The Scale of Global Modernisms: Imperial, National, Regional, Local
Author(s): HARSHA RAM
Source: PMLA, Vol. 131, No. 5, Special Topic: Literature in the World (October 2016), pp.
1372-1385
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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[ PMLA
talks from the convention
The Scale of Global
Modernisms:
Imperial, National,
Regional, Local
HARSHA RAM
HARSHA RAM is associate professor of
Slavic and comparative literatures at the
University of California, Berkeley. He is the
author of The Imperial Sublime (U of Wis
consin P, 2003) and is completing a book
on Russian-Georgian cultural relations
during the colonial and revolutionary eras
as a test case for "peripheral" modernism
and uneven modernization.
Center, Periphery, and Beyond
ONE OF THE PRINCIPAL CHALLENGES FACING THE STUDY OF GLOBAL
MODERNISMS, AS OF ANY TRANSNATIONAL CULTURAL PHENOMENON,
is the question of scale. In declaring the contemporary world to be
"one, and unequal," several recent theorizations of world literature
rest on the foundational assumption of a unified—albeit uneven
planetary scale (Moretti, "Conjectures" 56; see also Casanova 62-74;
WREC 6-12). As such they model the dynamic of literary circula
tion across world regions according to the geographic distances, as
well as the disproportionate access to socioeconomic and cultural
resources, that separate and distinguish the world's centers from
their peripheries. These distances, and the inequalities they generate,
are perceived as the necessary by-products of two spatial logics, that
of the expanding world market and that of the modern Westpha
lian system of sovereign and competing nation-states. To posit the
modern world as a singular system has the undoubted merit of ac
knowledging the structural connectedness of its operative inequali
ties, arising from the territorial partition of the globe by the imperial
powers during the final decades of the nineteenth century and from
its simultaneous unification in the wake of accelerating trade and
new infrastructures of transport and communication. Nevertheless,
the premise of a singular modernity (Jameson 142) has been repeat
edly challenged (Chakrabarty 6-16; Mitchell; Scott 113-15; Orsini).
It has been faulted for its developmentalist logic, involving an im
plied or explicit adherence to the related assumptions of linear or
stadial historicism and spatial diffusionism, which together reduce
the negotiated impact of modernity on the world's far-flung regions
to a process of top-down modernization originating in and imposed
by the West. The force of this critique is blunted once the world sys
tem (Wallerstein; Hopkins et al.) is grasped as a profoundly uneven
totality, allowing us to view the multiply differentiated space-times
that coexist in the global present as produced by the imbalances
© 2016 HARSHA RAM
!j72 PMLA 131.5 (2016), published by the Modern Language Association of America
© 2016 HARSHA RAM
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131-5 Harsha Ram
constituting the world system as such (in
literary scholarship, see Anderson, "Moder
nity"; Moretti, Modern Epic 50-52; Wollaeger
13-14; Lazarus 232-41, WREC 1-95; for cor
responding debates in historiography and the
social sciences, see Harootunian 62-63; Coo
per 113-49; Chibber).
But questions remain. Positing a singu
lar modernity, however internally differenti
ated by the dynamics of uneven development,
risks relegating noncapitalist modes of pro
duction and exchange, as well as premodern
cultural formations, to the status of archaic
remnants, anachronisms whose survival is
little more than the outcome of regressive
modernization, which combines the under
development of the periphery with progress
at the core. Ignored are the vitality and lon
gevity of genres such as poetry and oral per
formance in the realm of cultural production:
the easy marriage of world-systems analysis
to the study of the novel betrays a widespread
indifference in contemporary literary studies
to modes of transmission proper to bardic or
folk culture (Beecroft 90). More generally, the
dominant narrative of globalizing capital all
too often brackets the rival path to moder
nity offered by state socialism to many parts
of the world, from the Soviet Union to China,
throughout much of the twentieth century.
The explanatory power, no less than the in
tellectual limits, of systemic theories of world
literature, then, derives in large part from
three related spatial dynamics whose global
reach is assumed to have been definitively
achieved in the twentieth century: the ter
ritorial logic of the nation-state, the deterri
torializing logic of market exchange and its
concomitant division of labor, and the rise
of differentiated structures of knowledge in
which the humanities, as the privileged realm
of cultural specificity (vouchsafed in our field
by close reading), contrast with the universal
izing sweep of the social sciences (Lee 32).
The only widespread alternative to world
systems theory currently practiced in the
study of global modernisms is the network
model of literary production, most promi
nently advanced by David Damrosch, for
whom world literature is "less a set of works
than a network"—in other words, not a fixed
canon of texts but whatever is gained, cultur
ally speaking, when texts undergo translation
and transnational circulation (3). The net
works model advances a set of assumptions
about global space, as highlighted by Susan
Stanford Friedman:
As a reading practice, the circulation ap
proach to world modernisms focuses on the
nature and politics of interconnection and
relationality on a global landscape. It differs
from the center/periphery model by stress
ing the interactive and the dynamic; it as
sumes multiple agencies and centers across
the globe, different nodal points of modern
ist cultural production and the contact zones
and networks among them. It presumes as
well a polycentric model of global modernities
and modernisms based on circular or multi
directional rather than linear flows. (511)
In distinguishing between cultural modern
ism and societal modernization and in as
serting the possibility of multiple local or
regional articulations of the modern, the
networks model of world literature converges
with the social science debate on "local" or
"alternative" modernities (Sahlins; Appadu
rai; Gaonkar; Taylor), of which it might well
be seen as a literary-theoretical correlative.
The networks model and the world
systems model clearly make different as
sumptions as to how power relations find
expression in the cultural-aesthetic realm.
The efficacy of world-systems theory derives
from its ability to account for the dramatic
asymmetries of power that sustained the
world order during the heyday of literary
artistic modernism and to show the abid
ing pertinence of socioeconomic relations to
cultural production. The networks model, by
contrast, acknowledges the force of creative
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The Scale of Global Modernisms: Imperial, National, Regional, Local PMLA
agency and historical contingency, as well as
the interactive dynamism of cross-cultural
dialogue in contradistinction to political and
economic power. The question thus arises,
Are we obliged to choose between these mod
els, thereby dramatizing the epistemological
divide between the articulation of universal
systems proper to the social sciences and the
humanist exploration of cultural particular
ity (Robbins 46)? Or might we suppose that
both models acquire their relative purchase
from an orientation of scale? And if we were
to make these scalar orientations theoreti
cally explicit, might they also be reconciled
as two moments of a necessarily multiscalar
and cross-scalar method of analysis?
Rejecting any notion of space as a natural
given, the empty container of human activ
ity, recent debates in the field of geography
assume that scale, like space, is socially pro
duced. This assumption has led to a critique
of normative models of scale, which perceive
the "conventional scalar units of political ge
ography: neighborhood, city, region, nation
and supranational blocs, and the globe" as
"hierarchically nested territories with well
defined boundaries" (McMaster and Shep
pard 19), each lodged in the other like "so
many Russian dolls" (Brenner et al. 1). In
place of the "traditional, hierarchical concep
tion of political space as a scaffolding of scales
stretching vertically from the global and the
national downward to the regional and the
local" (14), contemporary geographers invite
us to explore the dynamics of scale as the out
come of the historical "contradiction between
expansion and centralization" proper to the
contemporary world system, which is able
to continuously "construct and dismantle
scales" as a means to facilitate the circulation
and restructuring of capital (Smith, "Scale
Bending" 194; Harvey, Spaces). Pertinent here
is the theoretical distinction between vari
ous kinds of scale, of which the geographer
Neil Smith distinguishes at least three: carto
graphic, which "refers to the level of abstrac
tion at which a map is constructed" and also
offers the conceptual grid on which such ter
ritorial entities as empires and nations can be
designated; methodological, involving some
kind of "compromise between the research
problem . . . and the availability of data";
and geographic, which "follows specific pro
cesses in the physical and human landscape"
("Scale" 724-25; see also WREC 131-54 and
Tanoukhi 604). Related to geographic scale
are what Henri Lefebvre somewhat obscurely
called "spaces of representation" ("les espaces
de représentation"; 43), by which he meant the
sites of embodied ritual, leisure, and creative
or celebratory practice whose imaginative
projections are experienced "through images
and symbols" (48-49, 53). Taken in isolation,
cartographic scale tends to assume its epis
temological constraints as an operational
given—with the simultaneous use of mapping
as a conceptual frame—whereas methodolog
ical scale risks becoming a self-limiting reflex
to the empirical challenge posed by a poten
tially infinite quantity of data. The center
periphery model would appear conceptually
related to cartographic scale, whereas the net
works model, with its affinity for rhizomatic,
or horizontal, linkages, seeks to render space
as a series of distinct geographic locales or
transregional itineraries. This essay seeks to
test the usefulness of both models by jumping
between cartographic and geographic scales
and by drawing on multiple archives and
regions that stretch the self-imposed limita
tions of methodological scale. The procedure
of scale jumping, it is hoped, will make scalar
hierarchy analytically and politically visible
as a dynamically unstable system.
The remainder of this essay falls natu
rally into three parts that enact a broader
movement from the cartographic to the geo
graphic. The first explores the efficacy of car
tographic scale by tracing the emergence of
modernism as a programmatic term designat
ing a literary movement in two world regions
habitually called peripheral or semiperipheral
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13 1-5 ]
but seldom if ever discussed together: Latin
America, on the one hand, and the Russian
empire—differentiated into its metropole
and vast hinterlands—on the other. The pre
cocious embrace of modernism by artists in
Latin America and the South Caucasus ap
pears to confirm the operative force of the
center-periphery opposition, even as it inverts
the temporal logic that prioritizes the center.
The second and third parts turn to the geo
graphic scale of local space as an essential
means by which to study the concrete forms
of modernist cultural practice. The city I have
been working on for over a decade is Tbilisi,
formerly Tiflis, the colonial administrative
center of Russian Transcaucasia until the rev
olutions of 1917 and the former and current
capital of Georgia. Tiflis—as it was widely
known throughout the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries—is of interest above all
because of the sheer richness of the cultural
production it witnessed during the czarist and
revolutionary eras, a richness that confirms
the pertinence of imperial and ethnonational
formations, even as it points to hybrid cultural
forms rooted in vernacular practices that were
at once local and transregional (AlSayyad).
Indebted to the goals of political emancipa
tion and cultural modernization unleashed by
the revolutionary era, the cultural production
of Tiflis, like that of many other cities and
regions of the far-flung Russian empire, an
ticipated by several decades the postcolonial
predicament triggered by the decolonization
of Asia and Africa. In this sense, the modern
ist production that arose in Tiflis yields read
ily to aspects of world-systems analysis based
on the opposition of the metropole—whether
Europe or Russia—to its margins. At the same
time, Tiflis was no mere periphery of Russia
or Europe. A long-standing conduit for com
merce, conquest, and cultural flows between
Europe, Russia, and the Islamic Near East, co
lonial and revolutionary Tiflis was equally a
crossroads city linking multiple regions, long
before they became culturally reified into the
Harsha Ram 1375
binary opposition of "East" and "West" (Rapp; £
Garsoïan). Moreover, the political economy r
and cultural life of nineteenth-century Tiflis, -*
largely devoid of many of the distinguishing |
features of capitalist development, raise im- '
portant questions about the persistence of j*"
premodern cultural forms and noncapitalist „
social relations in the related evolution of aes- 3
thetic modernism and historical modernity, «
questions that the premise of a singular mo- *
dernity has not definitively resolved. My hy- §
pothesis, in essence, is that both cartographic
and geographic scales are pertinent, as well
as mutually corrective, to the study of global
modernism. A city of revolutionary agitation
and bohemian excess, Tiflis witnessed at one
and the same time the collision of nation and
empire and the persistence of shifting older
legacies, local and transregional. By reading
the local and the transregional scales into
the more familiar cartography of empire and
nation, I offer elements of a cross-scalar and
multiscalar account of global modernism.
Mapping Modernism: From Latin America
to the Caucasus
It is a curious but significant fact, only sel
dom acknowledged outside Latin American
studies, that the first positive literary-critical
affirmation of modernism as a term, an affir
mation that embraced its wider epochal and
specifically aesthetic traits, emerged not in
France but in Central America. In 1890 the re
nowned Nicaraguan poet Rubén Dario hailed
the "new spirit that today animates a small but
triumphant and proud group of writers and
poets of Spanish America: the spirit of mod
ernism [el modernismo]" (19; cf. Rama; Cra
ven; De Castro 17-32).1 Profoundly inspired
by the French nineteenth-century lyric, Dario
gave a name to a process of literary innova
tion achieved through an optic of contraction,
assimilation, and creative adaptation. From a
Latin American perspective, recent French
poetry, from Victor Hugo to the symbolists,
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1376 The Scale of Global Modernisms: Imperial, National, Regional, Local PM LA
appeared as one continuum of radical innova
tion. In Matei Calinescu's words:
Although Hispanic modernism is often re
garded as a variant of French symbolisme, it
would be much more correct to say that it con
stitutes a synthesis of all the major innovative
tendencies that manifested themselves in late
nineteenth-century France. The fact is that the
French literary life of the period was divided
up into a variety of conflicting schools, move
ments, and even sects ... which failed to real
ize what they had in common. (70)
The term modernism, it seems, first emerged
to designate a programmatic poetics of in
novation out of a geographically peripheral
generalization and local reelaboration of re
cent metropolitan literary currents, currents
viewed as distinct in the European metropo
lis but conflated and repurposed by intellec
tuals from the periphery to meet local needs.
The Latin American avant-garde movements
that succeeded modernismo strove to elabo
rate their own spatial location beyond the
familiar challenge of temporal belatedness.
The Brazilian Oswald de Andrade's playful
"Cannibalist Manifesto" of 1928, like the con
cept of "transculturation" proposed in 1940
by the Cuban ethnographer Fernando Ortiz
(97-102), suggests a self-primitivizing em
brace of the local or the native and a radical
openness to the foreign. Taken together, these
cultural strategies allowed for a more critical
negotiation of the place of Latin America in
global modernity: not different temporalities,
belated or advanced, but a hybrid synchron
icity of disparate elements reconstituted into
new forms (cf. Canclini 76; Franco; Schwarz;
Yüdice; Rosenberg; Aching).
To what extent did this dynamic find an
analogue in the Russian empire? As in Latin
America, Russian literary modernism began
with a sweeping but critical assimilation of re
cent French poetry—but in a domestic context
defined by the didactic social concerns of the
populist intelligentsia (Vengerova). In 1893
Dmitry Merezhkovsky, widely considered one
of Russian modernism's founding figures, in
voked the term "modernist" ("MOflepHncr")
as a gallicism designating any "fashionable"
writer who addressed the "pressing questions
of the day" (175; see also Verret). In keeping
with French and British usage until the twen
tieth century, the term denoted little for Me
rezhkovsky beyond modish topicality. In his
notorious essay "What Is Art?" ("Hto Taicoe
HCKyccTBo?"; 1897-98), Lev Tolstoy displayed
a firm if hostile grasp of French symbolism
and decadence, phenomena he nevertheless
labeled "modern" ("MCKyccTBo Hoßoro Bpe
Memi") rather than "modernist" (87, 91). By
1905, however, without losing its sense of
artistically denoting a diffuse but pervasive
spirit of the times, the Russian term MOflep
HM3M had become more widespread. Andrei
Belyi, a central protagonist of Russian sym
bolism, complained that by modernism,
which was frequently "conflated with symbol
ism," people meant "a multiplicity of literary
schools that have nothing in common" be
yond their shared contemporaneity (29). Like
their French counterparts, the Russian mod
ernists largely eschewed or criticized the term
by which we designate them today, preferring
narrower sectarian self-designations even as
they welcomed the broader achievements of
the new or contemporary art.
Things, however, were quite different
beyond the Caucasus Mountains. By 1915
T'itsian T'abidze, a young Georgian modern
ist poet well versed in contemporary French
and Russian letters, was able to overcome
the reservations of his Russian counterparts
and hail "modernist art" ("QoQÇogftb'gcoo
^OCpnsBgôù") as the "native child of the
city" and "modernism" ("SoçpgftboftSo") as
the expression of "visionary poets" such as the
Frenchman Paul Verlaine, the Belgian Emile
Verhaeren, and the Russian Aleksandr Blok
(28). Similarly, the Georgian maître à penser
Grigol Robakidze did not hesitate to title his
programmatic 1918 Russian-language ac
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13 1-5 ]
count of the school of poetry he championed
"Georgian Modernism" (Tpy3HHCKJiM mo
flepHH3M"): the earliest attempt at articulating
the phenomenon of Georgian modernism to a
wider (pan-Russian) audience thus embraced
a term still controversial in Russia. In their
telescoping of recent literary history and in
their linking of the local (and protonational)
to a global modernist tendency, T'abidze and
Robakidze were essentially updating the pe
ripheral generalization of el modernismo
offered by Dario. To what extent can these
precocious (if causally unrelated) validations
of modernism be seen as the productive out
come of geographic distance from the metro
politan centers of modernity?
In the United States modernism came
to be defined by the formalism of Clem
ent Greenberg and the postwar New Criti
cal consolidation of the twentieth-century
Anglo-American literary canon, a process
begun decades after the peripheral formu
lations of Dario and T'abidze. In this sense,
the Latin American and Eurasian peripher
ies anticipated the conclusions formulated in
hindsight by Anglo-American critics. In dis
cussing Latin American modernismo, Perry
Anderson has called this phenomenon a "pro
drome," the precocious or early symptom of a
condition diagnosed only subsequently in the
centers of world power (Origins 3). In Geor
gia, modernism served as a catchall term sub
ject to internal differentiation, an amalgam
of heterogeneous artistic models and literary
movements imported, often anachronisti
cally, from Europe, ranging from fin de siècle
decadence to the futurist avant-garde. For the
Georgians, the high-modernist canon came
to embrace the recent trajectory of European
poetry from Charles Baudelaire to F. T. Mari
netti and Vladimir Mayakovsky and that of
European painting from the impressionists to
Pablo Picasso. These retroactive conflations
explain the contracted and accelerated way
in which Georgian art and literature evolved
during this period, ultimately generating
Harsha Ram 1377
patterns of cultural development that were
synchronous rather than sequential. The first jf
Petrarchan sonnets were composed in Geor- *
gian even as local poets were contemplating
the crisis of lyric form associated in European
literature with Stéphane Mallarmé. Symbolism
as a literary movement was introduced
in Georgia while the futurist avant-garde was
contesting and dismantling it in Russia and
Italy. These ironies were not lost on the Geor- j
gians. Indeed, they were fully aware of the advantages
as well as the burdens of an unevenly
modernized cultural field, a predicament
Leon Trotsky would later theorize as the "law
of uneven and combined development" (103).
From Dario to T'abidze, the positive
program of what might be called peripheral
modernism was twofold, involving the coordi
nation of artistic practices between the center
and the margins (aesthetic or cultural mod
ernization, generally inflected by an amalgam
of formal artistic innovations), as well as a
heightened sense of regional specificity or lo
cal difference. These two elements, implicating
the apparently irreconcilable goals of centrip
etal homogenization and centrifugal self
differentiation, could not readily be fused or
reconciled. In Latin America as well as in the
Caucasus, the bipolar opposition of center and
periphery was considerably attenuated to the
extent that each region was able to rearticulate
its place in relation to multiple centers, whose
resources were polemically contrasted. As
Pascale Casanova has written of Latin Ameri
can modernismo: "In availing himself of the
literary prestige and power of France, Rubén
Dario succeeded in overturning the terms of
Hispanic aesthetic debate and in imposing
the imported evidence of French modernity
upon Latin America and then, reversing the
terms of colonial subjugation, upon Spain
as well" (146-47). While Georgia lacked the
size as well as the linguistic commonality
that paradoxically allowed Latin America to
permanently overturn Iberian cultural domi
nation, a triadic spatial model, involving a
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The Scale of Global Modernisms: Imperial, National, Regional, Local PM LA
decolonizing periphery (the Caucasus), an
imperial metropole (Russia), and a rival cos
mopolitan center (Paris) apparently removed
from the exigencies of politics, reflects the
cultural aspirations of the modern Georgian
elites as much as those of Latin America.
Thus far, it seems clear that center
periphery distinctions, along with a diffusion
ist model of literary history that situated the
origins of innovation in France, were in fact a
commonplace of Russian-Eurasian as well as
Latin American debates; as such they cannot
be ignored or dismissed as a theoretical preju
dice retroactively imposed. At the same time,
peripheral modernism did not merely trans
pose metropolitan forms. Their adaptation
involved a dynamic of temporal acceleration
and local resignification, sometimes result
ing in the anticipation of conceptual gener
alizations achieved only subsequently by the
cultures of the metropole. I propose therefore
to retain a modified version of the center
periphery model wherever the interaction be
tween center and periphery can effectively be
seen to structure the cultural debates, socio
economic dynamics, and artistic practices of
the era. Yet center-periphery distinctions were
only one constitutive part of a more complex
scalar dynamic. The city of Tiflis bore wit
ness to a multiform local modernism and—as
we shall see—an uneven modernity in which
competing nationalisms and socialisms laid
claim to the political arena and where a ro
bust popular culture coexisted alongside high
cultural forms. In Tiflis, as in other cities lo
cated on Russia's borderlands, high and low,
East and West, and self and other flourished
or competed in proximity. In contrast to the
recuperative strategies of European modern
ism, which generally relied on the culturally
exotic and the physically remote (the most
frequently cited example is Picasso's cubist
appropriation of the African mask in 1907
[Gikandi]), Tiflis modernism strove for a
rearticulation of situational identities in an
intimate context of cosmopolitan coexistence.
My argument is that the environs of
Tiflis generated their own versions of mod
ernism and modernity, in which the global
coexisted and interacted in complex but pre
cise ways with the vernacular and the local. I
elaborate this convergence of the global and
the local as one of two distinct but equally ur
ban genealogies of modernism: one deriving
from the celebrated instance of Baudelairean
Paris as theorized by Walter Benjamin in
The Arcades Project and "Paris—Capital of
the Nineteenth Century" (and rendered rel
evant to discussions of geographical scale
by David Harvey in The Spaces of Hope and
"Paris, 1850-1870"), all duly mirrored by
Baudelaire's counterparts in the Georgian
literary elite; the other exemplified by the
popular culture of Tiflis, rooted in the trad
ing and artisanal classes. Both genealogies
relate to cultural articulations arising from
a social formation known as urban bohemia.
The differences arising between the bohemian
milieus of Paris and Tiflis—discrepancies of
class and geography no less than of literary
form—suggest how we might begin to articu
late the various bourgeois-cosmopolitan, pro
tonational, and local-vernacular expressions
of modernism, without sacrificing the global
perspective vouchsafed by world-systems the
ory. The site-specific framework of colonial
and revolutionary Tiflis, in its local and re
gional scalar dimensions, thus provides a rich
circulatory counterpoint to the cartographic
globalism of world literature.
The Urban Space of Colonial and
Revolutionary Tiflis
In hailing modernism as a "child of the city,"
T'abidze was echoing his many poetic prede
cessors since Baudelaire in affirming urban
life as the primary theme as well as the en
abling condition of modernist cultural pro
duction (cf. Alter). For T'abidze, the modern
city had realized the definitive separation of
nature from culture, since industrial tech
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13 1-5 ]
nology induced fundamental changes in the
human sensorium. He breathlessly hailed
"London, New York, [and] Hamburg" as cities
"where smokestacks are taller than temples,
where automobiles rush rabidly about, and
rows of zeppelins gather for flight" (28). He
was flaunting his up-to-dateness by referring
to the Italian futurist avant-garde's noisy em
brace of accelerating speed, the compression
of space-time induced by mechanized trans
portation and industrial commodity produc
tion. Both were hallmarks of the modern
Western metropolis, but neither was dramati
cally in evidence in Tiflis or other Georgian
towns, which lacked most of the defining fea
tures of industrial capitalism (Lenin 594). In
deed, until the end of the nineteenth century,
the economy of Tiflis was largely dominated
by preindustrial (artisanal and small-scale)
manufacturing and the commerce in transit
commodities that flourished in the bazaars
and caravansaries of the old city.
How then can we speak of a Tiflis mod
ernism? If colonial Tiflis scarcely mirrored
the spatial structures of a modern industrial
metropolis, it was by no means untouched
by the inroads of modernization. Tiflis was
a city stratified by ethnicity, legal estate, oc
cupation, and bureaucratic rank, as well as
dominated by a colonial administration that
sometimes collaborated and sometimes com
peted with the city's municipal authorities. In
the half century following the Great Reforms
of the 1860s, the city's formalized politics
came to be defined by a tug-of-war between
the Russian administration and Tiflis's ethni
cally divided indigenous elites: an "eminent
citizenry" of wealthy Armenian merchants
and men of property who controlled most
of the levers of economic power and a belea
guered group of urbanized Georgian aristo
crats fighting a prolonged and losing battle
against economic decline and exclusion from
municipal politics. Most of Tiflis's inhabitants
were effectively excluded from participating
in the city's governance until the revolution
Harsha Ram 1379
ary convulsions of 1905. The working populace,
meanwhile, found its cultural voice and *"
sense of economic agency in the professional *.
guilds that had long governed the activities of ®
trade and handicraft manufacturing (Akh- ~
verdov; Egiazarov; Bakradze and Berzenov; jj"
Suny, "Tiflis" and "Nationalism"). n
If the division of labor by class and eth- 3
nicity was the primary force structuring <5
urban space, then the construction of a Euro- <+
pean Tiflis, begun during the viceroyalty of
Mikhail Vorontsov (1845-54), superimposed
an East-West civilizational divide on a het
erogeneous urban context. In contradistinc
tion to the city's residual Asiatic—essentially
Persian—core but adjacent to it, Vorontsov's
urban renewal saw the construction of Go
lovinsky Prospect (now Rustaveli Avenue,
Tbilisi's main artery), a rectilinear boulevard
boasting the viceroy's palace and other gov
ernment buildings; Georgia's first prosce
nium theater; and the suburb of Sololaki, a
European-style residential neighborhood de
signed for the ascendant Armenian bourgeoi
sie. One is tempted to draw a parallel with the
contemporaneous restructuring of Paris by
Haussmann, a process that, along with the re
verberations of the failed revolutions of 1848,
arguably provoked the earliest articulations
of aesthetic modernism in France (Benjamin,
"Paris"; Clark; Ross; Harvey, "Paris"). Yet if
Haussmannisation was intended to facilitate
the free circulation of industrial and commer
cial capital and bring about the eventual em
bourgeoisement of Paris, then Vorontsov was
inspired by the different legacy of eighteenth
century Petrine modernization, which re
inforced the autocratic state as the primary
agent of economic development and cultural
progress (Jersild 63; Bater 135). Imperial ur
banism gave rise to what Daniel Brower has
called "façade cities" throughout the Russian
provinces (9), but the restructuring of Tiflis
sought to encode Russia's civilizing mission
in its Eurasian peripheries: in this sense, the
urban transformation of Tiflis followed many
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The Scale of Global Modernisms: Imperial, National, Regional, Local PML A
of the essential parameters of European colo
nial rule elsewhere in the world, reasserting
imperial authority while offering local elites
the beguiling benefits of cultural enlighten
ment and political co-optation (Oldenburg;
Glover; Avermaete et al.).
Modernity, then, was palpably evident
in Tiflis: it was manifested in the spatial re
structuring of the city and the cultural Eu
ropeanization of the elites fostered by the
Russian state, in the prolonged struggle be
tween artisanal and nascent industrial modes
of production and the radically distinct social
relations they implied, and in the distinctly
modern ideologies, be they nationalist or
socialist, through which the economic and
cultural aspirations and grievances of vari
ous communities were articulated. Class and
nationality elicited competing, multiple, and
contingent loyalties such that the vertical col
lisions of class struggle were often mediated
by the horizontal solidarity of shared ethnic
ity, the wider struggle against Russian autoc
racy, and the competing ideological visions of
national sovereignty or supranational social
ist federalism.
Tiflis's colonial and revolutionary his
tory—with its legacies of statist moderniza
tion, interethnic coexistence and political
resistance, premodern as well as modernizing
cultural practices—evolved on a local, urban
scale that we may usefully place alongside
the better-known story of Parisian bohemia.
A juxtaposition of these two distinct social
genealogies—Western and Near Eastern but
equally urban—offers us a precise means by
which to think about aesthetic modernism lo
cally, transregionally, and globally.
Genealogies of Bohemia; or,
Beyond the Flâneur
The Georgian, Armenian, and Russian elites
came into contact with the urban populace of
Tiflis in an unevenly modernized and densely
differentiated urban context. Over the course
of the nineteenth century, Tiflis had consoli
dated its popular culture, displaying highly
evolved codes of ethics and behavior gov
erning all modes of work, leisure, creativity,
and sociability. The self-consciousness of
Tbilisi's popular culture was most strikingly
displayed in various kinds of merrymaking,
festive poetic recitation, and song that were
rooted in a social milieu of bardic minstrels,
tradesmen, and artisans and that drew on a
diverse repertoire of Georgian, Armenian,
Azeri-Turkic, and Persian linguistic, musical,
and generic forms.
Originating in premodern, interethnic,
and transregional patterns of trade and cul
tural exchange but reflecting the shifts in
modern urban life, the popular culture of
Tiflis evolved a distinct system of syncretic
practices, mostly derived from a wider Near
Eastern matrix but inflected by the local pre
dilection for wine. These festive practices
were pursued in a materially tangible urban
realm: the taverns, gardens, and eating houses
of the old city, all located in proximity to the
bazaars and workshops of the artisanal and
trading classes. Guild sociability gave rise
to an ideal masculine prototype, that of the
ço6(?)çoo3ô6çoo 36(30 (dardimandi k'atsi),
or "man without a care," and found expres
sion in a genre of sung verse, the 9,gbi>3Ö6%o
(mukhambazi), that celebrated his amo
rous exploits, his leisurely pursuits, and the
paradoxical moral values that informed his
sybaritic excesses (Ram). Indeed, the moral
economy of the S'gbùSôùfto was to a large
extent predicated on the inversion of expecta
tions and conventions: profligacy was extolled
in opposition to parsimony, and any effort
expended in the pursuit of hospitality, love,
or shared pleasure was deemed preferable to
profit, or gain. The idealized prototype of the
çoù6çpo9ô6çoo <36ßo was manifested accord
ing to a differentiated typology of professions,
such as the chivalrous tjdftôboVbgcoo (qara
chokheli), or guild craftsman, or the rakish
and déclassé .joBfto) (k'int'o), or peddler. Ac
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13 1-5 Harsha Ram 1381
cording to the carnivalized poetics of inver
sion characteristic of Tiflis's popular culture,
the markers of each profession related less to
what a man made or sold for a living, or to his
station in life, than to his corporate dress code;
his speech; his leisurely, poetic, and amorous
pursuits; and his capacity to drink. Sociability,
which Georg Simmel once termed the "play
form" of democratic association that is most
fully realized among equals belonging to the
same social stratum, came to be celebrated as
a performative value, a form of festive cultural
semiosis that was consistently in excess of
the exchange value of the commodities being
made or sold in the city (130,132-33).
How does Tiflis's popular culture com
pare with the more familiar story of Pa
risian bohemia, widely recognized as the
social niche from which European modern
ism emerged? In Europe the social precondi
tions for modernism arose much earlier, in the
Romantic era, out of what César Grana has
called an "unresolvable tension between soci
ety and the man of letters" (xiii). The decline
of traditional forms of patronage, the com
mercialization of the literary market, and the
rise of mass literacy produced a surfeit of indi
gent literati whose vindication of the creative
imagination came to resonate as a protest
against the newly ascendant bourgeois order.
This process, generally traced to Paris under
the July Monarchy (1830-48), gave rise to a
mobile and growing substratum of intellectu
als typified by vagabond independence, non
conformism, and a manifest hostility to the
new market-driven values of thrift, industry,
and pragmatic calculation. Bohemia arose, in
Trotsky's astute if formulaic dismissal of the
Russian futurist avant-garde, as the "revolt...
of the semipauperized left wing of the intelli
gentsia" against and yet ultimately within the
bourgeoisie (114). It borrowed its antiutilitar
ian cultural posture from the old aristocracy,
even as its evident lack of means contrasted
with the lifestyle of the leisured classes. It re
jected the marketplace in principle but none
theless responded to the marketplace's call
for innovation, topicality, and scandal. These
contradictory affiliations—culturally aristo
cratic but economically petty-bourgeois or
déclassé—corresponded to a historic transi
tion in the status of the modern artist, an "in
termediate stage," as Benjamin would have it,
in which the Parisian intelligentsia "still has
patrons but is already beginning to famil
iarize itself with the market." Bohemia, for
Benjamin, was the social formation proper to
this transitional stage, in which the poet "sets
foot in the marketplace—ostensibly to look
around, but in truth to find a buyer" (Arcades
Project 10). The poet here appears quintessen
tial^ as a flâneur, "the idling pedestrian, the
curious, perhaps disinterested, purposeless
observer of teeming urban variety, the specta
tor connoisseur" (Alter 9). Poetic modernism,
then, arose from the bohemian poet-flâneur's
negotiation of an urban sensorium newly
transformed by the market economy.
In Russia as in Georgia, the emergence
of bohemia as a marked social category co
incided with the birth of modernism, more
than half a century after its Parisian mani
festation (Krivtsun 108-09). In Georgia,
modernism arose as a bohemian and urban
phenomenon, a fact vividly recalled by Roba
kidze in 1918: "In the beginning of 1915 the
sermon of the new artistic word rang out over
[the town]." Its effect was to "suddenly trans
form" all the taverns
into Parisian literary cafés, where, alongside
the sounds of hoarse accordions and the in
evitable "Mravalzhamier" [a popular Georgian
ritual song toasting the longevity of those pres
ent], one could hear the cherished names of
Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire, Frie
drich Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde, Paul Ver
laine and Stéphane Mallarmé (46-47)
Robakidze's breathless incantation of the
European modernist canon in the locale of a
Georgian city tavern returns us to the topic
with which we began, namely the role of
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1382 The Scale of Global Modernisms: Imperial, National, Regional, Local P M L A
g aesthetic modernism in effecting the cultural
*j coarticulation of center and periphery. My
« concluding point is this: Georgia's singular
g success in importing and adapting modern
u ism was owing not just to a mimicry of Eu
x ropean models but also, fundamentally, to
the recognition of a compatible local ambi
o ence. Put simply, Caucasian festive, singing,
*■ and drinking practices provided a regional
J2 analogue to modernist bohemia, a conver
2 gence lucidly discerned by Tiflis's greatest
poet-chronicler, Ioseb Grishashvili, in his
elegiac ethnography, d30£f>o 0<30C?0^0^
öo3g9d ("The Literary
Bohemia of Old Tiflis"). In its dandyism, in
souciance, and indifference to gain, the figure
of the Tiflis folk artist was perceived as the
vernacular equivalent of the Baudelairean
poet-flâneur. Two distinctly cosmopolitan cul
tures, entirely discrepant in their geographic
provenance (Russia and Europe versus the
Near East) and points of cultural reference
(elite versus popular), converged in a moment
of mutual—if partial—recognition. This was
particularly true of revolutionary Tiflis, which
saw a rapid mushrooming of Parisian-style
cafés and cabarets alongside the taverns and
gardens of the old city, all flourishing under
the auspices of the Georgian Menshevik gov
ernment. Generally reduced to exotic ciphers
of couleur locale, the festive spaces and prac
tices of old Tiflis are best seen as the palpable
signs of a still living popular culture, rooted
in an older relation to production, circulation,
and consumption in which time and space
were structured by sociability more than by
monetary exchange. These traits of Tiflis's lei
sure practices—rooted in premodern cultural
forms and noncapitalist modes of exchange—
resonated with the implied or overt critique of
bourgeois norms proposed by the café culture
of Tiflis's modernist bohemia in its Georgian,
Armenian, and Russian articulations.
What has been gained by viewing aes
thetic modernism as at once a global move
ment, linking multiple peripheries to multiple
centers, and a site-specific set of cultural phe
nomena, historically asynchronous, socially
and linguistically heterogeneous, but coexist
ing in dense proximity? Global modernism,
like many supranational phenomena, would
appear to require the simultaneous and mo
bile application of more than one scale of
spatialization. Restaged as the asymmetri
cal dialogue of imperial and national elites,
non-Western modernisms would appear to fit
readily into a center-periphery model, even as
peripheral literary histories seem frequently
to anticipate terminological generaliza
tions, including the term modernism, that are
reached only subsequently by Western theory
At the same time, Tiflis reveals the existence
of a sui generis vernacular culture, anterior to
the establishment of the nation, permissive of
hybrid or multiple identities, and requiring a
spatial model that exceeds the binarism of na
tion and empire, of dependent national elites
and their hegemonic imperial counterparts.
A scalar jump from global cartography to lo
cal geography reveals the contours of a city
that allowed modernism to function simul
taneously on two equally cosmopolitan reg
isters—the broadly Europeanized culture of
the Russian, Georgian, and Armenian elites
with their competing literary registers of
symbolism, Acmeism, and futurism and the
vernacular Near Eastern and commonly Cau
casian culture of the urban masses. For a brief
moment coinciding with the Russian Revolu
tion, these currents converged in a ludic reen
chantment of the everyday. Their convergence
points to the necessity of scalar thinking, ca
pable of mapping hierarchical cartographies
of power as well as tracing the networks that
link local and transregional histories.
Notes
I wish to thank Susan Stanford Friedman, Jeanne-Marie
Jackson, Michael Kunichika, Douglas Mao, Francesca
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13 1-5 Harsha Ram
Orsini, Lukasz Stanek, Rebecca Walkowitz, and Mark
Wollaeger for their generous and helpful comments re
garding this essay.
1. All translations are mine.
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