Limits of National History: Yoko Ono, Stefan Wolpe, and Dilemmas of Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

In his autobiographically charged essay “Reflections on Exile,” Edward Said conceived the state of the times under the sign of the uprooted: “Our age, with its modern warfare, imperialism, and the quasi-theological ambitions of totalitarian rulers—is indeed the age of the refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration.”1 Given the flux of cultural and geographical crossings characterizing recent history, Said noted how significant it is that many of the practices of twentieth-century modernism have been the work of dislocated people.2 Such observations are clearly not restricted to the field of literary studies. Migrants and other displaced individuals figure as prominently at the center of the canons of musical modernism and the avant-garde as at their limits. Musical creators as diverse as Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Kurt Weill, Cathy Berberian, Ornette Coleman, Stefan Wolpe, and Yoko Ono appear within an ensemble of geographically mobile and displaced vanguardists (whether forced, voluntary, or something in between) who worked across the arts in the twentieth century. In insisting on their place within global patterns of mass dislocation, Said brought such vaunted figures down to earth and rethought the significance their work may hold in contemporary times. From his perspective, border crossings—cultural, political, and geographical—should not be treated as peripheral to the study of recent history, but rather must be seen as a primary focus. Said thus implicitly asked whether repertories known as “modernist” or “avant-garde”—recognized as phenomena shaped by uprooted histories—could hold a repository of creative responses or possibilities that still have resonance in our ongoing “age of the refugee.” During a time when modernist art legacies have been hotly contested, it would seem compelling to follow through this line of inquiry. How would standard narratives of modernism and the avant-garde change if questions of displacement were brought front and center?

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