The interwar avant-garde transformed the modern understanding of painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and literature, as well as the contours of politics and philosophy. Prominent in Russia, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Czechoslovakia, and France, members of the avant-garde also traveled widely, visiting North and South America for inspiration, exploring the Mediterranean and Africa, and seeking to establish links with anti-imperial movements in Asia. These artists, poets, writers, intellectuals, and thinkers often became involved in the radical politics of their day—anarchism, communism, socialism, and fascism—and in many ways helped to define and radicalize European and global politics after the First World War. Later associated with Italian communist Antonio Gramsci (a contemporary of the period), the idea of cultural revolution they forged in the 1920s and 1930s—the indivisible link between culture and politics—saw the fusion of Marxism and the radical left with artistic experimentation, ethnic and national diversity, internationalism, anti-imperialism, and anti-fascism. 

This workshop, hosted by Trinity College Dublin and the University of St Andrews, will bring together new research on the avant-garde and its global diffusion, to challenge the perception that there is one, single ‘European’ avant-garde. It aims to better understand links between culture and politics, philosophy and activism, art and language, the similarities between the ideologies of the radical left and those of the radical right, and to explore the avant-garde from a multi-national, multi-lingual perspective in the fields of arts, culture, and ideas in the twentieth century. For the workshop, we welcome papers that examine any aspect of the avant-garde in the 19^th or 20^thcenturies, including in the fields of history, literature, art, film, cultural studies, or language.