Maybe it's not "clear" so much as something I am conscious of, or choose to be conscious of; it's more of a thin strand of a difference, but which, when examined, could unfold into an entire "antipodean" opposing vector.
My sense is that most readers will decide not to acknowledge this point, but I am not in any position, presently, to argue it. Korea, to take an example close to me, couldn't have had much of a response to modernism since they were an annexed Japanese property at the time, and in the fifties was being reduced to ashes.
It almost goes without saying that non-Christian countries have followed their own course, whatever that may be, and with a look at Johnston, we are reminded that Greece had a peculiar relationship to the mainland the orphic Angelos Sikelianos, for instance, was not waxing nostalgic for a foreign religion. Modernism is usually understood as a universal event, but it might be better understood as a local, Western one, at least in the early decades of the last century; as a result, most of the ways we talk about culture today are based on certain key events which had no resonance elsewhere in the world, though we choose to use this language for all occasions.
The present discourse on globalization appears, then, to be more general and useful across national boundaries than that of modernism in the arts, which relies on chronologies so, for instance, if Duchamp's urinal appeared in Japan in we would say it's derivative, but if Japan invented a new way to sell the same old stocks, and to subvert communities and manhandle small enterprise, they are full-fledged, innovative participants.
Anyway, the Malley poems and Angry Penguins' editor Max Harris's embarrassment and prosecution upon publishing them probably has many other strands that can be explored outside of its relationship to modernism, such as the reactionary response to overt, unclouded or even adolescent sexuality in poetry.
