Chapter 6 studies the work of the Polish dramatist Jerzy Grotowski, whose theater profoundly shaped the American stage. Grotowski’s Apocalypsis cum Figuris (1968) probes the boundary between theater and ritual practice. While most critics have attended to its embodied elements, I find it is entangled with the histories of literary drama, especially the writings of T. S. Eliot. Across Apocalypsis, a shift from representing to enacting religious ritual mirrors Grotowski’s own intensifying pursuit of ritual efficacy in his art and actor training. This pivot seems to be a reaction against language but actually develops through it. My analysis shows how Apocalypsis realizes a process of demystification through which ritual performance was reconstituted as a European export. This work seems to secularize ritual acts and to destabilize the hierarchical models that distinguish white Christian traditions from other forms of world performance. In fact, it extends Christianity’s universalizing model of the world.

This chapter traces the genealogy of fascism in South African politics and music, focusing on Afrikaner nationalism and its cultural expressions. Drawing on Christoph Marx, it argues that South African fascism emerged largely from local political culture, shaped by anti-British sentiment, Calvinism, settler racism, and weak democratic traditions, rather than direct imitation of European models. Music played a central role in articulating and normalising these ideas, from early Afrikaans psalmody and folk traditions to explicitly fascist compositions linked to the Ossewabrandwag. Through figures such as Hans Olaf Andrésen and Stephen Eyssen, the chapter shows how fascist ideology flowed seamlessly into apartheid-era cultural institutions and Western art music practices. Works like Eyssen’s Ons Boerwording and Andrésen’s songs encoded myths of a chosen people, divine destiny, and possession of land, while excluding black musical cultures. Even later avant-garde compositions, notably Roelof Temmingh’s Joernaal van Jorik, are read as haunted by this legacy. The chapter ultimately challenges claims of artistic neutrality, arguing that South African art music has been deeply entangled with fascist and apartheid ideologies.

There has been a longstanding tendency within the domain of Turkish and Comparative Literary Studies to associate the history of Turkish modernism with Nâzım Hikmet’s early career in the Soviet Union by focusing on his mediation of the international avant-garde. While his early futurist poems calling for the abolition of traditional verse are frequently cited as illustrating the emergence of Turkish modernism, his prose poems “The Gioconda and Si-Ya-U” and “Why Did Banerjee Kill Himself?” signify the conclusion of a Soviet-inflected Turkish avant-garde. Acknowledging the importance of Nâzım’s early poetics, this chapter provides a more comprehensive and multifaceted account of Turkish modernism’s “Easterly” trajectory. Scholars of Middle Eastern and Comparative Literary Studies refuse to ascribe any literary value to socialist realist aesthetics, immediately dismissing it as Soviet-sponsored dogma. Challenging this critical “prejudice” against leftist literatures (excepting the avant-garde), this chapter demonstrates that the history of Turkish modernism cannot be understood without exploring its entanglements with the histories of socialist realism and Marxian aesthetics.

This chapter examines the cultural and philosophical affinities between William Burroughs and the punk movement of the 1970s–90s, beyond the familiar “godfather of punk” label. Guy Stevenson argues that Burroughs’ deeply anti-humanist, anti-romantic aesthetic resonated with punk’s rejection of 1960s idealism, particularly through shared interests in nihilism, satirical obscenity, and avant-garde techniques like the cut-up method. Tracing Burroughs’ influence on figures from Patti Smith and Iggy Pop to Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, the chapter highlights his centrality to punk’s fusion of art, fashion, and political provocation. Burroughs emerges as both a prophetic critic of the counterculture he helped launch and a creative touchstone for a later generation disillusioned with its perceived hypocrisies. Punk’s Situationist roots and media-savvy irony are shown to mirror Burroughs’ own experiments in language, identity, and control, positioning him as a crucial, if ambivalent, figure in the evolution of Anglo-American radical aesthetics.

This article contextualizes the work of William Burroughs in terms of twentieth-century avant-garde movements, particularly Dada, Surrealism, Lettrism, and Situationism, arguing that he was deeply influenced by them and also made significant and hugely influential contributions to their aesthetic and political projects. It situates his early work with the beats as markedly Surrealist, and it argues that Naked Lunch is a Surrealist masterpiece. It traces Burroughs’ movement into 1960s multimedia cut-ups, image-text, film, and audio experiments in relation to Guy Debord and Situationism. The article concludes by noting that we should be cautious in how optimistically we read some of this work, particularly in light of the many ways the twentieth-century avant-gardes failed to realize their revolutionary hopes and how our current experience with a fully-networked world that uses many avant-garde techniques and ideas often leads not to a utopian revolution but instead a morass of reactionary post-truth politics.

This chapter positions William Burroughs within the radical tradition of avant-garde manifesto writing, arguing that his cut-up experiments, pamphlets, tape texts, and prose manifestos from the late 1950s through the early 1970s exemplify the genre’s urgency, performativity, and call to action. Drawing on the lineage of Marx, Futurism, and Dada, Jimmy Fazzino explores how Burroughs weaponized language and media to dismantle structures of “Control” through techniques of textual sabotage and sonic disruption. Works like Minutes to Go, The Exterminator, BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS, and The Revised Boy Scout Manual are read not only as aesthetic provocations but as revolutionary acts aligned with the manifesto’s historical function. Addressing Burroughs’s contradictions – including the inflammatory rhetoric of his guerrilla texts – Fazzino examines how Burroughs redefined literature as a site of resistance, merging art and life in a performative praxis designed to make things happen.

Chapter 5 studies the ways in which Bhanu Kapil and D. S. Marriott, two innovative British Asian and Black avant-garde writers based in the US, renovate lyric to invent a poetics of riot in the twenty-first century. The surplus of crisis – or what Joshua Clover has theorized in Riot. Strike. Riot as the new era of uprisings due to surplus economic immiseration disproportionately affecting racialized populations – appears in experimental form, which I call “surplus lyric.” In Ban en Banlieu, Kapil composes a cross-genre experimental poem to mediate instances of racialized violence against women spanning London, New Delhi, and the Bay of Bengal. In contrast, Marriott gives lyrical expression to a poetics of riot through his adaptations of the London-based underground musical genre of grime in his collection Duppies. Kapil and Marriott hold in common a political stance that envisions not progressive transformation but rather a radical abolition of the structures that perpetuate racial violence in Britain and elsewhere.

In order to characterize how African American poets enacted a version of the avant-garde, this chapter connects the formation of Black writers’ collectives in the 1980s and 1990s to the original theories of the avant-garde in which artistic dissent was tied to social withdrawal and political dissent. It identifies how the Dark Room Collective of the 1980s and early 1990s and the Black Took Collective of the late 1990s and early twenty-first century used their bohemian withdrawal to cultivate innovative artistic practices that led, paradoxically, to mainstream success. Since that success defies racial disparagement in ways analogous to how the collective withdrawal did, this chapter posits that "success" as an "avant-garde thing," an ambivalent extension of avant-garde dissent.

This chapter examines Spanish music during the interwar period (1918−39), a stage that coincides with the final two decades of the so-called Silver Age. It highlights the plurality of musical languages used to represent Spain’s evolving – and never fully agreed upon – national identity, with stylistic approaches ranging from late Romanticism to Neopopularism and Neoclassicism as predominant trends. Additionally, this chapter considers the extent to which the tense political climate and the debates between tradition and modernity also influenced repertoire programming, the activities of musical institutions, and the work of performers. Finally, the study explores the roles and spaces occupied by music during the Spanish Civil War and offers a perspective on Republican exile, aiming to reconstruct the trajectories of those musicians who were persecuted under Franco’s regime.

This chapter establishes the spirituals as the bedrock of African American poetry to characterize the tradition as inherently innovative from its origins to the present. It challenges the standard claim that African American poetry begins with texts written by enslaved persons reflecting familiarity with canonical British poetry. In this approach, criticism has generally considered African American poetry in dialogue with the mainstream canon, whether emulating or criticizing its values. Privileging written texts in conventional forms has resulted in devaluing poetry reflecting characteristics such as orality, performance, anonymity, and communal collaboration. It also results in wide acceptance of an African American poetry canon that historically has overlooked the innovative nature of this genre from its origins and an ensuing tradition of avant-garde poetry. From this biased perspective, the spirituals have been overlooked as the genesis of African American poetry, even though that is their rightful place. Viewing the spirituals as the true foundation of this tradition implies shifting some assumptions not just about these poems, but about the place and meaning of originality.

When Elizabeth Maconchy entered the British compositional scene in 1930 with the premiere of her orchestral suite, The Land, she and her fellow composers had an unsettled relationship with the prevailing musical styles of Europe. Whereas continental composers were highly regarded by British critics as cutting edge, their British contemporaries were faulted as derivative, unoriginal, and too steeped in national traditions to contribute to the ‘new’ music. Constant Lambert argued his rival countrymen (and women) had let their moment to be ‘modern’ pass them by. This chapter examines the scope of modernism on the continent and scholars’ difficulties in pinning down a precise functional definition of the so-called ‘modernist’ style. Practitioners of European modernism sought to be sensational or at the very least individual. British modernism, on the other hand, tended toward the juxtaposition of ‘old’ and ‘new’, an eclecticism that is not bound to any specific ideology.

In 1934, Pablo Neruda arrived in Barcelona as a Chilean diplomat, and in February 1935, he became the Chilean consul in Madrid. Living in Spain during the Second Republic and the Spanish Civil War marked a turning point in Neruda’s poetry. The Spanish Civil War provoked a historical awakening in Neruda’s poetics – as exemplified in España en el corazón – that paved the way to his ambitious poetic project of Canto general, as he aimed to historicize and politicize his portrayal of Latin American ruins. This essay on how the Spanish Civil War marks Neruda’s poetics examines how the use of the apostrophe throughout España en el corazón reveals the dialogic nature of his poetic project, which intends both to speak to a Republican Spain, with its dead soldiers and poets, and to defy the fascist leaders of the war.

Industrial imperialism affected Europe before anywhere else, bringing a dizzying burst of modernization that altered habits of life and the ways in which wealth was created and distributed. Among the many results of this disruption would be the opening of new niches in what had become an ossified theatrical environment. At the same time, realism and romanticism offered new ways of viewing the world and shaped how theatre artists filled those niches. Ballet and opera were transformed by romanticism although both would also eventually be touched by realism. The literary romanticism of spoken theatre was overwhelmed by competition from melodrama (which effectively integrated romanticism and realism) and the “well-made play” (which eschewed literary ambition in favor of stage-worthiness). It was then outflanked by a stringent realism that emphasized psychological and social issues, whose theatrical plainness led to avant-garde efforts to “retheatricalize” theatre.

This chapter explores the significant impact of the digital age on the realm of literature, focusing specifically on Hebrew poetry as a distinctive case study. This focus is driven by the declining status of literature within Israeli culture and the dynamic state of its reviving literary landscape. The study is structured in two phases: the first delves into practices and phenomena, while the second aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the field’s logic and values by examining different participants and levels. The chapter claims that the necessity of the second phase arises from the current state of the field, where the adaptation of media has become so ingrained that it conceals its influence on literary themes, forms, and language. The chapter addresses this gap using the theoretical framework of mediatization, which explores long-term changes associated with media evolution.

This chapter considers how Australian poetry of the 1970s participated in major social changes that were fuelled by a range of factors, including greater access to higher education, the sexual liberation movement, a drug subculture and Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. It traces how Australian writers turned to America for influence and were able to utilise new technologies to generate a vibrant small press culture. The chapter outlines the surge in collaboration, collectives and overlapping literary circles. It also examines a series of anthologies that sought to feature new energies and voices, with some seeking to demarcate such poetry from earlier or more traditional forms. Lastly, it analyses the significance of the poetry workshops based at Melbourne’s La Mama Theatre, little magazines, and the development of small presses that produced poetry collections during the decade of the 1970s.

A survey of drama and performance in the period 1975-1980, with emphasis on the innovative plays and experimental productions that appeared in New York in 1976, along with consideration of surrounding developments in visual art, literature, film, and music, and attention to the politics of these transitional years.