Modernism and Modernity at the Edge
The present can feel like an endless series of crises on the brink: the limits of democratic processes, prosperity, and social cohesion are being tested by political polarisation, disinformation, hyperconnected media, neoliberal financialisation, and rising global temperatures. At what is usually seen as the far edge of the world, our location in lutruwita/ Tasmania allows us to think eccentrically about what it means to be at or on the edge – whether geographically, spatially, socially, temporally, or aesthetically. Scholars and critics thinking about Australia in twentieth-century cultural history have pondered the tyranny of distance, cultural cringe, and the provincialism problem.