This panel stages an intervention by bringing together three different papers that stand against the militant discourses in modernist studies and instead illuminates the intersection of peace studies and modernism. Each of these papers employs the figures from the famous Bloomsbury group and use literature alongside different modalities of creation and curation to open new ideas about modernist pacifism. Though traditionally modernism has been read alongside war, these three papers reorient our thinking and put modernism in relation to peace. Here we build upon the work of Jessica Berman, Sara Cole, and Paul K. Saint-Amour, who all in the last decade have written about modernism, ethics, and peace, and whose work moves further from a definitional approach of modernism with its strict axioms of inclusion. These papers extend our understanding of modernism and its embedded call for peace by approaching this conversation through a variety of mediums, highlighting modernist studies’ multimodal nature, and introducing new archives to the discourse.

In “Saving the Old World, Making a New One: Bloomsbury Activism and Pacifist Resistance,” Sejal Sutaria illustrates how E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf deployed modes of revolution driven resistance that promoted their audiences to envision and embrace a pacifist socio-political transformation. In Three Guineas, Woolf deploys what Sutaria identifies as a “politics of untranslatability” to instigate her readers to envision an egalitarian, pacifist society while acknowledging that it can only be realized through a disillusion of the inherently violent, patriarchal power structures upholding the current order. Forster’s attention to the association of pacifism with the feminine, coupled with his urgency to exercise individual autonomy as resistance amidst threats to free speech made his version of pacifist activism tenuous according to biographer Wendy Mofat and “tepid” according to Ria Banerjee. In his radio talks on the BBC’s Indian Service, collected in Two Cheers for Democracy, Forster capitalized on the intimacy and inter-modality of radio to enact how individuals could assert their freedom to speak out against suppression of free speech and civil liberties in the name of national security. Sutaria contends that read together, the literary and cultural production of Woolf and Forster exemplify both the potential for what Charles T. Andrews identifies as active pacifism that prompts transformation, even as it confronts the challenge to balance the individual with the collective so central to the conditions of modernity.

Following Sutaria, Josiah D. Hillner works to bring modernist pacifism into the discourse of utopian studies, through discussing his work on the digital project Surveying Utopias: A Critical Exploration. In “Intervention as Disruption: The Juncture of Woolf, Burdekin, and Peace Studies,” Hillner places peace and the digital humanities in dialogue through describing the work on a standing and digital humanities exhibition, Surveying Utopias: A Critical Exploration. This essay discusses various approaches to utopian vision explored during the curation of our exhibition and, while no definitive model of utopia will be decided upon, Hillner shows that the nexus of the discourse is, in fact, addressing the larger domain of peace. If we imagine that every unfolding always exists as one possible version of utopia, that there is no singular original but an array of realizations, then the relations between versions is not a moral one of right and wrong but an ethical one of reciprocity. Emmanuel Levinas defines an ethical relationship as a kinship, a relation of interactions, or “a relation in which there is reciprocity.” In utopia’s unfolding, we find in the fold a call for an ethical response that Hillner argues is a call for peace. Hillner reads Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas alongside Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night and takes the audience through archival items of the digital humanities site to show how the utopic folds of peace manifest.

In “Intersectional Pacifism, Utopias, and the Being-Human of the Digital Humanities,” J. Ashley Foster brings the work of Sutaria and Hillner together by integrating theories on Bloomsbury’s pacifist activism into conversations in utopian studies and feminist digital pedagogy. Extending upon the work Foster published in 2018, “Bloomsbury and War,” this paper first lays the groundwork for serious thinking of social change. Through a brief glimpse at the Bloomsbury Group and Virginia Woolf, Foster shows that the phrase she coined—“intersectional pacifism”—from working on the digital humanities project, Testimonies in Art and Action, asks us to think about pacifist activism as a revolutionary call enmeshed in humanist, feminist, socialist, anti-fascist, anti-colonial, humanitarian, and social justice movements. She then takes a look at how curating a Digital Humanities and Special Collections exhibition, Surveying Utopias: A Critical Exploration, with graduate students from Fresno State, expands this discourse of social change and the dream of peace by recovering the lost histories of utopian visionary Albert K. Owen. She closes with exploring the way in which these digital humanities projects, Testimonies in Art & Action, and Surveying Utopias, are built from a feminist digital pedagogy that engages a social justice activism which responds to, in Judith Butler’s terms, our very precariousness of being human and tries to think, instead, of a global community of interrelatedness and hope for a better world.

This panel is timely because it gestures toward a slowly brewing undercurrent in modernist studies to think peace, indicated by the the topic of “Virginia Woolf, Europe, and Peace” of the 2018 International Conference on Virginia Woolf and the recent publications of Jane Goldman’s “Bloomsbury's Pacifist Aesthetics: Woolf, Keynes, Rodker” (2018), Charles Andrew’s Writing Against War (2017) and Jean Mills’s Virginia Woolf, Jane Ellen Harrison, and the Spirit of Modernist Classicism (2014). The panel's nuanced readings of Bloomsbury figures, sound archives, and digital humanities projects illuminate how pacifists discourses are ensconced in modernist art, literature, and thought. Session moderator Amanda Golden, whose recent work follows our multimodal tract and formulates feminist digital modernism, will facilitate the discussion following the three presentations.