Destruction Was My Beatrice by Jed Rasula

Naumann’s New York Dada 1915–23 (1994), Michael White’s Generation Dada: The Berlin Avant-Garde and the First World War (2013), or Michel Sanouillet’s Dada in Paris (2009), first published in French in 1965 and only recently translated into English. While readers of French have Marc Dachy’s Dada et les dadaïsmes (1994), Anglophone offerings have historically focused on one Dada center or another, as is the case with Francis M. Kamenish’s Mamas of Dada: Women of the European Avant-Garde (2015), which address the still-undervalued contributions of female Dadaists.Īmidst this abundance of publications, it is startling to realize that until now there has been no comprehensive, English-language history of the Dada movement in all of its international incarnations. In the past decade alone, the breadth of Dada scholarship available in English has expanded appreciably thanks to books such as Marius Hentea’s TaTa Dada: The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara (2014) and Tom Sandqvist’s Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire (2006), both of which add significant new background about the movement’s Romanian roots, and Ruth Hemus’s Dada’s Women (2009) and Paula K. The intervening years have spawned no shortage of secondary literature on the movement, ranging from anthologies to museum catalogs to works-such as Peter Bürger’s classic Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974 English translation 1984), or more recent books such as Richard Sheppard’s Modernism-Dada-Postmodernism (2000) and Matthew Biro’s The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin (2009)-that advance broader claims for the movement’s significance in the history of modern art and culture. Many Dadaists later published their own accounts of the movement in the form of memoirs, diaries, and collections of essays or letters, often strongly flavored by feuds and ideological oppositions. During this avant-garde movement’s short lifespan, its members produced anthologies and almanacs collecting and canonizing their most significant works. From the moment of its inception in 1916 Zurich, the Dada movement has inspired a seemingly compulsive drive to documentation.

Destruction Was My Beatrice by Jed Rasula