Reconsidering Modernist Totality

This review essay considers differing approaches to questions of totality in two recent volumes on modernism: Daniel Albright's Putting Modernism Together¹ and Behind the Masks of Modernism,² a collection edited by Andrew Reynolds and Bonnie Roos. Both volumes reexamine the history of modernist aesthetic production in a global and interdisciplinary context. Albright identifies a totalizing modernist aesthetic project across the arts, within a largely European framework. The contributors to Behind the Masks of Modernism, meanwhile, take a pluralizing approach to modernism(s), with substantial emphasis on the Global South.