Proud Flesh: New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness Vol. 1. 1 (2002) © Africa Resource Center, Inc., 2002 REVIEW ESSAY: MARSHALL BERMAN, ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO THE AIR: THE EXPERIENCE OF MODERNITY (New York: Pen- guin Books, 1982). Gladys M. Jiménez-Muñoz Marshall Berman intends his book to be a study in the dialectics of moderniza- tion and modernism (16). He begins by defining these two terms after having identified what he means by modernity. For Berman, “There is a mode of vital experience—experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life’s possi- bilities and perils that is shared by men and women all over the world today. I will call this body of experience modernity (15). Modernization, however is ... the social processes that bring this maelstrom into being, and keep it in a state of per- petual becoming...(16). While modernism is an ensemble of visions, ideas, and values: These world-historical process have nourished an amazing variety of vi- sions and ideas that aim to make men and women the subjects as well as the ob- jects of modernization, to give them the power to change the world that is changing them, to make their way through the maelstrom and make it their own. (16) In other words, it seems that, for him, (a) modernization is the social changes that are constantly taking place in this respect, (b) modernity is the way in which these changes are immediately lived and experienced (consciously or not), while (c) modernism is the post-facto reflection and intellectual / artistic / literary / ma- terial / political / etc. representation of these changes. Berman has embarked here on an ambitious effort of sociocultural regeneration. In light of the despair, desolation, and apparent emptiness of the current land- scape, the author proposes a re-examination and return to the modernism of the recent past as a way of revitalizing and transforming the present to guarantee the future: It may turn out, then, that going back can be a way to go for- ward: That remembering the modernisms of the nineteenth century can give us the vision and courage to create the mod- ernisms of the twenty-first. This act of remembering can help us bring modernism back to its roots, so that it can nourish and renew itself, to confront the adventures and dangers that lie