Introduction

When I began to think about editing this collection, echoes of the 100th anniversary celebrations of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Founding and Manifesto of Futurism were resonating widely. Italian Futurism has frequently been taken as a point of departure to interrogate some of the issues raised in this volume. Futurismo provided, and, to some extent, continues to provide, barring of course geographic determinism and an equally reductive reliance on capitalism as a heuristic, useful lessons in alternative modes of development and geographical displacement which help interrogate ‘peripheral’ angles of the Modernist phenomenon.