Junking modernity: early cinema, globalization, and the question of history ["junking modernity" jettisons common conceptions of early cinema which privilege, whether intentionally or not, western…

The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded a $60,000 Project Grant to support the research project "Junking Modernity: Early Cinema, Globalization, and the Question of History." The grant was awarded on September 1, 2023 under the Promotion of the Humanities Fellowships and Stipends program (CFDA 45.160) to be completed by August 30, 2024. The grant funding will support the production of new scholarship by the principal investigator, including the development of arguments exploring how the material alteration of mass media objects defines early cinema's global circulation in the early 20th century. The project draws from two decades of the recipient's experience tracking film fragments and unidentifiable reels in archives to re-examine common Western conceptions of early cinema and its relationship to modernity.

Junking modernity: early cinema, globalization, and the question of history ["junking modernity" jettisons common conceptions of early cinema which privilege, whether intentionally or not, western modernity's own discourse about itself. IT does so by placing "junk" at the center of historical inquiry. The double meaning of the term is important. On one hand, junk signals the anti-world of technological modernity, the stuff that is discarded, useless and lacking in appeal. Insofar as junk emerges as a symptom of disorder, of things gone wrong (or grown old), however, IT also refers to that which can be found and rescued: reclaimed, reworked, reintegrated. Junk, at its most interesting, is the mass-produced object become individualized or localized. Drawing from two decades of experience tracking celluloid fragments and "unidentifiable" reels in a dozen of the world's film archives, this study argues that the material alteration of mass media objects defines early cinema's global circulation in the first decades of the twentieth century.]