In this collection of essays, Hal Foster reflects on how modernism’s utopian frameworks can be reactivated in the face of recent political challenges. 

In both contemporary art and politics since COVID-19, the discourses of modernism and modernity have been challenged by unexpected developments. The convergences between left-wing indigeneity and right-wing nativism, and the political right’s appropriation of transgression—long a strategy of the left—point to essential challenges of the modernist project. The five essays of Modernism, Catastrophe, Utopia reflects on such developments, seeking to parse the elements of modernist discourse that remain valid or can be repurposed, and those which must be jettisoned. Literary and cultural critic Hal Foster shows how the constructive, even utopian dimension of modernism might be remotivated in the face of ecological catastrophe, potentially liberating us from a melancholic fixation on our traumatic past.