Interpretations of the idea of modernity in poetic schools of the Middle East and Central Asia in the 20th century

This paper will discuss how the idea of modernity is refracted in the practice of several schools of poetry that emerged in the twentieth century in the Muslim societies of the Middle East and Central Asia, namely Nazim Hikmet's Turkish engaged modernism, the Lebanese-Syrian circle of the Shi'r magazine, the Iranian She'r-e Nov movement, and the so-called Fergana school, which brought together poets and artists from Uzbekistan. These schools are usually perceived in the context of international literary modernism, where the literatures of the “global South” (to use Immanuel Wallerstein's famous expression) play a defining role. The chronological framework of the work covers the entire twentieth century, although the above movements entered the literary scene gradually, intercepting each other's aesthetic and intellectual agenda: first of all, in the 1920s, the modernist movement was formed in Turkey and Iran, then it was replaced at the turn of the 1940s-1950s by the Arab modernists, who formed their own literary program by the second half of the 1950s and remained active until the outbreak of the civil war in Lebanon (1975); with some interruption, in the 1980s, the Ferghana movement emerged. There was little direct contact between all of these strands, yet there were significant similarities in the way they saw the place of modernist literature in the cultural context of the global South. To a large extent, this state of affairs, as will be shown in the paper, was due to belonging to Muslim societies, albeit different from each other, but retaining significant cultural affinities.