MSIA2‘Modernism and Multiple Temporalities’
The Second Annual International Conference of the Modernist Studies in Asia Network (MSIA)
12-14 September 2019
Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo
Confirmed Keynote Speakers
Prof. Laura Marcus (Oxford)
Prof. Douglas Mao (Johns Hopkins)
Prof. Aaron Gerow (Yale)
Call for Papers
Following its highly successful inaugural conference held in June 2018, the Modernist
Studies in Asia Network (MSIA) calls for abstracts for its second annual international conference
on the subject of ‘Modernism and Multiple Temporalities’.
The concept of psychological time has long been a central theme of modernist studies,particularly with reference to textual features such as the stream of consciousness and narrativefragmentation. In recent years, however, increasing attention has been paid to the ways in whichthe ‘politics of time’ (Peter Osborne’s term) has defined the very experience of modernity andgenerated a variety of modernist innovations such as the avant-garde rhetoric of rupture orattention to the communal rhythm of the everyday. Starting with Karl Marx’s observation on
capitalism’s ‘annihilation of space by time,’ many critics have examined how the dominantversions of time (such as Walter Benjamin’s ‘homogenous, empty time’, or what E. P. Thompson
called ‘time discipline’) colluded with capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism; meanwhile, they
have also observed the ways in which the dominant ideologies were often contested through themultiplicity of temporality in various locations.
Building on these observations, we might revise the agenda of ‘New Modernist Studies’
formulated by Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz ten years ago—the agenda to expand
modernism temporally, spatially, and vertically. While we continue to pursue the verticalexpansion of modernism to include a variety of popular genres, we might now consider thetemporal and the spatial in conjunction and note how the spatial expansion of modernism urges us
to confront the multiplicity of experiential time across the world. We might also explore how theexpanded field of global modernism is itself constituted by competing or conflicting temporalities
that were lived or generated in the specific locations of modernity.
In this spirit, we invite papers that engage with multiple temporalities in the texts ofmodernism (literature, art, cinema, music, and other cultural products). How do they represent,reproduce, or reconfigure the experiences of time in modernity? How does the modernist
obsession with innovation contain the utopian desire for the future while also being charged by anostalgic longing for the past? How do the multiple temporalities of modernism challenge, contest,
or sometimes conform to the dominant versions of time? Or how do the texts of modernism
themselves travel across time and space, through the specific temporalities of transmission,reception, and translation? We welcome papers that tackle these questions with reference tomodernism in its global as well as local—European, American, African, Oceanian, Asian, or
elsewhere—manifestations.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:Modernism and the Histories of Modernity
Modernism and the Uneven Development
Synchronicity and Non-synchronicity
Dominant/Residual/Emergent
Dailiness and the Everyday
Internal and External Time
Psychological and Physiological Time
Secular and Sacred TimeLinear and Cyclical Time
Global and Local Time
Deep TimeTime and the Modernist Narrative

Cinematic TimeThe Ideas of Tradition and Innovation
Affect and the Perpetual Present
Gendered Experience of Time
UtopiaNostalgia
RhythmPrimitivism, Futurism, and Presentism
Temporalities of Transmission, Reception,and Translation
The Ideas of the Contemporary
Legacies of Modernism

Please send 200-word abstracts for 20-minutes papers along with a short bio tomultipletemporalities@gmail.com by 25 December 2018.
Conference Organizers (in alphabetical order):Fuhito Endo (Seikei University)
Asako Nakai (Hitotsubashi University)
Kohei Saito (Aoyama Gakuin University)
Motonori Sato (Keio University)
Kunio Shin (Aoyama Gakuin University)
Yoshiki Tajiri (the University of Tokyo)
Kyoko Yoshida (Ritsumeikan University)
The conference website will be ready by March 2019. For further information about MSIA, please
visit our website:
https://modernismasia.wixsite.com/main
Please follow us on twitter @modernism_asia
Please also visit our facebook pagehttps://www.facebook.com/groups/1739367313039810/?ref=bookmarks