Locating transnationalism: circle magazine and California modernism in the 1940s

Using the Circle magazine as a case study, this chapter explores dialogues between East and West Coast artists and writers about the unequal distribution of cultural and symbolic capital in America at mid-century. It aims to write Circle more legibly into narratives of California cultural development in the 1940s, emphasizing how negotiating the currency and identity of Surrealism, in particular, was implicated in the articulation of regional specificity. The magazine, then, exposes the interdependence of the translocal and transnational at this moment in modernism's history, when the tropes and practices of European Surrealism had become domesticated and indigenized. Debates about the regional and the transnational as they informed California modernism are better rehearsed in art historical literature on the period, and there is much to be gained from bringing into play this scholarship, not least because Circle was an "art-literary magazine", dedicated to the promotion of both visual and verbal cultural production.