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There are no neat boundaries in history. If one looks at broad movements such as “Zionism,” “Romanticism,” “Futurism,” or “Hasidism,” one sees that they are characterized by a heterogeneous but intertwined cluster of institutions, ideas, and features, expressed in specific persons, actions, and texts, and located in a given time and place. If one analyzes such a complex, one sees that for almost every individual phenomenon, motif, or idea, one can find both roots and antecedents in preceding periods. A new trend in history is marked not by the novelty of each detail; instead, one has a new framework that reorganizes various elements in a new way, selects and highlights previously neglected features, adds conspicuous new ones, changes their hierarchies, and thus makes the complex a totally new global entity. When such a framework is perceived as a new trend, it can win a broad following and become a dominant force in society.

This chapter proposes that we will soon find ourselves haunted by the ghosts of androids. Although ghost stories have been centrally studied throughout the history of the discipline of Folklore (perhaps most notably during the time of Andrew Lang in the British Folklore society), it appears we are quickly approaching a new era in ghosts: the ghosts of artificial intelligence. This chapter takes as its starting point the proposition of android ghosts, exploring the implications and possibilities emanating from this discussion. What sorts of ghosts will androids make?

The period of China's utmost vulnerability, from the Boxer uprising of 1900 until the rise of the Nationalist Party in the mid-1920s, coincided with the mass-marketing of Chinese stereotypes and the ‘discovery’ of London's Chinatown. The ways in which London's Chinese community came to represent national threat found its consummate expression in Sax Rohmer's tales of Dr Fu Manchu. After the war, things Chinese, Futurists, and louche West End nightclubs alike, were the target of hack writers and the popular press. Typical is a Daily Express article, headlined: ‘Nights in the Dancing Dens-When the Chinaman Takes The Floor’, describing a nightclub ‘decorated in the incoherent Futurist lines usual in such places’. London's fashionable cognoscenti enjoyed a renewed vogue for chinoiserie style. Paul Poiret's career took off when celebrity actresses and dancers adopted his controversial design for a loose-fitting Chinese-style coat while a studio shot in Chinese pyjamas was ubiquitous for every film starlet. Er Ma responds to the British fear and fascination for Chineseness, fanned by reports of Boxer ‘atrocities’ at the outposts of Britain's Empire, and the thrilling notion of a Yellow Peril at its very heart.

This chapter discusses Blast, which is a journal where the individualist politics of anarchism were combined with an ‘exploding’ oppositional ideology of art and the radical politics of Vorticism. It begins by looking at the political and aesthetic radicalism of Vorticism. It then moves on to study Blast, which was designed to shock the aesthetic sensibilities of its readers and to create art out of ‘political activity’. The chapter also looks at the concepts of Futurism and Vorticist Individualism, and studies the end of individualism.

Clashing with the material aspirations of the Bolsheviks, the post-revolution period led a to a sorrowful and fatigued conclusion of the Symbolist movement. Objectively, it led to either an abandonment of Russia or a making of a painful conciliation with the new reality. Inside Russia, Symbolism metamorphosized into Acmeism and Futurism. It has even been alleged that the artistic policies that musicians and writers were obliged to adopt during the Soviet years had their origins in the Symbolist poetics. Valentinov suggests that the Symbolist doctrine of life creation inspired the Soviet doctrine of Socialist Realism. Post-revolution, Valeriy Bryusov, the mastermind of the Symbolist movement, became a cultural bureaucrat in Moscow; Belïy continued to write, more often enraging than placating the authorities; Ivanov took up teaching in universities. Chaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Scriabin did not live to see the transformation of their homeland. Prokofiev, who had only a tangential and temporary connection to the Symbolist movement, experienced it from afar.

Chapter 3 intervenes in debates about whether the historic avant-garde (Dada, Futurism, Surrealism) represented a general tendency within modernism or a critical alternative to ideas of artisanal autonomy. The impact of World War I on medical, prosthetic, and psychoanalytic technologies was instrumental among postwar artists in imagining a damaged, wounded, or psychotic body. If the body could be seen as fragmented, recombined, and disjointed, as it was in Surrealism, it could also be imagined as promising a different ontology, one in which fragmentation or madness could be enlisted in revolutionary projects. Through readings of F. T. Marinetti’s novel, Mafarka the Futurist, Tristan Tzara’s The Gas Heart, and the self-portraiture of Frida Kahlo, the chapter explores works in which bodies are removed from narratives of reproductive futurity, organic coherence, and normalcy and seen through the optic of disability.

This chapter focuses on Kazimir Malevich's participation in the “Last Futurist Exhibition of Pictures 0.10” and “The Store” painting exhibition. It describes the works of Malevich featured in these exhibits and suggests that the location of Black Square indicates that Malevich was fully aware of the opportunities an installation presented for artistic statement. The chapter also discusses artist Vladimir Tatlin's efforts to abolish Malevich's Suprematism and establish Cubo-Futurism as the principal and sole art movement.

This chapter reads the audio and visual innovations that stemmed from Italian Futurist poetry and late German Expressionist performance, which burst upon the first audiences at the Cabaret Voltaire (the rowdy neighbour to Lenin’s lodging room in Zurich, before he returned to Russia in early 1917) and Dada soirées, in logical continuation of currents of poetic intervention that found their apogee in Hugo Ball’s sound poetry and poems without words of 1916. The historical context of the politicised fermentation of artistic activity in Germany specifically in the years leading up to 1916, and is presented here in rigorous detail as ground for the Dada activities that are discussed in the chapters that follow.

Connor Doak discusses Russian writer Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose work uses the idea of lyrical masks as an outward and visible expression of an inner tension, a tension almost always exposing a different side of cultural identity. The centrality on the visual coincides with a modernity immersed in spectacle and transgression of historical norms. This breach is mediated by the very mask as it hides and protects while fulfilling its revelatory function. Doak’s “The Emotion as Such” focuses on how the Russian Futurists deviated from their Realist aesthetic history to use masquerade (face-painting, costume, outlandish attire) both in their public self-fashioning and as metaphor in their poetry. By Doak’s account, through this lyrical masking, they transgressed gender norms and used “primitive” animal personas, through which they could reveal softer, more sentimental aspects that were inconsistent with Russian Futurism as we typically conceive it.

Chapter 2 considers the introduction of modernist aesthetics in Sweden in the early 1930s in the image communities of marketing and visual art. The main focus is the Stockholm Exhibition held in 1930 in which marketing and advertising played an integral part in the presentation of modern architecture, design and visual art. The exhibition area hosted the first large presentation of modernist visual art in Sweden and was simultanoeusly a decisive event for the introduction of modernist window displays. From the late 1920s and onwards window displays were clearly being influenced by avant-garde modernist art such as cubism, futurism and constructivism. This is evident in the designs themselves but it was also spelled out in professional journals and handbooks. In the commercial context pure marketing rationales and arguments were linked to the modernist aesthetic.The modernist design in window displays was not unique to Sweden around 1930. However, this is an instructive case as the reception of modernist images differed widely between the two image communities. Within marketing aesthetics the Stockholm exhibition marks the breakthrough for modernism. But simultaneously, the art field was very resistant to modernist aesthetics and the Art Concret exhibition proved to be a complete fiasco.

Though F.T. Marinetti’s Futurism effectively transformed Italy into an international literary capital in the 1910s, the rise of Mussolini and his Fascist party after World War One had the opposite effect, gradually cutting writers, critics, and readers off from Europe. Riviste like La Ronda, Il Convegno, Il Baretti, and Solaria, were created to fight against a commercial and political “deprovincialization,” and it was done precisely by adapting the form to accommodate critical and literary transmission from beyond Italy’s borders.

Chapter Six examines how Guglielmo Marconi’s invention of the wireless telegraph in 1895, which eventually enabled the widespread use of radio broadcasting in the 1920s, challenged avant-garde movements like Futurism and Dada to develop new modes of print production and distribution that would allow them to communicate faster and farther. Instead of using a single magazine model to consolidate their movements, the Futurists and Dadaists relied on the wild proliferation of magazine titles in many different locations all at once (110 for the Futurists in Italy between 1910 and 1940; 175 for the Dadaists around the world between 1916 and 1926). In doing so, they made the magazine function like a wireless transmitter capable of sending and receiving information quickly, and, in the process, they established expansive communication networks that were not bound by the infrastructure of the postal system.

This chapter discusses the “prehistory” of the Fascist idea of Rome, focusing on the period 1848–1922. It first examines aspirations for a “Third Rome” during the struggle for national unification in the nineteenth century, as well as debates over whether the city should be designated the national capital. It then assesses the critique of Rome by modernist and nationalist groups in the early twentieth century and the ways that Benito Mussolini and the nascent Fascist movement negotiated these divergent discourses. It also highlights the crucial role played by the dialectic between anti- and pro-Romanism in the formulation of romanità in Fascism's early years. The chapter shows how early Fascist romanità became a synthesis of incongruous elements: Risorgimento patriotism, Futurism and its anti-passatismo, the elitist modernism of the Vociani, and the Associazione Nazionalista Italiana's expansionist imperialism. This synthesis was most fully expressed in the “March on Rome,” an event that was represented simultaneously as a revolutionary usurpation and a restoration of the Eternal City.

This chapter considers the lineage of moving-image installation through painting. There are obvious continuities across painting and the installation of a moving image—both practices organize pictorial elements: shapes, textures, colors, light and dark into readable signs, for the most part defined by a frame, singly or in series. The orchestration of these components draws on compositional principles, forms of staging that were developed in painting. Beyond the common artistry that unites painters and those creating moving image installations, further homologies can be found in the structuring of spectatorship around a fixed point of view in front of the image, an operational bequest from classical realist painting. This chapter also examines Cubism as a new aspect of mobility, articulated within the spatialized domain of the image itself, as well as Futurism's depictions of movement. Finally, it discusses the historical moment of rupture in which the limitations of painting were held to be inhibiting the progress of modernity in the arts.

This book challenges the premise, advanced by black intellectuals, that the Obama administration ushered in a “post-racial” era in the United States. It brings together a collection of voices that explore blackness, politics, and performance in complicated ways, troubling the notion of post-blackness for a number of different reasons and from a number of different perspectives. The book offers an analysis of the Black Arts movement in the 1960s and 1970s, chastises the notion of post-blackness for its “dangerous abdication of history,” and links creative and literary traditions with the discourse on race and performance. It argues that “an unexamined politics of African Americanism lay at the bottom of post-Blackness” and offers Afro-Futurism as a method of problematizing the idea that a progressive way ahead involves the dissolution of race and erasure of racial performativity. It also considers the ways in which nation, empire, and questions of diaspora complicate discussions of an imagined “black identity” as well as notions of blackness among African Americans in institutional and political contexts of modern-day America.

This chapter offers Afro-Futurism as a method of problematizing the idea that a progressive way ahead involves the dissolution of race and erasure of racial performativity. In Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?, Touré argues that racism is very much alive today and that African Americans are still subjected to racist acts and activities, and that Black people need to stop performing race and simply be who or whatever they choose to be. This chapter critiques Touré’s representation of post-Blackness and argues that his call to transcend racial performativity is somewhat misguided, and that his calls for the abandonment of performing Blackness do little to combat racism and in fact, in some ways, unconsciously promote it through the negation of acts of racial solidarity and cultural specificity.