analysis and tried to provide a material reading of the archive as it unfolds in a singular convergence of industrial disaster, Cold War geopolitics, and global poetic expression.
To conclude, the participants and organisers of the symposium shared two rich days of profound and promising projects offering intermedial and postcolonial readings of world modernism. The symposium proved to be a productive format for presenting ideas and engaging in meaningful discussion. Most importantly, scholars emphasised the generative nature of the symposium and its positive impact on each project. In this way, continuing the modernist tradition of collaboration, the symposium became a modernist space of its own: encouraging exchange, dialogue, and the promise of further successful meetings in the future.