Modernism in a Global Context 9781472569646, 9781472569653, 9781474219631, 9781472569660

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgments
Permissions
Chapter 1 An aesthetics of motion
David Damrosch
Franco Moretti
Pascale Casanova
Gayatri Spivak
Paul Gilroy
Space and temporality
Translation
Racial and ethnic difference
Genre
What follows
Chapter 2 Imperialism
Landscapes of hierarchy and resistance
Imperialism as domination
Alternative cartographies
Ambivalence and hybridity
Metropolitan space
Berlin modernism
Olive Schreiner
Joseph Conrad
Elizabeth Bowen
Karel Čapek
Bandung modernism
Aimé Césaire
Pramoedya Ananta Toer
M. G. Vassanji
Concluding summary
Chapter 3 Cosmopolitanism
Cosmopolites and cosmo-skeptics
Prescriptive cosmopolitanism
Descriptive cosmopolitanism
Nancy Cunard
Nella Larsen
Djuna Barnes
Eileen Chang
Concluding summary
Note
Chapter 4 Cultural institutions
Pierre Bourdieu and his interlocutors
Little magazines
Independent publishers
Festivals and conferences
Cultural awards
Concluding summary
Notes
Chapter 5 Media
McLuhan, Kenner, and the mechanic media
Writing by other means
Media ethics and ecologies
Bearing across
Photography
Phonography
Cinema
Radio
Concluding summary
Conclusion
Modernities at large, or one world system?
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Modernism in a Global Context

ii

New Modernisms Series Bloomsbury’s New Modernisms series introduces, explores, and extends the major topics and debates at the forefront of ­contemporary Modernist Studies. Surveying new engagements with such topics as race, sexuality, technology, and material culture and supported with ­authoritative further reading guides to the key works in contemporary ­scholarship, these books are essential guides for serious students and scholars of Modernism. Published Titles Modernism: Evolution of an Idea Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers Forthcoming Titles Modernism’s Print Cultures Faye Hammill and Mark Hussey Modernism, War, and Violence Marina MacKay Modernism, Science, and Technology Mark S. Morrisson

Modernism in a Global Context Peter J. Kalliney

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © Peter Kalliney, 2016 Peter Kalliney has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-6964-6 PB: 978-1-4725-6965-3 ePDF: 978-1-4725-6966-0 ePub: 978-1-4725-6963-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: New Modernisms

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents

Acknowledgments  vi

1 An aesthetics of motion  1 2 Imperialism 25 3 Cosmopolitanism 59 4 Cultural institutions  89 5 Media 121 6 Conclusion: Modernities at large, or one world system?  157

Bibliography  165 Index  181

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the New Modernisms series editors Gayle Rogers and Sean Latham for encouraging me to write this book and for providing sensible advice along the way. David Avital and Mark Richardson showed patience and offered editorial guidance as the project developed. Anita Singh and Ryan McGinnis provided expert copy editing, fact checking, and indexing support. A. James Arnold graciously supplied important background information about Aimé Césaire; Elliott Colla did likewise with Tayeb Salih. Conversations with Debra Rae Cohen and Michael Trask were especially helpful as I assembled the chapter on media. I owe a debt of gratitude to my family, who kept this project afloat when I was taking on water: my parents, Elizabeth and Sami Kalliney; my new mother, Raymonde Rignall; my spouse, Karen Rignall; and our children, Nedjma and Zaydan, who remind me on a daily basis that reading ought to be fun.

Permissions “The Voyage,” by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Robert Lowell: Copyright © 1955, 1962 by New Directions Publishing Corporation. Used by permission. Sections of “Ode to Guinea” from Solar Throat Slashed: The Unexpurgated 1948 Edition by Aimé Césaire copyright © 2011, reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. Excerpts from “In the Waiting Room” from Poems by Elizabeth Bishop, copyright © 2011 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Publisher’s Note and compilation copyright © 2011 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. Published also by Chatto & Windus. Reproduced by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux LLC and Random House Group Ltd. Quotation from Louise Bennett’s “Colonization in Reverse” is courtesy of the Louise Bennett Coverley Estate and protected by copyright; applications for permission to quote should be directed to Judge Pamela Appelt ([email protected]) and Fabian Coverley ([email protected]).

1 An aesthetics of motion

The feeling that modernism is an aesthetics of motion is evident from the very earliest stirrings of the movement, long before it would ever be called modernism. Charles Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil [Les Fleurs du mal] (1857–68), commonly described as the first instance of European modernist literature, uses travel to depict the restless, unsatisfactory temperament that would become a familiar feature of later poetry. When the volume was revised and republished in 1861, it closed with “Le Voyage,” the final poem in a section called “Death” [“La Mort”]. As we might expect, the opening sequence in the poem alludes to travel, both real and imagined: For the boy playing with his globes and stamps, the world is equal to his appetite— how grand the world in the blaze of the lamps, how petty in tomorrow’s small dry light! . . . But the true voyagers are those who move simply to move—like lost balloons! Their heart is some old motor thudding in one groove. It says its simple phrase: “Let us depart!” (part I, lines 1–4, 17–20) Unlike the ingenuous child, whose dreams of travel are grand but also evanescent, the “true voyager” has neither lofty illusions nor a changeable nature. The genuine traveler is blown about the world as an untethered balloon, with little sense of direction and no will to resist the forces of nature that cause the movement. The lyric speaker’s thudding soul, unlike his mobile body, is stuck on one monotonous track, repeating the imperative of movement without cease. The need to move lacks obvious motivation, being

2

Modernism in a Global Context

mechanical, and the speaker does not seem to care much about the direction of movement. Later in the poem, the speaker licks his emotional wounds by reflecting on the bitter knowledge travel brings. A weary traveler might crave some rest, but not Baudelaire’s subject, who would not remain stationary by choice: How sour the knowledge travellers bring away! The world’s monotonous and small; we see ourselves today, tomorrow, yesterday, an oasis of horror in sands of ennui! (part VII, lines 1–4) The more this speaker travels, the more he seems to need to travel, although the more he travels, the more the world seems monotonous and monochromatic. Over the next few decades, visual and sound reproduction technologies would make the world seem smaller, and, to a surprising extent, just as monotonous and monochromatic as before. The need to travel is fueled by the speaker’s ennui, and yet seeing the world only adds to that sense of boredom and fatigue. At last, only in the closing stanza of the poem, do we get a clearer sense of what the speaker hopes or expects to find through his journeys: Only when we drink poison are we well— we want, this fire so burns our brain tissue, to drown in the abyss—heaven or hell, who cares? Through the unknown, we’ll find the new. (part VIII, lines 5–8) The blunt paradoxes and deep ambivalences of these final lines recur throughout modernist writing as it emerges and develops around the world. Only poison makes our bodies feel well; only when we are fevered do our minds function properly, understanding the world for what it really is. The difference between heaven and hell is of no consequence to this disillusioned secularist—who cares, he asks, as long as it gives us a remarkable experience. Encountering the unknown, the speaker concludes, will allow us to find the new. The concept of newness, the possibility of encountering the unknown, is virtually the only thing to excite the speaker’s jaded mind. In Baudelaire’s lyrics, the poet figures himself as a conduit to novelty, and yet he broods on the impossibility of discovering

An aesthetics of motion

3

anything new. This paradox is a signature feature of modernist literature. As Michael Levenson reminds us, “Modernity remains haunted both by a search for novelty and by the recollection of precursors,” creating the impression that new experiences are both highly desirable and likely to be compromised by the existence of precedents (2). Not infrequently, modernism’s invocations of aesthetic novelty hinge on representations of travel, translation, and cultural difference. The cultivated, agonized self-consciousness on display in Baudelaire’s lines finds fitting expression in the motif of travel. This sense of spiritual desolation is not caused by obvious external factors—the loss of a loved one, being spurned by a lover, or questioning one’s faith are common causes of emotional turbulence in earlier literary traditions—and hence the solution might strike us as equally unconventional. It is the sense of restlessness so pervasive in modernist literature that the present book hopes to document and to analyze. This restlessness reflects both the allure and the evanescence of novelty. Travel and translation are right at the core of modernism’s aesthetics of motion and dissonance. Sometimes, cultural exchange followed the routes set by European imperialism. E. M. Forster’s and George Orwell’s depictions of British India and their relationships with subcontinental intellectuals, such as Mulk Raj Anand, fit this rough pattern. Anand, Forster, and Orwell share an anti-imperial outlook that informs their aesthetics, but they came into contact through imperialist cultural institutions, including the BBC. Similar things might be said about Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon, whose political, philosophical, and aesthetic concerns were shaped by a shared anti-imperialism, and yet they too began a dialogue through the channels of French imperialism and its cultural networks. It was Raymond Williams, in “Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism” (1985), who first theorized this relationship between imperialism and the emergence of modernism in specific metropolitan locations, such as London and Paris. These cities had the specialized cultural institutions to support a small group of intellectuals, but these cities also had access to vast colonial regions from which to recruit talent and discover raw material. And yet informal or defunct empires, and sometimes colonies or ex-colonies, with large metropolitan centers were also able to serve this function. Barcelona, Berlin, and New York City, but also Buenos Aires, Cairo, and Ibadan have been sites of significant modernist

4

Modernism in a Global Context

activity because these cities attracted intellectuals from a diverse range of places. Modernism’s attachment to novelty is in some way connected to its proliferation at cultural crossroads. Sometimes, however, modernists neither follow the pathways established by imperialism, nor do they confine themselves, their collaborators, or their work to a world city or its primary language. As David Damrosch points out in What Is World Literature? (2003), texts travel in all sorts of unpredictable ways, with all sorts of unpredictable results. Franz Kafka provides a textbook example of a writer whose work has circulated across linguistic and cultural borders and who has become a high priest of modernist writing in the anglophone world and beyond. Kafka, the Czech who studied Hebrew and Yiddish and wrote in German, was translated into English in the 1930s as a universal writer, a figure who captured the forms of alienation thought to be endemic to modern life across cultures. In more recent years, however, an ethnic Kafka has been rediscovered, with translators encouraging readers to see Kafka as part of Czech and European Jewish cultural traditions. Kafka is not the only writer whose status and identity has changed in the process of being translated into other languages and imported into other contexts. Rabindranath Tagore, lavishly but briefly hailed by W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound, became a lasting poetic influence in Spain, where there was a major poetry award named in his honor; Roger Caillois, influential French editor, spent the Second World War stranded in South America and returned to France as a knowledgeable enthusiast of contemporary literature in Spanish, publishing much of the Latin American Boom in Paris; the young James Joyce so admired Henrik Ibsen’s drama that he learned enough Norwegian in order to correspond with his idol directly; Elizabeth Bishop lived fourteen years in Brazil, primarily for personal reasons; Paul Bowles and Claude McKay, an unlikely duo, both found refuge in Morocco; Sonallah Ibrahim and Ousmane Sembène spent formative years studying in the Soviet Union and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o finished drafting Petals of Blood (1977) there as the guest of the official Union of Soviet Writers. All these are examples of modernist writers whose work was profoundly influenced by travel and translation. Although imperialism had a determining effect on many of the cultural networks that were formed by modernists, other modernist writers and texts moved through channels relatively unconnected with imperial relationships. In some instances, writers

An aesthetics of motion

5

stayed close to home and were thus much less experienced travelers than the texts they produced. In the next section of this Introduction, I provide an overview of five major theorists of global or transnational literature: Pascale Casanova, Damrosch, Paul Gilroy, Franco Moretti, and Gayatri Spivak. None of these scholars restricts himself or herself to modernism, I should note in passing. Collectively, their thinking about the global dimensions of literature has influenced the study of modernism in two key ways. First, these theorists have encouraged readers to compare geopolitical maps to their literary counterparts. We know that some nations and regions are more politically and economically powerful than others; is the same true of literature? Have some nations and groups—especially those most powerful in geopolitical terms—imposed their languages, their cultures, and their literary discoveries on less powerful nations? If this is the case, have less powerful nations embraced or resisted the imposition of exogenous influences—or have the literary cultures of the socalled periphery been more ambivalent, embracing some influences and rejecting others? Since modernism and Western European imperialism are at the very least historically coincident—some scholars have deemed them coextensive (Slemon)—this bundle of questions has shaped much recent scholarship on modernist writing. Second, the vexed relationship between modernism (as a set of aesthetic tendencies across the arts) and modernity (as a broad historical marker associated with the global dominance of capitalism and an increase in intercultural contact) has been a crucial factor in this discussion, as Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers discuss in their introductory volume in this series. Do modernists reject modernity, are they enthusiastic about it, or perhaps the relationship is more agonistic than this simple binary would imply? Critics were long accustomed to reading T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) as an extended complaint against modernity, but recent trends in modernist studies have shown an Eliot who is more open to popular music, new technologies, and commodity culture than previous scholars had allowed. Similar things might be said of Chinua Achebe. Achebe’s earliest readers hailed him as someone eager to record the traditions of Igbo culture before they disappeared into the maelstrom of modern society, but more recent studies reveal an Achebe who believed Nigerians could be more independent, both culturally and politically, not by rejecting

6

Modernism in a Global Context

modernity, but by harnessing change in a way that might empower his fellow nationals. Casanova, Damrosch, Gilroy, Moretti, and Spivak each have instructive things to say about these debates.

David Damrosch What is world literature?, asks Damrosch, in his field-defining book which takes that question as its title. It is a big question, as he readily admits, but his provisional answer is as deceptively, disarmingly simple as the question preceding it: “The idea of world literature can usefully continue to mean a subset of the plenum of literature. I take world literature to encompass all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language” (4). Conceptually, Damrosch’s definition is delightfully straightforward and yet adaptable enough to be fitted to different circumstances. World literature is not all literature ever produced. Rather, a practical definition of the term is literature read beyond or across original cultural and historical contexts, in translation or not as the case may be. World literature consists of texts in motion. They might be ancient texts, read in the present, or contemporary texts read by people in various places. How texts are read—a question Damrosch explores at great length—is far more important than how they are produced, by whom they are produced, and through what mechanisms they circulate. A reductive way of looking at Damrosch’s definition would be to call it anti-New Historicist. One does not need elaborate discussions of historical and cultural contexts to read a writer effectively and meaningfully, from a world literature perspective. A more sympathetic (and faithful) way of reading Damrosch is that he makes room for the specialist, upon whom the generalist ought to rely for detailed information, while admitting the possibility of vast comparative reading projects across place and historical period. The generalist may not even be able to read the source language of a text to make interesting comparisons with other texts: this is no sin, and often a virtue, in Damrosch’s system. The question of translation is no more vexing to Damrosch, whose no-nonsense approach to the matter has ruffled a few scholarly feathers. As a text moves into the sphere of world literature, “far from inevitably suffering a loss of authenticity or essence, a work can gain in many ways.” This is not to say that a text is somehow

An aesthetics of motion

7

unchanged or preserved when it circulates in translation, nor is it to suggest that there is no difference between bad and good translations. Rather, it again directs the interpretive eye away from the text, the unique, one and only source text, and toward the reader, who does not always need to know every facet of the source culture to get something tangible and interesting out of the experience of consuming a text (Gilroy, Homi Bhabha, and Edward Said, by contrast, insist that the homogeneity of source cultures is not tenable; every culture is hybrid). Damrosch also undercuts the myth of the author, but not necessarily in the mode of deconstructionist high theory; some authors write with translation in mind, anticipating foreign audiences for their texts, but this does not mean that textual indeterminacy reigns supreme in this account. Damrosch spells out the theoretical implications of this general position: “To understand the workings of world literature, we need more a phenomenology than an ontology of the work of art: a literary work manifests differently abroad than it does at home” (6). Texts can gain, as well as lose, when borne across languages and cultures. In the case studies he presents in his book, Damrosch tracks individual texts, such as The Epic of Gilgamesh, as they have moved around the world. Damrosch’s book, like Spivak’s Death of a Discipline (2003), ought to be read as a powerful defense of the humanities in a time of perceived crisis. When Damrosch states in the conclusion that world literature is a mode of reading (rather than a mode of writing, we might say), he implies that literary language is something special and powerful, that it cannot be explained by historical and political contexts alone. Describing world literature is really an attempt to define literature full stop: Literary language is thus language that either gains or loses in translation, in contrast to nonliterary language, which typically does neither. The balance of credit and loss remains a distinguishing mark of national versus world literature: literature stays within its national or regional tradition when it usually loses in translation, whereas works become world literature when they gain on balance in translation. (289) Bracketing, for the moment, the issue of whether or not we can talk of translation so generally as a practice (rather than as a deliberate attempt to shift from one reading context to another), Damrosch

8

Modernism in a Global Context

here defines literature succinctly as something that either loses or gains in the process of being translated. Nonliterary texts, or documents with no aesthetic pretensions, need not fear or crave translation. If the goal is simply to communicate information, any unadorned language that meets that goal successfully will do the job. Not so with literature: because it is figurative, perhaps, it makes the job of translation both more challenging and more rewarding. The aesthetic dimension of literature is most readily perceived in the effects of translations. It is noticeable that Damrosch’s method is steeped in close reading. Each chapter fastens on one text or writer, demonstrating how translation changes the way we can read, opening interpretive possibilities for the creative literary consumer. The book seems to move effortlessly through time and space, from ancient Babylon to Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars (1988). Each interpretive gesture rests, very simply, on the premise of reading carefully. The difficulty, as some of his critics have pointed out, is that he offers no diagnosis of how and why literature moves the way it does. Translation happens, but not randomly, his critics would aver. Although Damrosch shows great awareness of this fact—several of the chapters take pains to document the translation histories of individual writers, such as Kafka—he never develops any theory of translation that goes beyond the particular instance, elucidating a general principle. This nimble but uncomplicated approach to translation forms the basis of Emily Apter’s lengthy rebuttal to Damrosch in Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013). And unlike Pascale Casanova’s work, which is very concerned with how translation governs relationships between cultural centers and peripheries, Damrosch is unperturbed by the fact that translation is not necessarily a politically innocent practice. Given that so many practitioners of global literary criticism are interested in expanding the modern canon beyond its European and North American base, Damrosch’s relative lack of interest in this question has provoked substantial debate.

Franco Moretti From one angle, Moretti’s work on global literature, especially his articles “Conjectures on World Literature” (2000) and “More

An aesthetics of motion

9

Conjectures” (2003), is diametrically opposed to What Is World Literature?. Where Damrosch notes how individual texts have been translated and adapted to fit new contexts, Moretti uses the provocative phrase “distant reading” to describe what is badly needed in world literary studies. If we want to understand something useful about how literature functions in a world system, we need to adjust the unit of analysis—we need different types of evidence, more than the singular example, or a small canon of overworked texts, can provide. We require big data and fewer, agonizingly detailed close readings: summaries of many novels, formal definitions of genres, a few basic, common features that determine how closely the individual text hews to the generic type, and lots and lots of data about where and when the genre started, when it began to proliferate in a given place, and when it started to move to other places. We might learn more about the system if we focus far less on the particular instance and focus more on the big picture, identifying some of the key features of a genre, as well as local variations. If such a study could include both geographical and longitudinal information, tracking the number of instances of a genre in both space and time, we would be able to see how genres develop, proliferate, stagnate, mutate, and eventually die. The global literary critic should know statistical information about when novel production began to take off in multiple countries: not only in Britain and France, the core of novel production, but also in Brazil, India, Japan, and Nigeria—rather than lots of information about Don Quixote or Robinson Crusoe in isolation from their innumerable predecessors, siblings, and offspring. In theory, this approach has the great advantage of accounting for the vast majority of texts ever produced, nearly all of which remain unknown to literary critics. Most literary critics know a wealth of information about a mere shelf or two in an enormous library. And Moretti himself speaks as a very able close reader of particular texts, as he shows in The Way of the World: The “Bildungsroman” in European Culture (1987). He contests Damrosch’s account in another important way: where Damrosch does not make the question of cultural power centers, peripheries, and the relationship implied between them an integral part of his model, Moretti takes it for granted that there is a symbolic struggle between core and periphery. In what Moretti describes as a sort of “law of literary evolution,” in cultures from “the periphery of the literary system

10

Modernism in a Global Context

(which means: almost all cultures, inside and outside Europe), the modern novel first arises not as an autonomous development but as a compromise between a western formal influence (usually French or English) and local materials” (“Conjectures,” 58). Studying the world literary system thus involves identifying family trees, where there are lines of descent and family resemblance, as well as the wave patterns, as genres spread out and diversify across the world. The identification of a dense literary hub, and a dispersed outer rim, immediately became a point of contention for his critics, who asked if literature always moves from self-evident core (Britain, France) to equally self-evident periphery (Brazil, India, Japan, and Nigeria in this example): Could not the flow be reversed in some instances? Moretti’s riposte is unequivocal: “Yes, forms can move in several directions. But do they? This is the point, and a theory of literary history should reflect on the constraints of their movements, and the reasons behind them” (“More Conjectures,” 75). Thus, the short answer is actually “no”: in the case of the novel, the flow is largely one-directional. Novels emanating from the periphery tend to import plots but employ local characters and local narrative voices; writers from the center, by contrast, systematically ignore the developments on the periphery. Moretti hedges a bit in the pages that follow, noting that there is a substantial semi-periphery— Germany, Ireland, Russia, and Spain spring to mind in the case of the novel—allowing some degree of two-way interface between core and periphery. But to this we might add: Moretti’s explanation of how the novel moves works well if we describe its growth in different parts of the world, but what if we look at the form’s longterm evolution and development? In mid-twentieth-century Britain, many locals believed the metropolitan novel was in great distress, encouraging critics and readers to look elsewhere—especially to colonies and former colonies, or what became known as the Commonwealth—for the most exciting literary developments. The novel may have begun at the core and spread to a periphery, but the core did not retain its dominance indefinitely. Such an observation is not precluded by the theory Moretti offers here, although it is not a point he seems inclined to develop, either. Moretti certainly has his detractors. Because the practitioners of literary studies have substantial investments in close reading, it will surprise no one that his conviction that close reading is only so much misspent effort would be met with staunch resistance.

An aesthetics of motion

11

There are, however, more substantive criticisms to be made. In particular, Moretti’s practice of distant reading, with its reliance on large numbers of local data points, is very good at showing where and when literary genres move, but it is so far unable to theorize how or why genres grow, move, change, and die. How literature leaves its place of origin, the precise mechanisms by which it moves from one region to another, can be an interesting and ultimately more rewarding question to pose, requiring richer data but also more interpretive nous. For example, when Moretti observes that the novel moves in similar ways as it travels around the world—in Brazil, India, Japan, and Nigeria, he notes, novel production goes from nonexistent to substantial in the span of about two decades— the expression of this general law of literary movement suppresses as much as it exposes. In Nigeria, for instance, the proliferation of the novel in English at mid-twentieth century is driven by a few key factors: the transition from British imperialism to nominal independence, the exponential growth of secondary school and university populations (tutored in English), and the creation of the African Writers Series to serve those constituencies. Studying the interface between politics, education, and publishing ventures in the Nigerian case tells us a great deal about how and why the novel burst onto the scene at mid-century. In theoretical terms, we might say that there is much to be studied in the yawning gulf between big data and close reading: namely, in the many institutions of literary production which help translate or transfer literature between different cultural contexts. Chapter 4 takes up this very question. The implied disagreement between Damrosch and Moretti will be instructive for approaching modernism as a global movement. Damrosch’s work shows us how a select canon of modernist writers—Kafka serves as one of his major examples—moves across cultural contexts. The question is not whether or not Kafka has been translated badly or well, but how the movement of his texts into different reading contexts has generated interesting readings of his work. Moretti, by contrast, encourages us to be skeptical of any definition of modernism that consolidates the reputation of any particular writer at the expense of reading widely, indiscriminately. The advantage of his approach, for students of modernism, is that it allows us to see the uneven flow of cultural influence: if modernism is on the move, we should attend to the questions of how, when, and for what purposes it moves.

12

Modernism in a Global Context

Pascale Casanova Similar to Moretti’s “Conjectures,” Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters [La République mondiale des lettres] (1999, English 2004) seeks to explain how the whole system works. For her, the world literary system is not a mode of reading, as it is with Damrosch, but instead a global pecking order: there are richly endowed literary cultures and languages, as well as literary cultures mired in poverty and obscurity. For perhaps a century and a half—at least through the 1930s—Paris was the undisputed center of cultural production, and more important, the center of global tastemaking. The social and intellectual freedoms offered by Paris, as well as the international status of the French language, combined to help make Parisian intellectuals the arbiters of the world literary system. For an aspiring writer of almost any nation or region—Eastern European, sub-Saharan African, Irish, North American, South American, Chinese—being recognized by the authorities in Paris represented the pinnacle of literary achievement. This was because the Parisian literary establishment fashioned itself, paradoxically, as the antithesis of local or national interests. In this account, writers from nations with a limited literary tradition have two stark options: (1) stay at home, write in a local language, and appeal to national authorities, or (2) opt for exile in Paris (usually a literal exile, but sometimes only a literary expatriation), abandon national prejudices and limitations, and seek a global audience through appeals to the literati. As this synopsis would suggest, Casanova’s model seems to be drawn from the example of Joyce above all—the aspiring writer, frustrated by local standards and limitations, takes refuge in Paris in an attempt to go beyond national or regional categories. Pierre Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology and Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, which also inform Moretti’s project, provide much of Casanova’s theoretical framework. Ideas such as cultural capital (the recognition a writer may achieve in the area of cultural production, which may not be recognized by other fields or in other contexts) become interesting concepts in Casanova’s hands. Individuals within the cultural field engage in competition with one another. When an aspiring modernist writer attacks the figures and institutions of the establishment, we should read this less as a pure statement of aesthetic preferences and more as a conscious strategy,

An aesthetics of motion

13

an attempt to siphon away or redirect some of the symbolic capital attached to others. Languages and nations, as much as individuals and institutions, have forms of cultural and linguistic capital at their disposal. Paris may have been the undisputed cultural capital of the world for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but its position was always under attack by rivals and pretenders. In the latter half of the twentieth century, both London and New York City presented fierce challenges to Parisian dominance. Nations, regions, and languages, too, are in a constant struggle to tilt the field to their own advantage, as any seasoned observer of the Nobel Prize will know from watching campaigns for particular writers. In contrast to Damrosch, for whom the questions of cultural power and inequality are fairly distant concerns, Casanova’s account is all about competitive struggle. Any critic of global literature who hopes to describe the imbalances and politics of world literary space must reckon with Casanova’s and Moretti’s work. Furthermore, Casanova’s account is worth studying in some detail because it retains a strong sense of the nation as a culturally significant unit. Thus, while Damrosch and Moretti consider how texts move across boundaries, Casanova is far more concerned with how nations and regions remain distinct cultural entities competing within a global system. More than one interlocutor has questioned the apparent Parisian bias of Casanova’s account, along with some of her depictions of national literary traditions, such as the Irish example. Others have quibbled with her readings of North and South American writers: it may be going too far to claim that without Parisian recognition, figures such as Joyce, William Faulkner, or Gabriel García Márquez would have been consigned to regional recognition only. Beyond this, some of her critics remain unsure of whether her depiction of a clear, antagonistic division between national and global literary culture is tenable. As Casanova says: One of the peculiarities of the relationship that deprived writers [i.e., those from the literary periphery] maintain with the literary world has therefore to do with the terrible and inescapable dilemma they have to confront and then resolve in their various ways, regardless of differences of political, national, literary, or linguistic history. Faced with an antimony that is unique to their situation (and that appears only to them), they have to make

14

Modernism in a Global Context

an unavoidably painful choice: either to affirm their difference and so condemn themselves to the difficult and uncertain fate of national writers (whether their appeal is regional, popular, or other) writing in “small” literary languages that are hardly, or not at all, recognized in the international literary world; or to betray their heritage and, denying their difference, assimilate the values of one of the great literary centers. (180) This general model may work well for some writers, but the empirical evidence does not seem to support this in other instances. Could we really assert that a writer such as Léopold Sédar Senghor, political leader of postcolonial Senegal, cofounder of the négritude movement, and inductee to the Académie française, subordinated his regional or national aspirations in order to achieve recognition in Paris? The fact that he elected to write in French does not mean that he unequivocally “assimilate[d] the values” of Paris. Or in the case of Achebe—did his choice to write in English, and his ability to garner an international reputation, involve a repudiation of the Igbo language or of Nigerian autonomy? As Achebe would say, he helped bend English into a Nigerian shape, making it a tool suitable for nationalist writers engaged in the struggle for postcolonial autonomy, cultural and political. It seems more likely that some literary figures, whether through talent, luck, or skillful negotiation of different regimes of value, are able to succeed in the international cultural marketplace without sacrificing their commitment to local or national systems. The clear divide between assertive parochialism, on the one hand, and untethered cosmopolitanism, on the other, seems open to question if we consider the careers of some postcolonial writers who both reached global audiences and maintained strong connections with their nations and regions of origin.

Gayatri Spivak In Death of a Discipline, Spivak calls for “planetarity,” or a form of reading that invokes the planet as a category of thought, over and against the global. Globalization, she reckons, involves the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere. In the gridwork of electronic capital, we achieve that abstract ball

An aesthetics of motion

15

covered in latitudes and longitudes, cut by virtual lines, once the equator and tropics and so on, now drawn by the requirements of Geographical Information Systems. . . . The globe is on our computers. No one lives there. It allows us to think that we can aim to control it. The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan. (72) In many respects, this is a very old-fashioned understanding of globalization, as Spivak herself is well aware. Marx and Engels certainly write of it: capitalism contrives to expand across the world by way of abstractions. Exchange value, in which any commodity can be exchanged for any other commodity only by varying the number of units; latitudes and longitudes, the abstract geographical grid that permits the world to be navigated more predictably; actuarial tables, allowing financiers and insurers to turn unique objects and people into statistical averages; and now our computers, which convert any information into immaterial records. There is some playful irony here, too: Spivak, the master of abstract, theoretical language, argues against the ubiquity of abstraction. Spivak installs the planetary imagination, based in humanistic learning, as the foil of capitalist globalization. The effective difference between them is largely the difference between being an agent, which globalization encourages us to believe we are, and being an object, of which the planetary reminds us. The planetary alerts us that humans occupy the planet on sufferance, on loan as she puts it, and not by right. This realization ought to lead to another insight: “To be human,” she claims, “is to be intended toward the other” (73). In a bracing turn, Spivak offers a number of brief close readings in an attempt to think more expansively about the elasticity of the collective, turning to Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, Mahasweta Devi’s “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha,” Diamela Eltit’s The Fourth World, José Martí’s “Wandering Teachers,” and W. E. B. Du Bois’s “The Negro Mind Reaches Out.” The overarching goal of these textual excursions is to show how literature allows us to incorporate Freud’s uncanny into our understanding of cultural differences. Among other things, a nuanced understanding of the uncanny, with all its overdetermined gender dynamics, will help us get beyond the Manichean binaries of early postcolonial theory—white-black, metropolitan-colonial,

16

Modernism in a Global Context

modern-traditional—and toward a more interdisciplinary criticism in which both comparative literature and area studies can learn from one another. There are several notable differences between Spivak’s account of transnational literature, on the one hand, and those of Moretti and Casanova, on the other. First, and most obvious, Spivak has a very different notion of what center and periphery might look like. For her, critics ought to get away from the habit of thinking that “new immigrant groups” are the key to unlocking the question of cultural difference (84). Instead, Spivak urges us to look beyond urban space, as well as beyond identity politics that lean too heavily on homosocial masculinity. Second, Spivak is unapologetically committed to retaining close reading as the foundation of literary studies. She offers a rebuttal to Moretti’s “Conjectures” that could easily be extended to include Casanova’s project as well. Surprisingly, Spivak and Damrosch, for all their clear differences, are of one mind about the status of close reading in the new comparative literature. Aside from emphasizing close reading, Spivak underlines the importance of learning other languages— given her interest in the relational qualities of reading, this makes a great deal of sense. Finally, and perhaps most important, Spivak claims that the criticism of globalization ought to be inseparable from thinking about gender. Literary representations of gender are a kind of test case for the literary critic who would like to question the function and failure of our collective imagination. Hence her reliance on the uncanny as the principle of planetarity: knowing more about representations of gender not as the aberration, but as the rule of operations, will help us recognize the magnitude of the planet and the fiction of the autonomous subject.

Paul Gilroy Although Paul Gilroy is not noted for his attention to gender in his analysis of the black Atlantic, he and Spivak share some key principles. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) refuses to fetishize racial difference as some cultural studies thinkers are wont to do. He begins the book with a lengthy discussion of African American criticism and British cultural studies, insisting that both are too nationalist in scope. And like

An aesthetics of motion

17

Spivak, who argues that the “precapitalist cultures of the planet” are of value to the contemporary critic (101), Gilroy’s depiction of the African diaspora’s intellectual community as a “counterculture” of modernity is predicated on ethical judgments. Following the lead of C. L. R. James, who in The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938) contends that Haiti’s slaves were the first modern, industrial proletariat, Gilroy argues that the shared experience of “middle passage” and slavery made black Atlantic thinkers the most advanced, most progressive thinkers of their day. As in Baudelaire’s poetry, Gilroy’s model of dissonant and critical modernity is an aesthetics of motion: “It is particularly significant for the direction of my overall argument that [the main examples in the introduction are black] sailors, moving to and fro between nations, crossing borders in modern machines that were themselves micro-systems of linguistic and political hybridity” (12). Literary and intellectual traditions, at least where the African diaspora is concerned, cannot be described by reference to simple national formations. While Gilroy’s account predates Moretti’s vision of global literature by several years, we might read Gilroy anachronistically as offering an implicit criticism of Moretti’s core-periphery scheme of literary evolution. For Gilroy, the intellectuals of the African diaspora are paradoxically more modern than their contemporaries and also more emphatically anti-modern at the same time. Although he is not primarily a scholar of modernist literature, this formulation makes him sound a bit like one: his description of Black Atlantic intellectuals as both relentlessly up-to-date and yet at odds with modernity in some fundamental way is precisely how most modernist scholars describe the writers they study. Gilroy shows little patience for the notion that ideas (or literary forms) originate in one place and spread from there. The black Atlantic does not exist without motion, exchange, and a degree of reciprocity. Cultures are inherently hybrid formations, and so are aesthetic forms. Because of its ambition and influence, The Black Atlantic also presents a big target for critics with different ideas. Some readers have not been entirely satisfied with Gilroy’s level of attentiveness to the function of gender; his black Atlantic networks are largely, though not exclusively, populated by men (and even some men with fairly retrogressive ideas about women). Equally important, Gilroy’s networks cluster most densely between North America,

18

Modernism in a Global Context

the anglophone Caribbean, and Western Europe. Major centers of black Atlantic consciousness, such as Brazil and Haiti, receive only passing references in his account. Even more noticeable is the peripheral impact of African intellectuals. This gap is less surprising if we recall that slavery and the middle passage are privileged sites of consciousness-building in his account of the cultures of the diaspora. Finally, despite Gilroy’s efforts to refuse ethnocentric categories, there is some question of whether he goes far enough in his analysis. Is it legitimate to describe a black Atlantic intellectual history that exists apart from, and hostile to, a “white” Atlantic? Perhaps Gilroy’s model does not allow for enough cross-racial intellectual traffic even as it rejects national boundaries. Such an intellectual history would emphasize not only how black intellectuals have responded to their white colleagues, but also how white North Americans and Europeans reckoned with the cultures of the African diaspora as they formulated their ideas about art and literature. Since the publication of Gilroy’s book over two decades ago, modernist studies has changed dramatically. More than anything else, it has expanded: geographically and culturally (modernists can be found anywhere), linguistically (there are a greater range of texts available in translation), politically (from fascists to social democrats to anarchists, from imperialists to anti-imperialists, from feminists to misogynists), textually (modernism appears in many media, not just in conventional literary forms), and temporally (the dating of modernism from 1890 to 1940 is neither as widely accepted nor as closely observed as it once was). As a result, we now have a richer archive of modernism (there are lots more modernists than there once were). In what remains of this introductory chapter, I try to provide an overview of some of the most interesting research developments during this period of rapid change.

Space and temporality As we might expect, scholars with an interest in expanding the cultural basis of modernism have sought to be more geographically inclusive. Recent years have witnessed substantial efforts to bring old modernisms (read: North American and Western European) into dialogue with modernist formations from around the world (Doyle

An aesthetics of motion

19

and Winkiel; Brooker and Thacker; Wollaeger with Eatough). Susan Stanford Friedman has been even more emphatic in arguing that studies of modernism need to be more geographically openended. She uses a form of “locational feminism” to contend that feminist criticism has a future only if it learns to be more attentive to comparative cultural contexts (Mappings, 18). In her more recent work, she also shows an inclination to expand the temporal frame of modernism, reading texts from the Mongol Empire to the current moment through the prism of modernism (Planetary Modernisms). Rethinking the temporality, as well as the geography, of modernism has become a major concern (Dimock; Hayot). So long as we continue to define modernism and modernity in the same old way, these scholars insist, we will keep finding them, roughly, in the same old places and saying many of the same old things. Other scholarly interventions have treated the question of space more literally. Christie McDonald and Susan Rubin Suleiman turn to GPS networks as a relational model for thinking about francophone literary history. They are drawn to the idea that GPS devices allow for constant recalculation (pace Casanova and Moretti, no center, no periphery), but they also recognize that such technologies were developed first for military uses, productively dulling the utopian longings of academic writing about global thinking. Other scholars take a more historicist approach, showing how modernist literature evolves in conjunction with mapping techniques and geographic thinking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Bulson, Novels; Hegglund; Moretti, Atlas; Thacker). The black Atlantic paradigm has allowed scholars to consider environmental factors as well as racial subordination in the workings of modernity (Baucom, Specters; DeLoughrey).

Translation Attempts to establish literature on a global footing have certainly reinvigorated debates about translation. Brent Hayes Edwards’s The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (2003) and Apter’s The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006) put translation theory to work on two very different fields of play. Whereas Edwards traces the function of slipping and sliding between French and English,

20

Modernism in a Global Context

primarily, in the formation of a radical black Atlantic during the high period of modernism, Apter’s more deracinated study thinks about the effects of translation in the contemporary world, ranging from the hypothesis that everything is translatable to its antithesis, that nothing is translatable. Apter’s interest in classical philology is shared by Christopher GoGwilt, who attempts to delineate “a philology without guarantees, but oriented toward as full as possible a retroactive accounting for the coordinates of transnational modernism” (243). Decolonizing the modernist archive, GoGwilt suggests, involves a comparative framework in which the development of English and the development of other modern languages, such as bahasa Indonesia, may be brought into a direct, non-hierarchical relationship. Christopher Bush, on the other hand, charts fascinating correspondences between literary translations, mistranslations, and the function of media— which, after all, tend to translate words, sounds, and images into other forms. Bush’s reading of the modernist archive suggests that the development of new media encouraged some modernist writers to think of themselves as uniquely equipped to carry ideas and texts from other cultures, especially China, whether or not they knew much about the source culture in question. Although Bush notes the hubris attached to such translation efforts, he also suggests that China figures in unpredictable ways in modernist texts, not merely as empty signifier. In more general terms, the call to compare languages and literary cultures has been sung loud and clear (Baer; Chow, Not Like; Dimock; Felski and Friedman; Spivak; Walkowitz, Born).

Racial and ethnic difference Given the prominence of postcolonial literary studies and the cultural relationships created by imperialism and anticolonialism, it is not surprising that considerations of racial and ethnic difference have figured prominently in writing about modernism in a global context. There is a diversity of work on this broad topic (Arnold; Emery; ­Gikandi, Writing and Maps; North, Dialect; Seshagiri; Winkiel). Much of this scholarship complicates longstanding scholarly narratives about modernism and depictions of racial difference. Jessica Berman’s Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and

An aesthetics of motion

21

­ ransnational Modernism (2011) self-consciously disrespects racial T and imperial boundaries, arguing that writers from a wide range of cultural situations may share ethical perspectives. Nuanced considerations of gender difference have added another level of complexity to the discussion (Edmondson; J. Marcus; Stephens). No longer are modernist critics content to segregate white and black modernism from one another. Aside from Chapter 2 in this volume, which considers the effects of imperialism on modernism, there is a separate book on modernism and racial difference planned for this series.

Genre One of the most robust and unexpected twists in the discussions about modernism in a global context has been the attention paid to literary genres. Moretti’s “Conjectures” proposes that we study the movement of literature around the world by tracking genres, but even scholars with no great sympathy for Moretti’s approach have seized on the problem of literary genres in an attempt to get some purchase on the vast topic of global literature. In one of the earliest treatments of modernist fiction and globalization, The Novel and the Globalization of Culture (1995), Michael Valdez Moses posits the continuing relevance of generic categories, suggesting that the global novel relies very heavily on a theory of tragedy. A recent special issue of PMLA (2014) on tragedy confirms this general outlook; an article by David Scott in the issue argues that tragedy is the quintessential genre of the postcolonial world in the postBandung era. By contrast, Jahan Ramazani throws down the gauntlet for reading lyric poetry as the preeminently global form, arguing counterintuitively that poetry—long read as the most local of literary forms—subtly captures the restlessness of modernism (see also Hart). Discussing figures as diverse as Louise Bennett, Okot p’Bitek, Melvin B. Tolson, and W. B. Yeats, Ramazani and Hart each show that comparing vernacular poetry in English from different regions can show that a scrupulous attentiveness to questions of form can be compatible with revisionist accounts of modernism; we need not abandon formalist reading habits in order to redraw the cultural parameters of modernism along

22

Modernism in a Global Context

more global lines. The twentieth-century novel, it will surprise no one, has been plumbed extensively for its transnational depths: Jed Esty (Unseasonable) and Joseph Slaughter both examine the bildungsroman as the preeminent transnational literary form, while Peter Hitchcock makes a similar case for the serial novel. Drama, manifestos, and performance art have also attracted interest as border-crossing genres. Following the work of Marjorie Perloff, critics have noted the paradoxical combination of spirited internationalism and recrudescent nationalism that proliferates among the avant-garde (Caws; Puchner; Winkiel). Perloff, who reads the avant-garde as both fugitive and fungible, demonstrates that the manifesto probably ought to be classified as a piece of performance art, designed to attract maximum notice and capable of moving easily across national borders.

What follows If modernism offers an aesthetics of motion, the ensuing chapters follow modernism’s urge to move around. Each chapter begins with an overview of the most relevant criticism. These critical introductions are designed to offer a survey of the theoretical landscape. The objective is to outline critical debates, pointing to salient areas of agreement and disagreement. The tone, I hope, will be fairly even-handed, the goal being to introduce readers to points of intersection and divergence among critics without necessarily endorsing one approach or method. The fact that this book is a critical introduction to the topic of modernism in a global context gives me some justification for this approach. Although the book covers a wide range of critical perspectives, these chapters attempt to orient the reader by highlighting specific points of discussion. These chapters are not comprehensive on this front: they omit some critics who might otherwise be present, and they often reduce the complexity of arguments for the sake of clarity. Space, and of course my own competencies and limitations, help explain these gaps. I encourage interested readers to dig more deeply on their own. After an overview of the critical landscape on a particular research question, each chapter provides a number of short applied readings, offering somewhere between five and perhaps a dozen case studies. Again, my own interests and limitations guide my choices. I make

An aesthetics of motion

23

some effort to reach different sections of the world, but these case studies are far from comprehensive. The case studies are meant to be suggestive, showing readers how a comparative method can yield interesting results. In a sense, everything and everywhere are grossly underrepresented: no individual text and no regional canon receive anything like a full treatment. These limitations, I hope, are offset by other gains, notably a widening of perspective that attempts to grapple with modernism’s restlessness. The book’s four main chapters each focus on one of the most promising research areas in international modernist studies. Chapter 2 shows how the emergence of postcolonial theory has dramatically changed the way scholars of modernism now regard the movement. A chapter on modernism and imperialism is therefore an obvious choice for inclusion here. Chapter 3 focuses on cosmopolitanism. Euro-American modernist literature has been associated with cosmopolitanism for quite some time, and recent thinking about the value and ethics of cosmopolitanism has reinvigorated treatments of modernist writing. Chapter 4 considers the burgeoning interest in literary institutions, from little magazines and anthologies to literary prizes and cultural festivals. Finally, Chapter 5 turns to media and technology—especially the new transmission and storage devices of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—suggesting how modernists both embraced new technologies as a way of imagining broader audiences and also questioned the cultural impact of sharing and archiving reams of sound and visual data. New technologies promised to allow the willing artist to transcend narrow boundaries of culture, language, and race, and yet some modernists were quite keen to emphasize that better connections with far-flung places do not always mean better communications. With these four main chapters, this book will not aim for complete coverage of modernism in all its regional variants. Every region of the world has contributed to modernist literature, but the point of this book is not to take readers on a global tour, to compare writers from what is sometimes called the periphery with writers from what is often regarded, implicitly, as the center. In fact, I largely resist the urge to read any literary object strictly, or primarily, in reference to other texts from the regional canon to which it belongs. To my mind, an area studies approach to modernism—a chapter on North America, South America, Western

24

Modernism in a Global Context

Europe, Eastern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, subSaharan Africa, East Asia, Southern Asia, Micronesia, and so on— is both too straightforward and not straightforward enough. Too straightforward in that it might offer literary histories of individual regions, thereby giving us a false sense that we understand all the components of the whole; too straightforward in that it would be more difficult to draw culturally, geographically, and linguistically inconvenient connections between writers in different places from different generations; and not straightforward enough in that a strict coverage model would limit our ability to see modernism as an inherently global movement, not easily bounded by a smaller geographical units of analysis. A truly global perspective should alter our perceptions of the cultural center, whatever that might be, as well as the cultural margins, wherever those might be. If the book has an underlying argument, it is that categories such as European, African, or Latin American modernism should seem to us somewhat limiting, enticing us with a comfortable sense of cultural specificity at the expense of a more uneasy, a more expansive understanding of what modernism does when it is on the move.

2 Imperialism

It would be difficult to overstate the impact of postcolonial studies on the way scholars now think about modernism. The advent of postcolonial theory dramatically changed how students and teachers of modernism are likely to understand the geography and politics of the movement. Thirty years ago, it was possible to teach Anglo-American or French modernism as if imperialism did not affect literary production all that much; now, it is nearly inconceivable to approach the subject without acknowledging, at the very least, the ways in which representations of and responses to imperialism inform modernist culture. The present status of Joyce provides a handy illustration of this point. Joyce’s contemporaries were prone to read him as part of the continental tradition in the spirit of Flaubert (Ezra Pound) or as a timeless myth-maker (T. S. Eliot). Since the advent of postcolonial theory, however, critics have repositioned Joyce as a semicolonial writer (Attridge and Howes), as a proto-revolutionary subaltern writer (Duffy), and as a peripheral modernist who used the experience of underdevelopment to transform writing in English (Jameson, “Modernism”). Once read as the master of a placeless modernist style, Joyce’s status now reflects broader changes in literary studies prompted by the advent of postcolonial theory. Recognizing imperialism’s effects has led to two major changes in the study of modernism, especially of anglophone literature: (1) influential reinterpretations of canonical figures, such as Joyce and Joseph Conrad, with special attention to their depictions of colonial cultures, and (2) a recalibration of the modernist canon, with writers such as Mulk Raj Anand, Katherine Mansfield, Claude McKay, and Jean Rhys assuming a more prominent place in the modernist pantheon.

26

Modernism in a Global Context

The publication of Orientalism (1978) began this process. Although Edward Said’s book is not about modernism, its impact in the humanities was so far-reaching that it forced scholars to consider how imperialism might have influenced the evolution of modernist culture. Additionally, the advent of New Historicism in the 1980s encouraged critics to think more deeply about literature’s political and historical contexts. New Historicism’s close attention to social environments that impact forms of representation— especially to class, gender, and racial hierarchies—encouraged scholars to consider how Western European imperialism affected literary production. For modernist scholars with a global perspective, two major international conferences provide neat contextual bookends for their endeavors: the Berlin Conference of 1884–5, at which the European powers redrew the political map of Africa, and the Afro-Asian Conference of 1955, held in Bandung, Indonesia, at which the emergent postcolonial nations denounced European imperialism and proclaimed their neutrality in the Cold War. These diplomatic summits comprise a natural dialectical pair in several ways. At Berlin, there were no representatives of indigenous Africans; at Bandung, the European imperial powers, the United States, and the Soviet Union were provocatively excluded from the gathering. Both conferences were important venues for articulating nationalist programs: the Berlin meeting was convened by a recently unified Germany to help secure its seat at the bargaining table of European nation-states, while Bandung’s delegates used the format of the international conference to demand recognition as autonomous political units. The Berlin Conference ratified a system of cooperation among the European powers over the disposition of African territories: Germany bolstered its claims as a sovereign nation-state by making claims in Africa and also by nominating itself as a mediator of disputes between European imperialist nations. Yet the summit also ushered in a new, intensive phase of imperialist competition that would contribute to the outbreak of war in 1914. The Bandung Conference, likewise, transpired under a banner of postcolonial solidarity and Cold War neutrality, but its participants also realized that a mutual hatred of colonialism would not in itself create lasting bonds between emergent nations. The Berlin and Bandung conferences are useful conceptual signposts for the study of modernism in a global context because

Imperialism

27

these gatherings captured the political and cartographic imaginary of their respective moments. Modernism began, roughly speaking, at a time when many Western Europeans believed they could rule distant lands without consulting the groups who lived there, and yet these very presumptions brought Western Europeans into closer contact with diverse peoples who would challenge their view of the world. The Berlin Conference began, coincidentally, in the same year the Greenwich Meridian was established, an equally significant moment in European imperialism. Modernism was winding down, it could be argued, with Western European domination of the world being challenged not only by colonized people themselves, but also by the two superpowers which would set the ideological agenda of the Cold War. Colonized peoples tended to be suspicious of both the United States and the Soviet Union, resisting the demand that everyone declare Cold War allegiances: the process of throwing out imperial powers did not make new nation-states eager to become client states of another sort. But the Cold War also provided an opportunity to exploit the relative weakness of the old imperial powers, allowing colonized regions to achieve a degree of political and cultural autonomy. Using these two conferences as historical markers, this chapter focuses on modernist representations of cultural geography. This emphasis on “contact zones,” to cite Mary Louise Pratt’s influential concept, allows this section of the book to compare depictions of cultural interchange across a wide temporal and aesthetic range of texts. First, this chapter provides an overview of the secondary literature on modernism and imperialism, showing how a heightened attentiveness to the geographies of imperialism has been brought to bear on the study of the period’s literature. Next, it turns to the Berlin Conference as a sort of template for reading modernism’s representations of imperialism. The works of Olive Schreiner, Conrad, Elizabeth Bowen, and Karel Čapek come up for consideration here. Finally, this chapter glosses the Bandung Conference to contextualize representations of anticolonialism and decolonization. The discussion closes with brief readings of Aimé Césaire, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and M. G. Vassanji. As we shall see, not all the European modernists considered here were supporters of imperialism, just as it would be a mistake to regard all modernists from colonial regions as unambiguously anti-imperialists. Examining these writers suggests that modernists

28

Modernism in a Global Context

were very interested in how imperialism and anti-imperialism were remaking the cultural and political geographies of the world. These texts all use cross-cultural exchange as a basis for experiments in literary form.

Landscapes of hierarchy and resistance For scholars of literature and the arts, the principal insight of Orientalism is that Western European imperialism of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and first half of the twentieth centuries was subtended by a complex imaginative project and a massive scholarly archive. Exploration, conquest, rule, and material exploitation of farflung regions of the world may have been the primary goals of Western European imperialism, but these objectives could not be accomplished without the aid of experts who could study and help interpret different cultures: philologists, linguists, literary comparatists, cultural geographers, archaeologists, social anthropologists, and other cognate disciplines. “My contention,” writes Said, “is that without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the postEnlightenment period” (3). Orientalism was, first and foremost, an academic invention. By employing a wide range of knowledge workers, Western European imperialism left a deep imprint on the arts and the humanistic disciplines. Said’s other key contribution to the study of global modernism is his “contrapuntal” method, implied in Orientalism and developed more systematically in Culture and Imperialism (1993). In the former book, Said argues that orientalist scholars and writers have imagined the world through a set of binary oppositions, designed to consolidate the imperialist order by representing cultural others as morally inferior and materially backward. In the latter book, Said says, “Partly because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, [heterogeneous], extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic” (xxv). Only by juxtaposing different, and frequently conflicting, perspectives can scholars get a true sense

Imperialism

29

of history and the history of representational forms. To put it crudely, every system of domination or exclusion produces acts of resistance, individual and collective. Studying the types of cultural interplay fostered by these forms of conflict gives us a clearer picture of literary history. Moreover, imperialism not only helped generate structures of domination and resistance, but also created systems of interdependence and cross-cultural exchange. Without subordinating the political dimensions of his argument in Orientalism, Said’s later work allows for more supple readings of literary texts by freely admitting the limits of imperialist hierarchies. Scholars of modernism have taken these fundamental insights in many different directions. Speaking in the broadest possible terms, the emergence of postcolonial theory has opened four main areas of inquiry within modernist studies, each of them partly enabled by Said’s work. First, scholars have probed modernism for its imbrication in and complicity with imperialism and racism (McClintock; Parry, Postcolonial; Slemon). Conrad, more than any other writer, has been read as both modernist innovator and chronicler of imperialism. Second, the advent of postcolonial theory has encouraged readers of modernism to study how subordinated groups have responded to imperialism. Modernist literature can also be read as a discursive space in which both proponents and opponents of imperialism could make themselves heard (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin; J. Berman, Commitments; Boehmer; Brown; Chrisman; Edwards; Emery; Gilroy; Goyal; Snaith). Césaire, as a cofounder of the négritude movement, is often represented as a modernist poet who responded defiantly to imperial systems of representation. Third, some scholars have been eager to show how imperialism generated sites of ambivalence, hybridity, and indeterminacy (Bhabha; Gikandi, Maps; Suleri Goodyear). Almost all the modernists I consider in this chapter show some interest in cultural hybridity. Finally, a number of critics have documented the effects of imperialism and, later, of decolonization upon metropolitan culture (Baucom, Out; Casanova; Esty, Shrinking; Jameson, “Modernism”; J. Marx; Williams, “Metropolitan”). Čapek, in a hilarious representation of the empire striking back, shows how the cultures of imperialism also remake metropolitan space. Before considering how modernist texts register the effects of imperialism, it might be useful to say a few words about each of these four main approaches.

30

Modernism in a Global Context

Imperialism as domination Said’s highly influential readings of Conrad and Rudyard Kipling reveal the extent to which some turn-of-the-century writers were totally pervaded by the spirit of imperialism. As Said writes of Heart of Darkness (1899), the novella “works so effectively because its politics and aesthetics are, so to speak, imperialist, which in the closing years of the nineteenth century seemed to be at the same time an aesthetic, politics, and even epistemology inevitable and unavoidable” (Culture and Imperialism, 24). Conrad shows a great deal of skepticism about the imperial project in this text and in several others, yet in Said’s view he is unable to accept that imperialism may be neither uncontested nor inevitable. Conrad sees many of the problems with imperialism, in other words, but he cannot imagine non-European subjects who might possess the faculties and the means to confront imperialism on its own terrain. Said observes similar traits in Kim (1901), Kipling’s novel about British India. Although Kim moves effortlessly between colonial agents and colonized groups, Kipling’s title character never has his loyalties tested as a twenty-first-century reader might wish: his support for the crown and the imperial order of things never wavers. As Said remarks of the novel, “There might have been a conflict had Kipling considered India as unhappily subservient to imperialism, . . . but he did not: for him it was India’s best destiny to be ruled by England” (Culture and Imperialism, 146). According to this reading, Kipling does not falter on creative or aesthetic grounds, but instead exhibits the limitations of his worldview. Readers of Kipling are rewarded not with a faithful depiction of colonial India, but instead with a remarkably detailed glimpse of imperialism from within, a view that would be challenged, eventually, by other writers from both sides of the imperial divide. Benita Parry also summarizes Kipling neatly as “an exemplary artist of imperialism,” a writer who combined fine-grained ethnographic observation with the blind spots of a prototypical bourgeois Victorian man (Postcolonial, 130). In their readings of imperialist literature, Said and Parry emphasize the map-making impulses of Conrad and Kipling, both of whom develop elaborate spatial systems to represent cultural difference. Anne McClintock describes cartography as “the servant of colonial plunder, for the knowledge constituted by the map both

Imperialism

31

preceded and legitimized the conquest of territory” (27). According to McClintock, however, the maps of imperialism legitimize not only plunder but also a gendered system of labor and exploitation: there is an extensive trope of feminizing colonial space through maps, and in the process masculinizing acts of exploration and conquest of other peoples. From the very beginning of European exploration—McClintock goes all the way back to Christopher Columbus’s belief that the globe was shaped as a woman’s breast— up through the early modernist period, when bestsellers such as Henry Rider Haggard could picture the route to King Solomon’s mines as a spread-eagled woman, imperialists made their project legible through an erotic rendering of space, transforming distant lands into virgin territories and intrepid explorers into sexual predators. This imaginative geography, of course, was developed with the aim of subordinating colonial peoples and installing Western Europeans as the rightful rulers of the world.

Alternative cartographies Paul Gilroy reads maps in a rather different way. If Said, Parry, and McClintock, in their interpretations of imperialist literature, emphasize how white European men tended to see the world, Gilroy begins by wondering how the people of the African diaspora might understand their situation. The Black Atlantic is an explicit attempt to reinscribe the pathways of imperialism, and therefore, of modernity itself. For him, the peoples of the black Atlantic are both at the forefront of modernity—slavery and imperialism being the quintessential experiences of the modern subject—and also uniquely critical of capitalism, the primary social expression of modernity. Not coincidentally, Gilroy here transfigures one of the preferred self-definitions of high European modernism: cutting edge, in relentless pursuit of novel forms, and yet deeply skeptical of industrial modernity and capitalism. Although Gilroy has very little to say about how black Atlantic modernist writers may have been in dialogue with their white counterparts, it is clear that he does not regard aesthetic innovation as the exclusive property of Western European and North American modernists. Other scholars of literature and imperialism, by no means all in accord with Gilroy’s project, have also suggested that we might

32

Modernism in a Global Context

write a more accurate history of modernism if we recognize how the movement gave a limited number of colonial subjects a platform upon which to denounce imperialism. As Elleke Boehmer summarizes, “There is an intriguing coincidence in the fact that metropolitans began to acknowledge the presence of others around the same time as colonized writers were appropriating European genres, symbolic conventions, and modern structures to express their own identity” (98; see also J. Berman, Commitments; Brown; Chrisman; Emery; Joshi). I argue that instances of aesthetic overlap were not serendipitous accidents, but rather a function of metropolitan literary institutions that begin to admit colonial intellectuals during the middle decades of the twentieth century (Commonwealth). This emphasis on resistance to imperialism within the modernist period represents a significant departure from the earliest work in postcolonial studies. From one angle, Orientalism is an attempt to document the collective attitudes of influential Europeans during the high imperialist moment, the Berlin Conference era. Needless to say, such experts did not often canvass the subjects of orientalism for their opinions. On the other side, we might observe the traces of the Bandung Conference in Gilroy and other critics who prefer to emphasize the distinctive cultural forms of colonized people. The transnational edge of Gilroy’s argument is crucial, as it was for the Bandung organizers: the history of anticolonial movements looks very different if we recognize how intellectuals learned from and spoke to constituencies beyond the metropolitan-colonial nexus. Brent Hayes Edwards insists that the anticolonial movements of the diaspora ought to be read through structures of translation, even misunderstanding: “Black internationalism is above all practiced in the multilayered and convoluted exchanges between periodicals [in different languages, especially English and French], in their sometimes uneasy and sometimes misdirected attempts to carry blackness beyond the boundaries of nation and language, to read the race problem as a world problem. In this sense, diasporic reciprocity is above all a call to translate” (118). The Bandung Conference had a number of precursors, including the various Pan-African conferences held between 1900 and 1945. These conferences were explicitly anticolonial, as Edwards points out, but they were equally important as sites for increasing understanding (and generating misunderstanding) among colonial subjects dispersed in space and separated by cultural and linguistic barriers.

Imperialism

33

Ambivalence and hybridity Starting in the early 1990s, critics began to question the tendency to regard imperialism as a set of rigid dichotomies, or Manichean binaries, split along an axis of colonizer-colonized. Might there not be more room for ambiguity and complication, more intermingling of cultures in places where contact between Europeans and indigenous groups was extensive and centuries old? The pervasiveness of high theory in the 1980s, especially of deconstructive reading protocols, would encourage those interested in postcolonial studies to be more nuanced in their approach to the colonial archive. This strain of postcolonial criticism, although influential in modernist studies and beyond, has always had its detractors, who claim that emphasizing the forms shared by European and colonial subjects tends to evacuate postcolonial theory of its political mandate. Widely cited books by Suleri Goodyear and Bhabha demonstrate both the risks and the rewards of adopting a deconstructive approach to reading the colonial record. Suleri Goodyear writes, “In the context of colonialism, English India represents an ambivalence that addresses the turning point of such necessary imbrications as those between the languages of history and culture; of difference and fear. As a consequence, its trajectory is extensive enough to include both imperial and subaltern materials and in the process demonstrates their radical inseparability” (3). Imperial and subaltern materials are impossible to segregate in this account. Orientalist experts are not permitted to be aloof in the way Said suggests. In a similar vein, Bhabha argues: The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation. . . . The borderline engagements of cultural difference may as often be consensual as conflictual; they may confound our definitions of tradition and modernity; realign the customary boundaries between the private and the public, high and low; and challenge normative expectations of development and ­progress. (2) Ambivalence, imbrication, hybridity, mimicry, and permeable borders: without totally overwriting differences in power, these books claim

34

Modernism in a Global Context

that there was more interplay between different cultural groups than other scholars of imperialism have recognized. If imperialism generates clear antagonisms between the colonizer and the colonized, it also, according to this model, produces an unexpected set of affiliations and complex sites of exchange. Anticolonialism, in short, is not the only discourse through which colonial and postcolonial subjects express themselves. It is worth noting Suleri Goodyear’s distinction between “British India,” which might be translated loosely as the imperialist culture of the Raj, and “English India,” which might be described as the English-language tradition in India. It is the literary record, primarily, that shows the most evidence of ambivalence and indeterminacy. The same is true for Bhabha, who places special emphasis on the power of language to reflect, and reflect upon, culture. The rewards of this approach are most evident in Suleri Goodyear’s perceptive reinterpretations of Kipling and E. M. Forster, or Bhabha’s clever reading of Salman Rushdie, showing how representations of physical intimacy can challenge the hierarchies we might assume prevail in colonial India or postimperial London. The hazards are evident as well: if these books offer superb readings of literary texts, they are rather more circumspect on the question of how the British secured their position for several hundred years, and how it was successfully challenged by anticolonial movements. These texts imply that literature offers a zone of exception, in which imperialism’s hierarchical codes are not strictly observed. Simon Gikandi’s work shows critics how concepts such as hybridity and ambivalence, inspired by developments in postcolonial theory, could be used to broaden the conceptual field of modernism. Gikandi argues that Caribbean writers of the mid-twentieth century adapt European modernist techniques to challenge imperial authority. “In order to contextualize Caribbean modernism and its cultural politics,” he writes, “we need to conceive it as opposed to, though not necessarily independent of, European notions of modernism” (Writing, 4–5). In this account, European modernism determines many of the forms, but not the politics, of its Caribbean variant. Gikandi pushes this thesis further, claiming that “the crisis in colonialism, so latent in the period of nascent and high modernism, presented postcolonial writers with a productive cultural space” (Maps, 194). Anticolonial and postcolonial writers do not need to throw modernism overboard in order to represent themselves and

Imperialism

35

their constituents. This conclusion is based on a reinterpretation of modernist writers, such as Conrad and Graham Greene, who represent the colonies not as a space for securing European superiority, but as the place in which European intellectuals could question the core values of imperial culture. Modernist techniques, therefore, were fully available to colonial subjects as instruments of cultural decolonization. Césaire or Wole Soyinka need not sacrifice their credentials as anti-imperialists to be read as modernist writers.

Metropolitan space Not long after the publication of Orientalism, scholars of modernism began to wonder how (or if) the ideas and practices of imperialism affected modernists, the canonical figures of Western Europe and their North American counterparts. The problem was twofold, at least. First, it was not entirely clear how imperialism might have been experienced in London or Paris or Berlin in the latter part of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries. Much of the detailed historical work on that topic was published after the question began to be asked by literary critics (Schneer). Second, and perhaps a more pressing difficulty: acknowledging imperialism as an important context for modernism seems to go against the impulses of modernism itself, or at least against the conventional understanding of modernism as insulated from politics and history. For decades, the prevailing reading of modernism was narrowly aesthetic, with contextual and political questions downplayed or ignored altogether. Modernist literature, in places, seems to demand such a reading (how else to decipher wordplay that lacks a clear referent, for instance?). The supposedly realist literature of the Victorian period and the genre fiction of the modernist period, the Kiplings and the Rider Haggards, are much more obvious places to establish correspondences between literary representation and the practice of imperialism; in experimental modernism, with its tangential relation to the material world, finding traces of imperialism in the literary record might be much more difficult. Two of the earliest and most influential essays on modernism and imperialism solve this problem in distinctive ways. In “Modernism and Imperialism” (1990), Fredric Jameson suggests that we are asking the wrong questions if we attempt to scour

36

Modernism in a Global Context

metropolitan modernism for direct reflections of the peoples or spaces of colonialism. As Jameson rightly points out, the common meaning of “imperialism” has changed dramatically since the Second World War (or better yet, since the Bandung Conference). Before the war, most Western Europeans were likely to think of other imperialist nations, and not of colonized places, when the question of imperialism arose. Rather, the best way to apprehend the reality of imperialism—the world-economic system of uneven capitalist development—in European modernism is to appreciate the gaps, the silences, the confusions, the spatial and temporal inconsistencies. Here is how Jameson describes the situation: Colonialism means that a significant structural segment of the economic system as a whole is now located elsewhere, beyond the metropolis, outside of the daily life and existential experience of the home country, in colonies over the water whose own life experience and life world—very different from that of the imperial power—remain unknown and unimaginable for the subjects of the imperial power, whatever social class they may belong to. Such spatial disjunction has as its immediate consequence the inability to grasp the way the system functions as a whole. (50–1) The intense scrutiny of subjectivity we find in Western European modernism, the dizzying wordplay, can be read as a symptom of this material problem, this vast distance separating the scenes of colonial production and metropolitan consumption. The best instances of metropolitan art take this gap as a constitutive problem, channeling it into the reflexive aesthetic forms we now call modernism. The payoffs of Jameson’s absence thesis—his suggestion that metropolitan modernism tends to represent the world system through evasions—are clear. We need not find direct representations of colonialism in modernist art to claim that modernism is influenced by imperialism in some way. In fact, we can claim that the signature features of modernist literature (the delicate probing of consciousness we find in Mrs. Dalloway, say) are determined by an imperialist world system that is just beyond the cognitive apparatus of modernism itself, hence the crises of representation to be found there. And finally, Jameson’s essay allows for there to be an important exception to the metropolitan-colonial divide, which he says is more or less uncrossed by the modernists themselves: colonial Ireland,

Imperialism

37

as represented by Joyce. Ireland, proximate to, and using the language of, its imperial overlord, retains many of the distinctive features of an underdeveloped colonial economy. With hindsight, some of the limitations of Jameson’s approach have become more apparent, with his reliance on a very selective canon of modernism (a canon many modernist scholars would no longer accept) and his equally selective reading of those writers. Raymond Williams’s “Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism” (1985) attacks the same problems but proceeds with a different set of premises. Unlike Jameson, who reads modernism’s experimental styles as the symptom of a conceptual gap, Williams regards the movement’s reflexive exploration of individual subjectivity—the monad—as a false universal, a cognitive blind spot of another variety altogether. High modernism’s desire to represent human consciousness more accurately (again, think Mrs. Dalloway), in all its complexity, Williams reads as a projection of Western European culture on the world as a whole. Modernism’s hubris ought to be read contextually, as a symptom of modernism’s emergence in the great imperial metropolises of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In an oft-quoted passage, Williams observes that the development of modernism has “much to do with imperialism: with the magnetic concentration of wealth and power in imperial capitals and the simultaneous cosmopolitan access to a wide variety of subordinate cultures” (44). For Williams, modernism’s blind spot is more willful, more expressive of cultural arrogance, for he claims that the modernists have imaginative access to a wide variety of cultures, subordinate and parochial from the perspective of the metropolis. Even if modernists, individually, are not supporters of imperialism, the movement as a whole is inextricably linked to a system of cultural domination. Recent scholars are more inclined to accept the position of Williams than Jameson on the relationship of imperialism to high modernism. T. S. Eliot’s use of diverse cultural materials in The Waste Land and Ezra Pound’s appropriation of Chinese materials throughout his poetry are only two of the most obvious examples in which self-consciously modernist figures appropriate source material from colonial and semicolonial regions of the world, as Williams would have us expect of the modernists. And yet Jameson’s pithy description of imperialist modernity, even if it does not fully account for the dynamics of modernist literary production,

38

Modernism in a Global Context

offers a very powerful tool for understanding how the imbalances of imperial capitalism might be reflected in the imaginative maps of Western European writers. If Williams’s reading of modernist culture and imperialism now approximates to a critical consensus, Jameson’s materialist description of imperialism as capitalism’s globalizing force has a great many adherents as well, even if his description of imperialism as modernism’s gaping blind spot is no longer fully accepted. By way of concluding this review of the critical literature, we might identify the key debates clustering around modernism and imperialism as between materialist and discursive (or textual) approaches. Those favoring a discursive or textual approach have more interpretive wiggle room, more evidence to suggest that imperialism generated structures of ambivalence and hybridity. The scholars who privilege texts, in particular, are far more likely to suggest that imperialism produces sites of ambivalence, hybridity, and cultural confusion. Those favoring a materialist and historicist approach, by contrast, tend to be very good at reminding us that imperialism is a system of political and cultural domination, leading to resistance. To encapsulate this difference another way: Do we best understand the culture of imperialism by reading texts for evidence of political dispensations, or do we begin with the material facts of imperialism in order to document literature’s ideological underpinnings? Do we begin with political hierarchies and make deductions about the politics of modernist literature, or do we begin with the texts and inductively assemble the political culture of imperialism? As different as Said, McClintock, Gikandi, Suleri Goodyear, Bhabha, and Edwards may be, they all employ versions of discursive analysis to trace the effects of imperialism on modernist writing. Casanova, Gilroy, Jameson, Parry, and Williams, even when they develop highly sophisticated close readings, use materialist arguments to chart correspondences between modernist texts and imperialist contexts. We might characterize the debate with slightly different terminology as a methodological contest between dialectical and dialogical approaches. A dialectical method allows us to recognize the differences in material and representational power between metropolitan and colonial spheres. A dialogical approach allows us to read texts that examine the diversity of colonial cultures within the overarching unity of the imperial system. One group sees

Imperialism

39

imperialism as a tool for spreading capitalist exploitation, while the other views it as a means of spreading cultural forms, especially metropolitan languages. And if the writing on global literature is an indication, this running debate shows no sign of exhaustion.

Berlin modernism With this overview of the secondary literature in place, the remainder of this chapter takes a closer look at modernist writing directly. It uses the Berlin Conference of 1884–5 and the Bandung Conference of 1955 as heuristic categories to differentiate two overlapping strains of modernism: the literature of high imperialism—of Western European expansion and rule—and the literature enabled by transnational solidarities generated through anticolonial movements. As we shall see, not all the Western European modernists of the high imperialist moment are enthusiastic supporters of imperialism, nor are all the colonial and postcolonial writers of the Bandung generation unilateral opponents of imperialism. The point of referring to Berlin and Bandung is not to create a litmus test for imperialist and anti-imperialist writing. Nor is it to insist that there are two perfectly distinct historical periods within modernism: the Pan-African Conference of 1900, which influenced many black Atlantic modernists, is part of Bandung’s genealogy, but it occurred during the moment of high imperialism. Rather, the idea is to examine how modernism’s global ambitions were nurtured in these two different political climates and intellectual traditions. The modernists influenced most clearly by Berlin, this chapter will suggest, tend to see the question of cultural difference through imperialism’s binaries, even when critical of the practice of imperialism. More significant, perhaps, are the traces of intra-European competition to be found in modernism’s representations of empire. If the Berlin Conference ratified Western European supremacy in Africa, it also added national prestige and rivalry to the equation. European imperialism was as much about jealousy of other European powers as it was about dispossessing or civilizing non-European peoples. Before Berlin, the majority of African peoples were still under local, non-European control (especially in the interior of the continent); by the First World War, nearly the entire landmass had been claimed by European powers.

40

Modernism in a Global Context

In metropolitan Britain, especially, many observers saw this program of expansion as necessary to retain national preeminence—to keep the French and Germans in their place; however, they also saw it as a massive drain on scarce resources. European ambivalence about the imperialist project is no small part of modernism’s history.

Olive Schreiner Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) is a good place to begin an examination of an incipient Berlin modernism. Schreiner’s novel might be more accurately described as protomodernist, anticipating some of the narrative developments of modernism, especially in its temporal shifts and hybrid styles. And, like Conrad and Elizabeth Bowen, her writings do not make it easy to pin down the author’s feelings about imperialism. On the one hand, African Farm dramatizes the experiences of white South Africans almost exclusively: members of the indigenous population are bit players and fringe characters, silently serving their white employers (McClintock). On the other hand, the novel seems to question the principal values of the rural white South African community—land, cattle, marriage, and church—going so far as to suggest that white society thwarts the emotional, intellectual, and moral capacities of the people reared within it (Esty, Unseasonable). It is a novel that depicts the colonial situation as stultifying. In Schreiner’s preface to a later edition of the book, the author offers a roundabout apology for the novel’s anticlimactic, even tedious atmosphere. At least one of Schreiner’s reviewers suggested that the novel would have been better if it had been a tale of “wild adventure; of cattle driven into inaccessible ‘kranzes’ by Bushmen; ‘of encounters with ravening lions, and hair-breadth escapes’.” Those sort of stories are best left to metropolitan writers with vivid imaginations, Schreiner retorts bluntly; the writer who wants to show the reality of the situation must “squeeze the colour from his brush, and dip it into the gray pigments around him. He must paint what lies before him” (v–vi). The novel’s fanatical devotion to the grim realities of South Africa leads Schreiner to refuse the catalog of exotic tropes associated with colonial romance. And so the novel opens with a flat, wearied description of the setting: a wide, desolate, plain, a lonely ranch, “the solemn monotony” of the landscape

Imperialism

41

interrupted only by a barren, “solitary ‘kopje’,” at the foot of which the homestead sits (21). It is night, so there is little human activity, and the novel starts the business of introducing the main characters in their sleep—all except the boy Waldo, the little, morbid insomniac who passes the night worrying about death and eternity. The atmosphere does not really perk up after the novel gets going, either. Even for white settlers, life on a remote farm seems bleak, especially for the three children trapped on the ranch. The main adult characters are truly horrid. Tant Sannie, the matriarch of the farm, is a predatory bride: having buried three husbands, she seeks a fourth to add to her lands and herds of cattle. Bonaparte Blenkins, the confidence man who courts her for a time, is a sadist straight out of a Dickens novel who terrorizes the children. The neighboring Afrikaners come off as a group of avaricious, inbred bumpkins. Waldo and another child from the farm, Lyndall, escape for a time, but the narrative reins them in before long, stymying their dreams of flight. African Farm also shows the uneasy mixture of Europeans jockeying for position in the colonies. There are some invocations of national stereotypes: the Afrikaners are tough, insular, and uneducated; the Irishman, Blenkins, is a drinker, a savage, and a con man with a golden tongue; Waldo and his German father are bookish, dreamy philosophers but also industrious workers; Lyndall, an English orphan, is conceited, beautiful, educated, worldly, and obstinately principled. There is not only a white-black or colonizer-colonized binary at work in this text: these are members of European national groups slugging it out on the front lines of empire, staking claims on territory and resources. Schreiner’s quirky novel, however, in a foretaste of Conrad’s work, shows the utter futility of these efforts to turn distant colonies into economically and socially productive spaces.

Joseph Conrad Much has been written on the theme of Conrad’s fiction and imperialism; so much, in fact, that one is reluctant to say more than a few words on this topic, encouraging the curious reader to consult the voluminous secondary literature. I take it for granted that Conrad may be read both as a critic of imperialism and as someone

42

Modernism in a Global Context

who assumes European superiority (in political and cultural matters, at least) and sees no viable alternative to imperialism. Beyond that, Conrad’s fiction establishes connections with the other major figures in this chapter on two fronts. First, he sometimes represents the colonies as a space in which the core values associated with imperialism can unravel, where the identity of imperialists can become unhinged, as Gikandi suggests (Maps). We see this in Lord Jim (1899–1900) as well as in Heart of Darkness. Second, texts such as Heart of Darkness show his awareness of fierce competition between the Western European imperialist powers, which Jameson lists as a calling card of imperialist literature. The narrator of Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, Marlow, is frequently befuddled by what he encounters. The imagery of West Africa in the former story is exaggeratedly confused; the coast is unfathomable, the people inscrutable, the forests prehistoric and impenetrable. There is little evidence of imperial mastery here, and the one European person who embraces the challenge of learning the ways of the place—Kurtz—loses his faculties in the process. Lord Jim’s title character is a failure, too, violating the seaman’s code of honor by abandoning a sinking ship full of passengers. Jim’s failure, unlike Kurtz’s, is fully deliberate, and he spends the rest of life trying to rebuild his reputation by upholding the principles of imperialism—especially the rule of law and order—in an obscure setting (by metropolitan standards). If the colonies offer a place in which imperialists can prove themselves, they are also the place in which Europeans can falter and lose their way. For many readers, Conrad’s ambivalence about imperialism is precisely what makes him identifiably modernist: these doubts, it can be argued, contribute to his more experimental narrative forms. Conrad’s reservations about imperialism are often expressed in comparisons between styles of colonial administration. The sort of imperialists who are simply running a racket—trying to get rich by stealing from other people—do not look too attractive. As Marlow famously says in Heart of Darkness, the practice of imperialism can be salvaged only by a sort of idealism, by pledging fidelity to the “idea at the back of it” (10). Failings are individual, as in the case of Jim, but also collective, as in the case of the Belgian regime in the Congo. Conrad sets the story in the Congo partly in response to widespread reports of abuse there, of the Belgian administration using torture and execution—not to contain rebellions, but to enforce work

Imperialism

43

discipline. From this angle, Heart of Darkness expresses its doubts about particular imperialist nations without ever fundamentally questioning the right of Western European nations to rule distant parts of the world. The story might even be taken as a backhanded defense of British imperialism, which was supposed to protect “natives” from this sort of ill treatment by avaricious imperial competitors. Imperialism did not always make Western European writers more conscious of other, radically different cultures, but it sometimes gave them a more international frame of reference by drawing comparisons between different imperialist practices. Heart of Darkness is as much a comparison between British and Belgian imperialism as it is a representation of the Congo. This is Jameson’s reading of Western European imperialism in action, or in distress.

Elizabeth Bowen On the face of it, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September (1929) has little in common with Conrad’s fiction. Set on a country estate in revolutionary Ireland, it is a novel of manners. And yet in one significant respect it is very similar to Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim: The Last September represents late colonial Ireland as an enigma of sorts, a place where it is very hard to tell who did what to whom. Bowen’s narrative is germane to this discussion for a couple of reasons. First, there are long descriptions of social life on the country estate—tennis parties and dances and dinners—in which nothing happens but endless, mostly inane chatter, all while a guerilla war is being fought just out of sight. This is one of Bowen’s signature contributions to modernism: dialogue that seems to go on indefinitely, so that it is easy to lose track of the speakers and even the topic under discussion (if readers can get lost in stream of consciousness writing, it is just as easy to lose track of things in Bowen’s streams of dialogue). Second, when an important event happens—in this case, a confrontation between a revolutionary fighter and two of the main characters in the novel—the readers miss it. The narrator simply blocks direct access to the scene, allowing what is ostensibly the most important moment in the story to happen behind the dramatic curtain. The confrontation happens when several of the main characters are out for a stroll in the vicinity of a large estate. Lois, an orphaned

44

Modernism in a Global Context

niece of the estate owners, is mulling over a big decision: Should she marry an English soldier posted in the area, who helps keep the imperial status quo? Her companions are both guests at the country house: Marda, a fashionable and witty twenty-nine-yearold woman, and Hugo Montmorency, an older, married man, infatuated with Marda (as is Lois, for that matter). While Marda and Lois explore the ruins of an abandoned mill, Montmorency loiters outside, smoking, rehearsing what he will say to Marda at the right moment. Inside the mill, unbeknownst to Montmorency, the women stumble upon a rebel fighter, dozing. He awakes and pulls out a pistol, questioning them about their companions and intentions, advising them to give up walking and “keep within the house while y’have it.” Lois tends to agree with the man, thinking, “She has better be going—but where?” (181–2). The scene then abruptly shifts to Montmorency’s perspective. He hears a shot ring out and sees the women emerge from the mill, Marda with her hand bleeding. He asks for an explanation and wants to confront their attacker, but the women thwart him on both fronts. Lois says they gave their antagonist their word of honor that they would not discuss what happened inside the mill. Marda says peevishly, “Oh, do let’s talk about something else,” as if the little incident had become tedious to her (184). Like Montmorency, the reader never learns exactly what happened: Did the pistol go off by accident, as Marda implies, or did the man shoot at them on purpose; was it merely a warning, or had he meant to kill them? The scene comes as a shocking intrusion on the course of the story, making a gaping tear in the narrative fabric. As with Lord Jim, in which the narrator, Marlow, spends a long time concealing from the reader that Jim actually jumped ship, the third-person narrator of The Last September refuses to give readers full access to the scene of reckoning. Here, in revolutionary Ireland, nearly all the military action is displaced and rerouted, happening on the fringes of the coming-of-age plot. And yet we would be mistaken if we conclude that the narrative totally suppresses the violence happening, for the most part, offstage. This feeling of being caught in the middle is characteristic of what I have termed Berlin modernism, or what Suleri Goodyear describes as the literary affect of English India. As we shall see further on, the Bandung modernists are less equivocal on this matter.

Imperialism

45

Karel Čapek Karel Čapek’s War with the Newts [Valka s mloky] (1936, English 1937) shows the self-destructive tendencies of global capitalism with a wickedly funny satire of colonial administration during the interwar period. Čapek is an important if relatively understudied figure outside the Czech literary tradition, perhaps because he wrote in Czech (unlike his more celebrated contemporary, Kafka, who wrote in German). Anticipating some of the techniques of science fiction—Čapek is probably best known for coining the term “robot” in his play, R. U. R. (1921)—his best mature work offers a dystopian view of industrial progress, nationalism, and Soviet as well as Nazi totalitarianism. In War with the Newts, Čapek shows how the expansionist tendencies among the Western European powers might lead to catastrophe. With its story of likely human extinction, caused primarily by imperialist greed, the novel is one of the sharpest literary attacks on the attitudes associated with the Berlin congress. The novel begins by exploding the romance of imperialist exploration and commercial expansion. The opening pages introduce us to a Dutch sailor, Captain J. van Toch, who has been sent to search for new pearl fishing grounds in the Indonesian archipelago. As far as he is concerned, the days of new, startling discoveries—at least in the tropics—are long gone: Those rats in Europe imagine that there’s something to be found here that nobody knows about yet! Jesus Christ, what mugs they are! . . . There’s a new brothel in Padang, yes, but new fishing places? . . . In Europe, there you might still come across some odd thing; but here—don’t people come here just to sniff and nose out what can be devoured? and not even devoured, what can be bought and sold? Sir, if in the whole of the damned tropics there was anything left worth a brass farthing, three agents would be trying to get something out of it and signal with dirty handkerchiefs to boats of seven nationalities to stop. (12–13) Imperial capitalism, it would seem, has extracted everything profitable out of the tropics. There is nothing left worth finding or stealing or trading. In Europe, perhaps, we might discover some

46

Modernism in a Global Context

untapped resource in an out-of-the-way spot. In Conrad’s turn-ofthe-century work, Europeans could still get lost and discover new things and make money in the colonies; in Čapek’s novel, the chapter of imperial expansion has closed. If there is anything unknown, it is likely to be found in Europe. Much to his surprise, Captain van Toch finds something during his wanderings near Sumatra: a species of giant newt, living in the sea waters of a remote island, previously unknown to Europeans. These newts, or salamanders, have remarkable abilities: they swim in the ocean and walk upright on dry land; they have four fingers on their front legs, allowing them to manipulate tools; they build extensive dams or breakwaters in bays and shoals to protect themselves from larger sea predators; they breed prolifically, with human assistance; and, after a while among human beings, they learn to speak and read and even to reason abstractly. The captain immediately takes his discovery to a European financier, who initially agrees to fund a scheme to have the newts harvest oysters for pearls. This is a great success, but soon the market is saturated, and the firm’s investors start considering other ways to commercially exploit the newts. Since the newts are skilled builders capable of using tools, even of operating heavy machinery, the firm’s director comes up with a new plan: employ the newts as underwater contractors to construct dams, canals, and docks, even to build new lands out of the sea. “The Salamander Syndicate,” announces the director at a shareholders meeting, “will supply plans and schemes for mastery of the seas. . . . Four-fifths of the world’s surface is covered by the sea; beyond question it is too much; the surface of the earth, the map of the seas, and of the continents must be amended. . . . The adventurous story of the pearls we shall replace by a paean of work” (150). Here we see a dream for remaking the very structure of the earth, with non-human labor doing the hard work. When imperialism has filled in all the blank spots on the map of the globe, it finds ways to make entirely new territories. The passage is very reminiscent of Goethe’s Faust, in which Marshall Berman finds the essence of modernity: “The vital force that animates Goethe’s Faust, that marks it off from its predecessors, and that generates much of its richness and dynamism, is an impulse that I will call the desire for development” (39). In Berman’s account, modernity can be differentiated from other historical epochs by its linking of economic and personal development: modernity’s great promise is

Imperialism

47

that we can realize our individual potential by participating in the project of developing, or remaking, the earth. Čapek’s novel satirizes this desire by showing some of the unanticipated consequences of modern economic development. Before long, the Salamander Syndicate dominates the “S-Trade,” or the international market for newts. The creatures are bred in special underwater farms, transported around the world, and sold individually or in work gangs. In one of his niftier turns, Čapek notes the similarities between the developing trade in newts and the old transatlantic trade in human cargo: The transport of the Newts [is humanely done]. . . . Their death-rate during transport hardly amounts to 10 per cent. In accordance with the wishes of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals there is a chaplain on board each tank boat, and he sees to it that the Salamanders receive humane treatment; and night after night he gives them a sermon in which he impresses chiefly on their minds respect for mankind and grateful obedience and love to their future employers, who wish for nothing but to care paternally for their well-being. . . . There are people who take the abbreviation S-Trade (Salamander Trade) to stand for Slave-Trade. Well then, as unbiased observers we can say that if the old slave trade had been as well organized, and with regard to hygiene as irreproachably carried through, as the present trade with the Newts, we could only have congratulated the slaves. (182) In this comparison, War with the Newts holds imperial rule to ethical account. Bad enough are the imperialists themselves; worse yet, perhaps, are their liberal assistants who ensure that the most nakedly exploitative practices are cloaked in the humane garments of paternalism. This Czech novel is an unlikely participant in the black Atlantic discussion Gilroy would identify five decades later. It is not long before the proliferating newts launch an underwater revolt. Having armed the newts as part of their coastal defense systems, the world’s leading capitalist nations are extremely vulnerable to submarine maneuvers from their erstwhile servants. In a coordinated surprise attack, the newts trigger massive earthquakes off the coasts of the US, China, and Senegal. The newts have run out of suitable shoals, and now they seek to enlarge their domains: the

48

Modernism in a Global Context

imperial project in reverse, as it were, or Faust’s utopian vision of development inverted. After these warning shots, the newts attempt to parley with their overlords: “We want to be on good terms with you,” the newt commander relays in a broadcast to humans. “You will supply us with steel for our drills and pickaxes. You will supply us with explosives. You will work for us. Without you we could not move old continents” (310). The humans do not consent to work for the newts, and so the war begins. Great Britain is the first to succumb; its entire naval fleet is destroyed in a matter of days, and the newts begin to flood its low-lying territories. Even then, the great maritime nations refuse to cooperate: imperialists to the bitter end, France, Germany, and Holland sit by idly while the British are flattened, only for the newts to turn their attentions to the continent next. The Swiss, in their mountaintop retreats, remain neutral, of course. With its satirical representation of Western European imperialism, War with the Newts is not only a fitting way to bring this discussion of Berlin modernism to a close, but also provides an imaginative bridge to what I call Bandung modernism. On one side, we see high imperialism as a system of competition for territory and resources that leads to inexorable expansion and exploitation (and then self-destruction); on the other side, we see a form of international cooperation based in resistance to Western European imperialism. This dream of a different kind of internationalism—fed not by the logic of profit and power, but of autonomy and local control— provides inspiration to many of the modernists from colonial regions. It will be productive to examine how they redraw the imaginative maps of the world.

Bandung modernism The Bandung Conference did not emerge spontaneously, out of nothing. As many historians have documented, there is a long history of organized resistance to imperialism and slavery. National anticolonial movements, such as the African National Congress and the Indian National Congress, are part of this legacy, but the Pan-African conferences (of 1900, 1919, 1921, 1923, 1927, and 1945) made intercontinental conferences an important discursive space in which to denounce colonialism. If we consider the

Imperialism

49

anti-slavery movement and international socialist movements as part of Bandung’s genealogy, we will see that the Bandung Conference has a rich and varied set of antecedents. It was enabled by the simultaneous and related occurrence of three things: the success of anticolonial movements in India, Indonesia, and Egypt; the relative weakness of the Western European powers after two devastating wars; and the Cold War, which in various ways encouraged or forced the old imperial nations to release their grip on their colonial possessions. Richard Wright’s book on the conference, The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (1956), offers an interesting treatment of Bandung from the perspective of a sympathetic outsider. For the purposes of this study, Wright makes a few salient points about the summit. First, the conference galvanized nonwhite people the world over, opening a symbolic war with imperialism on all fronts. Second, Wright describes the conference as thoroughly non-ideological, rejecting both Cold War superpowers. Third, the conference participants embraced the idea of modernity, of economic and industrial development, so long as it did not reintroduce another, more insidious form of imperialism. The Bandung participants all sought development without relinquishing local control over resources. As we might expect, the writers most influenced by the ideas expressed at Bandung put modernism to different uses than the Berlin modernists. Bandung modernists are more likely to harbor anticolonial ideas, of course, but also to explore the possibilities— and limits—of intercultural collaboration (whereas the Berlin modernists tend to be very sensitive about imperialist competition). We should be wary, however, of imagining that Bandung ushered in a radically different aesthetic. As we shall see, Schreiner, Conrad, Bowen, and Čapek serve as productive interlocutors for writers drawn to the international decolonization movement.

Aimé Césaire Césaire offers an interesting example of a writer whose affiliation with modernist aesthetics evolved as European hegemony and Cold War ideologies were openly challenged by the Bandung Conference participants. It is important to note that Césaire has many facets: he

50

Modernism in a Global Context

was an acclaimed lyric poet and dramatist, influenced by Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Guillaume Apollinaire, championed by Jean-Paul Sartre and André Breton; he was cofounder, with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon-Gontran Damas, of the négritude movement; his scholarly and polemical prose earned him a lasting place in the canon of anticolonial literatures, alongside thinkers such as Frantz Fanon; and he was a Communist Party politician, serving as the mayor of Fort-de-France and as a deputy in the French National Assembly, helping to draft the law that would “departmentalize” some of France’s overseas territories, including his native Martinique. Like Senghor, fully immersed in literary culture and the decolonization movements, Césaire was unusually well positioned to trim his poetic sails according to the prevailing political winds. Quite often, it is his English-language handlers—his translators and his most sympathetic critics—who execute those maneuvers on his behalf. Césaire’s epic Notebook of a Return to the Native Land [Cahier d’un retour au pays natal] (1939–56; 1947 first English translation) is a landmark of anticolonial literature. As the editors of an updated translation observe, Césaire reworked the poem several times over the course of his career. A. James Arnold notes that the 1947 editions (there were two that year) toned down some of the spiritual language of the original. In 1956, the poet oversaw another set of revisions “that would align the poem with Césaire’s new political position, which embraced the immediate decolonization of Africa in militant tones” (Original 1939 Notebook, xix). Césaire accomplished this goal, in part, by excising some of the poem’s extended sexual metaphors—a legacy of his waning interest in surrealism—and replacing that material with more sober verses examining the plight of black agricultural laborers. In effect, Césaire removed some of the poem’s most obvious borrowings from surrealism and inserted, in their place, more straightforward political commentary. “The result,” as Arnold says, “is decisive; from 1956 onward the reader is no longer oriented toward a network of metaphors that undergird a drama of personal sacrifice. Henceforth the drama is a sociopolitical one that calls for decolonization and the democratization of economic institutions” (xix). A brief examination of “Ode à la Guinée,” a shorter lyric poem from the 1940s (English 1973), shows how Césaire, his editors, and his translators reworked his earlier poetry to reflect the political

Imperialism

51

climate of the late 1950s. As the title suggests, the poem offers tribute to Guinea, the mythical land of the speaker’s forbears. The poem is an evocative exercise, showing how the speaker is infused with and restored by the landscape. The lyric voice is masculine, and the verdant landscape is feminine: “by the woman supine like a mountain” the speaker wanders, and “by the fire of the woman . . . whom I seek” the speaker finds warmth and spiritual sustenance (Solar Throat Slashed, 143). When the poem was revised in 1961 for the collection Cadastre, Césaire excised the most sexually explicit of these images. The following passages were excised from the original poem in the 1961 version: “by the wailing of the bow / by the glory of my nights / by my loins spurting more than ever / by the brown odor of a morning agitated in my nostrils / from the depth of a delirium without trembling.” (Solar Throat Slashed, 143). Comparing the different versions of the poem side by side, the effect is noticeable. By cutting these lines, the conclusion of Césaire’s 1973 translator seems more plausible: “Refusing the facile exoticism of the previous generation of Black poets writing in French, . . . eschewing the simple statement, . . . Césaire’s vision coagulated into precise images of the indignities and tortures suffered under the colonial system, and into the counter-images of liberation that pre-condition the flowering of love and the reconciliation of man with the universe” (Cadastre, xiv). With these lines restored in the most recent edition, however, Césaire seems much closer in spirit to the exotic and erotic literature of imperialism. As Arnold, editor of the newly restored edition, says of the original poem, “Césaire’s transformative vision is most often violent, but not revolutionary in any political sense. Indeed there is nothing at all like a political process expressed, invoked or alluded to in this collection” (Solar Throat Slashed, xviii). These are two largely incompatible versions of Césaire, derived from markedly different versions of the same short poem. It is worth noting that Césaire authorized these changes, undoubtedly feeling that the revised poetry better fit his evolving political and aesthetic commitments of the 1960s and 1970s. But we should observe caution in reading the early Césaire as more “modernist” and the latter as more narrowly “political,” and therefore non-modernist. A genetic examination of his poetry can reveal multiple versions of modernism, layered on top of one another in a palimpsest. The earlier poem borrows from the literature of imperial conquest, even

52

Modernism in a Global Context

if it does not denigrate Africans explicitly. The rendering of the African landscape as a feminine sexual object, and the lyric speaker as a sexually potent man, sustains such a reading. But the revised version of the poem is no less modernist, formally speaking, even if its politics are governed by a Bandung sensibility. With a nod to Gilroy, Césaire’s poetry shows us the complicated interleaving of modernist writing and black Atlantic politics over the course of his career.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer Like Césaire’s poetry, Pramoedya’s fiction shows an awareness of how subtle changes in language can help document the evolution of anticolonial movements. Pramoedya’s Buru Quartet includes the best-known Indonesian novels outside Indonesia. The first three novels in the quartet follow Minke, a young nationalist, from precocious student to nationalist hero. Loosely based on the life of Tirto Adhi Soerjo, the series fictionalizes the growth of resistance to Dutch imperialism through the consolidation of the nationalist movement, Japanese occupation during the Second World War, and independence in 1949. Pramoedya’s novels also provide a handy site for thinking about anticolonial modernism, returning us to the region where Lord Jim and War with the Newts fictionalize the maneuvers of European imperialism. The first novel in the quartet, This Earth of Mankind [Bumi Manusia] (1975, English 1981), offers an interesting allegory of colonial development. As with the conveners of the Bandung Conference, Pramoedya’s narrator/protagonist does not shun modernity and development in favor of nationalist insularity. In fact, Minke sees economic, political, and cultural development as the cornerstones of self-sufficiency. At school, his Dutch teachers impress upon him the benefits of industrialization, which will liberate people from drudgery and toil. In the first few pages of the novel, the protagonist records how he was fortunate to attend school from a very young age, experiencing “modern learning and science” as a “blessing whose beauty was beyond description” (16). Although Minke comes to question much of what his European teachers tell him, he holds on to the idea of modernity as something that will enable Indonesian sovereignty. Over time, he comes to believe that

Imperialism

53

the Japanese, not the Dutch, provide the best and most relevant example for fellow Asians to follow. The Japanese state accepted the challenge of industrial development, seeing it as something that could help it ensure the nation’s cultural and political integrity, not as a force that could maintain territorial sovereignty only at the cost of compromising or corrupting Japanese traditions. In his spare time, Minke reads up on the Japanese experiment, believing that its embrace of modernization would provide a template for Indonesians to emulate. As he matures, Minke begins to question Dutch hypocrisy, especially the completely separate legal regimes for European and non-European populations, but he becomes a firm advocate of the modern thinking espoused by his schoolteachers. When a few Dutch acquaintances question his attachment to the idea of modernity, asking him what he means by the concept, he replies, “It isn’t in the dictionary. . . . It is the name for a spirit, an attitude, a way of looking at things that emphasizes the qualities of scholarship, aesthetics, and efficiency. I don’t know any other explanation” (143). It is an interesting way to define modernity, one that may clash with contemporaneous European definitions of the concept, as the context implies (it is Dutch, rather than Indonesian, friends who challenge his attachment to the idea). Efficiency—this part of Minke’s definition certainly fits with midtwentieth century ideas about the sort of progress enabled by industrialization, for instance. But scholarship and aesthetics? In the European imagination of the time, scholarship and aesthetics were as likely to be regarded as inherently critical of modernity as they were to be conflated with it. Of course, we could conclude that Minke is here simply confused about what modernity represents. Alternatively, we might infer that for a person living in a largely non-industrialized, colonial society, the promise of specialized learning and sophisticated artistic production could be facilitated, not damaged, by a modern state of affairs. Achebe, we may recall in passing, claimed that it was juvenile for Nigerian writers to complain about the “soulless efficiency” of modern European life when “the very thing my society needs may well be a little technical efficiency” (“Novelist as Teacher,” 69–70). Similar to many modernist writers in the colonial world, Pramoedya seems far less agonized about the cultural effects of modernity than his metropolitan colleagues. For his protagonist, modernizing

54

Modernism in a Global Context

Indonesia’s economic, legal, and political systems goes hand-inhand with modernist intellectual practices Minke plays his part in modernizing Indonesia’s literary culture by becoming a celebrated journalist and short story writer while still in his teens. He becomes embroiled in a complicated legal dispute between an indigenous Indonesian woman, his mother-in-law, and a Dutch family laying claim to her land and business. The court case occupies a significant part of the narrative. Minke, using the pen name Max Tollenaar and writing in Dutch, takes to the press to plead the case of his mother-in-law. Minke wins many admirers for his prose style, but he begins to regret his choice of Dutch as his main literary language. His mother reproaches him for not embracing Javanese, while his mother-in-law chides him for being unable to write in Malay, which many more people could read than his Dutch, deft though he may be in its usage. As Pramoedya’s translator, Max Lane, points out, the question of translating between languages is a preoccupation of the novel, where the narrator repeatedly announces in what language or dialect a character speaks. In colonial times, Lane explains, languages were used to enforce caste and racial distinctions: the indigenous population were discouraged from using Dutch; the remnants of the indigenous feudal classes (in Java, where the novel is set) use Javanese; people of mixed descent tend to speak various dialects of Malay (a transnational and interethnic trading argot, not unlike Swahili), largely because it is the primary language of intercaste and interracial communication; the Dutch learn only enough Malay to order around servants; and so on, depending on the social situation. As Christopher GoGwilt argues, international modernism thrives in the cracks and gaps between languages and dialects, exploiting the nuances of different linguistic practices. Any truly international form of modernism ought to reckon with the consequences of traffic between languages, just as Bandung attempted to create a common anticolonial movement out of divergent cultural and political situations. Some readers may recall that Benedict Anderson’s theories about the relationship between print media and modern nationalism were developed partly from his extensive research on Indonesia. Although Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983) refers only fleetingly to Pramoedya’s work, Anderson is very familiar with these texts and the historical process they fictionalize. It is interesting to note that Anderson emphasizes

Imperialism

55

forms of social and political conflict that become manifested in linguistic struggles, as when nationalist groups attempt linguistic unification in order to bolster nationalist claims. Pheng Cheah argues that Minke turns to Malay as the proper language with which to start his own newspaper (in a later volume in the series) in order to speak to a wider range of Indonesian people (Spectral Nationality). GoGwilt concurs: “The conflicting claims of different languages—Dutch, Javanese, Malay, even English—shape Minke’s decision to write in the lingua franca Melayu [Malay] to crystallize an alliance of anti-colonial political forces among the heterogeneity of ethnic groups throughout the Dutch East Indies” (27). If we read the Buru Quartet as both recording the birth of a nationalist movement as well as participating in an international revolt against racism and colonialism, the multilingual accents of Pramoedya’s prose signal membership in a global community of anticolonial modernists.

M. G. Vassanji Like the Buru Quartet, The Gunny Sack (1989) is a multilingual text, written primarily in English but with fragments of Swahili, Cutchi, Gujarati, and Arabic woven into the story. A bildungsroman, it combines a clever narrative device with multigenerational family history to creatively reconstruct the history of South Asians in East Africa. The narrator, having fled Tanzania for the United States, sifts through an old, battered gunny sack, spinning out yarns as he retrieves family keepsakes from his luggage. A string of rosaries lead him to tell us of a devout aunt who prayed for well-being and absolution; a bloodstained muslin tunic prompts him to recite the tale of a great-grandfather who misappropriated community funds, and was killed for it; diaries, written in a strange script, promise to disclose the origins of an esoteric sect to which the narrator’s family belongs. The narrative is pegged, loosely, to the lifespan of the storyteller, but the digressions zoom unpredictably through time and space, juxtaposing lives and events and places in a dizzying array of anecdotes. Salim, the narrator, imagines the bag and its contents as a “spongy, disconnected, often incoherent accretion of stories over generations” (66). Most of all, the novel tells of the strained relations between the narrator’s tight-knit South Asian

56

Modernism in a Global Context

community and indigenous Africans in the colonial era and during the transition to independence. Although the novel reflects a glimmer of optimism, briefly infused by the glow of independence, it also dwells on the lost opportunities of the Bandung moment, when old antagonisms dampened expectations despite the formal end of foreign domination. For all of The Gunny Sack’s narrative complexity, two love stories carry the burden of the novel’s central message. First, we learn of the narrator’s great-grandfather, who traveled, alone, to East Africa from the west coast of India in the late nineteenth century. He stopped in Zanzibar for a year before settling on the continent. There, we learn, he took an indigenous African woman, probably a slave, for a romantic partner, begetting at least one son by her. Salim knows almost nothing of this woman, his great-grandmother—did she resent her situation, was she indifferent, or did she, perhaps, come to love Salim’s great-grandfather? When news of the greatgrandfather’s situation reaches his family back in India, he is implored to find a more suitable bride—and so he spurns his African mistress and their son for an Indian woman of Zanzibar, with whom he begins another family. The narrator’s grandfather is the half-acknowledged product of this mixed-race union. The narrator’s “impure” ancestry is a jealously guarded family secret within the South Asian community, but Salim identifies very strongly with his grandfather, his cross-communal ancestor. When enrolling in school, Salim violates convention and puts down his grandfather’s name as his family name. As he says, “The name chose me, and it chose my future” (108). Rather than suppress this side of his heritage, as so many others in his situation choose, this plucky narrator embraces it, combining the spirit of internationalism found in Gilroy’s black Atlantic networks with the textual indeterminacies evident in Bhabha’s description of cross-cultural discourse. When independence comes, Salim believes he can honor his grandfather’s legacy, righting a communal wrong, by fully embracing Julius Nyerere’s nationalist, self-reliance movement dubbed ujamaa. During his national service, Salim falls in love with a patriotic Swahili woman, Amina. Together, they start a reading group at the camp, with an eclectic syllabus of Chinua Achebe, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, Karl Marx, Kwame Nkrumah, and William Shakespeare (221). After national service, the pair enroll at university, where they start a radical student group,

Imperialism

57

Students for a New Africa: “We considered papers, examined the week’s news, issued communiqués, organised debates and seminars, published bulletins. Yes, we did stir up the campus while we lasted, and the membership reflected a cross section that would encourage anyone who had hopes in the new Africa”—a proudly independent, multiracial, nonsectarian Africa (226). The romantic pairing merely reflects the idealism of the moment. This spirit of cooperation, however, quickly gives way to postindependence realism. Old prejudices, the novel suggests, are not so easy to slough off, and they find it difficult to sustain an atmosphere of tolerance and respect once the optimism of independence gives way to sobering challenges. Amina goes to the United States on scholarship; Salim gets there eventually himself, as a refugee, hounded out of the country like many Asians. Although the novel ends on a rather pessimistic note, it is interesting to observe how its cultural geography depends on the kind of connections that were forged in the Bandung era. Spanning four generations and three continents, the narrative’s temporal and geographical sweep is enabled by a global perspective that matures in the context of an anticolonial internationalism. We can also see that the novel has a very different perspective on the idea of autochthony than a figure such as Césaire. In “Ode à la Guinée,” Césaire projects a kind of political affinity between his lyric speaker, the reader, and the paradigmatic black West African peasant. Vassanji’s narrator, however, does not take any such affiliations for granted. Instead, in his account, attempts to forge connections are likely to be asymmetrical, negotiated by groups with divergent histories and sometimes conflicting values. In the texts of Pramoedya and Vassanji, anticolonial modernism is both linguistically and geographically expansive, yet they do not assume a similarity of outlook among colonized people. Modernist narrative devices, with their ability to illustrate connections across temporal and spatial boundaries, are very well placed to do this kind of imaginative work.

Concluding summary What I have labeled Berlin and Bandung modernism are convenient classifications, applied to a diverse, even divergent, set of texts

58

Modernism in a Global Context

and writers. Berlin modernists are not, by and large, jingoistic imperialists, nor are their Bandung counterparts unequivocal backers of nationalist movements as the cure for imperialism. The Berlin modernists discussed in this chapter tend to have reservations about imperialism, yet they are neither willing nor fully able to represent how colonized peoples feel about their situation. While writers such as Schreiner and Conrad know that colonized people may be resentful and dissatisfied with their lot, they are unable to see clear alternatives to European imperial rule. Bowen and Čapek are more alive to different viewpoints, but they are especially cognizant of the conflicts experienced by imperialists themselves. Perhaps this is the greatest aesthetic quality of high imperialist literature: its ability to see the moral bankruptcy of imperialism from the inside. Representing imperialism as a conflict largely between European powers (and sometimes between pro- and antiimperialist factions at the metropolitan core), many writers of this generation use experimental techniques to record the anxieties and ambivalences of their situation. Bandung modernists, likewise, rely on transnational perspectives in their representation of the possibilities and challenges of anticolonial movements. For many years, a poet such as Césaire was read as someone who evolved away from experimental modernism in his embrace of anticolonial political movements. But this reading of Césaire is too simplistic: the latter Césaire may have tempered his surrealism to an extent, but in no way do his Bandung sympathies lead him to renounce his interest in experimental aesthetics. Similarly, it would be easy to read a writer such as Pramoedya as a purely nationalist figure, but we can see in his exploration of linguistic conflicts in colonial Indonesia that his work moves between classes, ethnicities, and languages. Vassanji’s work soberly explores the discontinuities of nationalist movements that would like to homogenize the nation-state. Thanks in no small part to the advent of postcolonial studies, scholars are now more able to assess how imperialism and anticolonial movements have shaped the aesthetics of modernism.

3 Cosmopolitanism

In many of our received accounts of twentieth-century art and literature, modernism and cosmopolitanism are practically synonymous. Modernists and cosmopolites are liable to be praised or condemned on the same grounds and with equal vigor. In one standard account, there is the cosmopolitanism of the Left Bank modernists, such as Samuel Beckett, Henry James, or Gertrude Stein. Many critics have read these various expatriates as elective cosmopolites, as intellectually detached artists longing to escape the cultural illiteracy of their provincial nations of origin. The idea that cosmopolitanism announces a position of complete intellectual and material detachment undoubtedly springs from this simplified version of modernism. Stephen Dedalus’s pledge to “fly by [the] nets” of language, nationality, and religion, and his determination to live as an expatriate, offers a powerful model along these lines (Joyce, 220). The kind of aesthetic innovation and social unconventionality prized by modernists, it could be argued, were made possible by cosmopolitan communities, based exclusively in the large metropolitan centers, but in Paris above all. The criticisms tend to be just as misleading and hyperbolic, leaning on a caricature of the literary expatriate: this sort of cosmopolitanism is simply a form of political and ethical detachment, enabled by elitist attitudes and relative affluence. Against this, however, there is an equally important type of modernist who regarded cosmopolitanism as the only viable response to the political catastrophes of the century. Cosmopolitanism could function as an antidote to excessive nationalism or xenophobia, a reaction to violence and exclusion. It is in this spirit that Virginia Woolf writes in Three Guineas (1938), “As a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world” (129). Woolf here alludes to words attributed

60

Modernism in a Global Context

to Diogenes, the great cynic philosopher of ancient Greece, who in response to a question about his place of origin, is said to have replied, “I am a citizen of the world [cosmopolite].” For the modern reader, however, Diogenes’s brand of cosmopolitanism has an elective quality to it, even a hint of smug morality: the cosmopolite has a better and broader view of the world than anyone who cannot see past his or her own origins. By contrast, Wolf’s ethical viewpoint is grounded in a more or less descriptive rhetoric: she has no country because she does not have full legal or political equality in her place of birth; she wants no country, partly, because there is not another that will offer her refuge on terms she would accept; she claims world citizenship principally as a woman, in that thinking women everywhere understand the dangers of exclusionary patriotism in a world on the brink of total war. Woolf does not opt for a cosmopolitan outlook only because it is ethically superior; it is that, but it is also a pragmatic response to nationalisms that would subordinate the claims of women. Woolf’s cosmopolitan feminism is a direct, some might say defensive, protest against modern forms of ethnocentrism, nationalism, xenophobia, and misogyny. As we shall see in this chapter, cosmopolitanism is not always enabled or underwritten by a privileged viewpoint—a view from nowhere, as some have called it (Nagel). Woolf’s claim to a cosmopolitan outlook, or world citizenship, is a view from a very particular place, that of a woman protesting against the modern excesses of capitalism, nationalism, and patriarchy, described in Three Guineas as interlocking forces. If the cultivated detachment of a V. S. Naipaul, for example, has left his flank open to charges of elitism from critics such as Rob Nixon, many other writers who might be described as worldly sophisticates—such as Djuna Barnes, Eileen Chang, Nancy Cunard, and Nella Larsen—imagine cosmopolitanism as a form of engagement with systems of exclusion and oppression. As this chapter will suggest, the concept of cosmopolitanism has appealed to a wide cross-section of modernist writers, many of whom are concerned about ethical treatment of subjugated groups— European Jews (particularly between the wars), colonial subjects, and people with non-normative sexual identities. Bruce Robbins defends “actually existing cosmopolitanism” as “a reality of (re)attachment, multiple attachment, or attachment at a distance” (Cosmopolitics, 3). This ideal is a competing legacy of modernism.

Cosmopolitanism

61

This chapter also frames the idea of cosmopolitanism by reference to the longer intellectual tradition through which modernists encountered it. The idea of cosmopolitanism is closely associated with modernity and the Western European enlightenment. Although the term has its roots in ancient Greece with the Cynics and the Stoics, it was reanimated in the late eighteenth century by no less a figure than Immanuel Kant, who believed that a cosmopolitan outlook could serve as a prophylactic against autocratic rulers. As Pauline Kleingeld summarizes, Kant posits cosmopolitanism as “the affirmation of moral obligations toward humans anywhere in the world because they all share in a common rationality, regardless of their different political, religious, and other particular affiliations” (2). If we accept Kleingeld’s view, the cosmopolitan ideal is grounded in a set of moral obligations and rational procedures. One need not travel widely or become intimately acquainted with other cultures, so long as one is responsive to the ethical claims we have on one another, regardless of national or religious forms of belonging. Being cosmopolitan can simply be a willingness to recognize and accept the forms of difference we see in our own local communities. Broadly speaking, Kant’s interest in cosmopolitanism is compatible with his position as a leading enlightenment thinker: we should allow reason, not tradition, to guide our ethical conduct. Although the Western European enlightenment, in general, and Kant, in particular, have been the object of numerous attacks and revisionist accounts, from Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) to various postcolonial accounts of Kant’s incurable racism, there have been a number of recent attempts to salvage Kant’s cosmopolitanism as a workable form of ethical engagement (Appiah, Cosmopolitanism; Cheah; Friedman, Mappings; Nussbaum; Robbins, Feeling). Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, also key theorists of modernity, offer a somewhat different verdict on cosmopolitanism in The Communist Manifesto (1848). For Marx and Engels, cosmopolitanism has evolved in distinct ways with the advent of modern capitalism: The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

62

Modernism in a Global Context

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. . . . In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. . . . And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrowmindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature. (77) Often quoted in the debates about world or global literature, this passage describes cosmopolitanism as a mixed bag. Marx and Engels welcome, in many respects, the destruction of “national one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness,” especially in intellectual production. As they point out, it is the reactionaries who are most hostile to these new systems of exchange, or what Anthony Giddens calls the “disembedding mechanisms” of modernity (53). And yet their attitude toward cosmopolitanism is ambivalent. Marx and Engels are hardly partial to the bourgeoisie, who have internationalized capitalist production and exchange not for altruistic reasons, but instead for personal gain. The Manifesto also foreshadows contemporary complaints against cosmopolitanism: that it is the privilege of the moneyed classes; that a detached viewpoint is no real viewpoint at all; that there are major problems with cosmopolitanism that no rhetoric of ethics could answer fully. As we shall see in this chapter, the ideas of Kant, Marx, and Engels anticipate many of the twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury debates about cosmopolitanism. For our purposes here, the difference between Kant and Marx and Engels is not simply their levels of enthusiasm for, or wariness of, cosmopolitanism. Rather, the salient difference is that for Kant, cosmopolitanism is a prescriptive category, whereas for Marx and Engels the term is primarily descriptive. Kant and his latter-day followers hope more people will adopt a cosmopolitan outlook, but they assume that the world falls far short of their ideal. Marx and Engels, by contrast,

Cosmopolitanism

63

are less upbeat about the growth of cosmopolitanism, less confident about its ability to improve the ethical grounding of the world’s subjects. This is partly because cosmopolitanism is, more or less, a settled fact for Marx and Engels: so long as capitalism is allowed to do its work, the world already possesses a cosmopolitan character, and it is becoming more so as time passes. Only international solidarity among the working classes has ethical purchase in their work—and it is not clear whether Marx and Engels would describe such internationalism as cosmopolitan in essence.

Cosmopolites and cosmo-skeptics In Europe, during the interwar period, the term cosmopolitan was employed often as a derogatory euphemism for Jews and, occasionally, homosexuals. Nationalists and ethnocentrists, including both Hitler and Stalin, used the epithet to question the allegiances of supposedly rootless minorities. Less frequently, the term could be applied to an emerging class of jet setters, the rich who were familiar with all the fashionable resorts. But as Gayle Rogers points out, there was also a concerted effort by intellectuals to reclaim the term during the period. He points to Spain’s José Ortega y Gasset, who argues that cosmopolitanism ought to be the proper outlook for any self-respecting intellectual: Before the war [the First World War], an internationalism of words and gestures existed—a deceitful, abstract cosmopolitanism that cancelled national peculiarities a priori. It was the cosmopolitanism of workers and bankers, of the Ritz Hotel and the sleeping-car. . . . But the cosmopolitanism of today is better, for instead of requiring us to abandon our characters and ethnic destinies, it recognizes and appreciates their engagement. (qtd. in Rogers, 20) Ortega y Gasset redeems cosmopolitanism for use by intellectuals, specifically. Against some sort of bland, universal humanism, Ortega y Gasset suggests that cosmopolitanism need not entail abandoning regional, even national attachments. In fact, he suggests just the opposite: the cosmopolite ought to appreciate, even recognize “ethnic destinies” by engaging them in an ethical

64

Modernism in a Global Context

way. Being cosmopolitan means being alive to difference. We might say that Ortega y Gasset’s ideas represent an earlier strain of multicultural discourse: cosmopolitanism is not about leaving behind local attachments, but about fostering cultural differences and encouraging intellectuals to see the value in such expressions of particularity. Ortega y Gasset’s reclamation of cosmopolitanism anticipates many contemporary debates about the term. The skeptics routinely arraign cosmopolitanism on a charge of elitism. Timothy Brennan reads cosmopolitanism as one especially troubling symptom of US imperialism, triumphantly parading itself after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Although there are those who promote cosmopolitanism as an antidote to nationalism, Brennan sees precisely the opposite effect: “Cosmopolitanism is the way in which a kind of American patriotism is today being expressed” (26). This form of patriotismby-another-name is particularly evident, and troubling, Brennan suggests, among liberal intellectuals, especially those who claim to study forms of cultural difference, such as scholars working in postcolonial studies. Eric Lott, arguing in a similar vein, believes that cosmopolitanism is a self-congratulatory form of internationalism. He launches his most trenchant attack against Appiah: “Appiah’s revival of the imperial self, for whom affiliation is experienced as compulsion, issues a call for what he terms ‘other options’ (unspecified, of course, in shape or purpose). Is this all just [Ralph] Ellison at the Ritz—a fantasy of mobility and unlimited ‘options’?” (110–12). Notably, Lott calls Appiah’s cosmopolitanism a revival of the “imperial self,” or what Mary Louise Pratt calls the “monarchof-all-I-survey” (201). Most of all, cosmopolitanism is not simply a form of detachment: it is the kind of detachment underwritten by affluence, the sort of perspective encouraged “at the Ritz,” as Lott complains, echoing Ortega y Gasset. Shu-mei Shih makes a more nuanced argument that cosmo­ politanism is a recrudescent form of imperialism. In discussing Chinese modernist literature, especially in its relation to Shanghai, a city carved up into large concessions to European states during the interwar period, Shih suggests that cosmopolitanism ought not to be a term of unqualified approbation when applied to Chinese writers: I argue that the application of the term “cosmopolitanism” is by definition asymmetrical, depending on the position of the

Cosmopolitanism

65

subjects in question. When applied to Third World intellectuals, “cosmopolitanism” implies that these individuals have an expansive knowledge constituted primarily by their understanding of the world (read: the West), but when applied to metropolitan Western intellectuals there is a conspicuous absence of the demand to know the non-West. This “asymmetrical cosmopolitanism” is another manifestation of a Western-dominated world view. (97) From one angle, Shih’s project is an attempt to include Chinese writing in the global canon of modernism without privileging European forms of writing. Because Chinese modernism is influenced by its contact with European culture, it would be easy to place the most Europeanized writers at the lead of Chinese modernism. In arguing that Chinese cosmopolitanism is just another word for “Westernized,” Shih is making a double claim: modernism is not merely the spread of “Western” aesthetic forms; China had its own version of modernism, one that emerges in dialogue with, but is not determined by, its European counterpart. Cosmopolitanism becomes a negative pole in her analysis. For her, it can only imply a double standard: European cosmopolitans only need know one another, but peripheral and semi-peripheral cosmopolitans need to know “the West.” A study of Chinese modernism will not work on these terms, Shih argues. One of the difficulties with the debate about cosmopolitanism is that few of its proponents would acknowledge the imperialist undertones of their arguments. In fact, they each argue that cosmopolitanism provides a basis for better ethical thinking; it is, for them, the antidote to imperialism, not one of its causes or symptoms. This argument plays out in competing interpretations of the literary record, where cosmopolitanism appears sometimes as an ethical virtue, sometimes as an imperialist vice. For instance, most scholars agree that Djuna Barnes and Nancy Cunard are cosmopolitans, but there is sharp disagreement about the ethical and political ramifications of their cosmopolitan outlook. Some are determined to see Barnes and Cunard as colluding with imperialist and racist attitudes (Carlston; North, Dialect), while others defend them as ethically engaged and politically committed (A. Friedman; J. Marcus; Winkiel). Adding to the confusion are those who take a more disinterested view of the whole question of literary cosmopolitanism (A. Anderson; J. Berman, Cosmopolitism; Rogers; Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan).

66

Modernism in a Global Context

Prescriptive cosmopolitanism Martha Nussbaum and Appiah are probably the best known of the contemporary self-proclaimed cosmopolites. As Nussbaum states the case, “Patriotic pride is both morally dangerous and, ultimately, subversive of some of the worthy goals patriotism sets out to serve. . . . [We] would be better served by an ideal that is in any case more adequate to our situation in the contemporary world, namely the very old ideal of the cosmopolitan” (4). Appiah regards cosmopolitanism as a pragmatic compromise. On the one hand, the cosmopolitan recognizes “that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind.” On the other hand, there is respect for cultural differences, and the knowledge that we can learn from observing those with different beliefs. Sometimes “there will be times when these two ideals—universal concern and respect for legitimate difference—clash. There’s a sense in which cosmopolitanism is the name not of a solution but of the challenge” (Cosmopolitanism, xv). Two of Appiah’s underlying points are worth emphasizing here: first, that cosmopolitanism is a process, not exactly a solution, a way of thinking that can always be adjusted according to circumstance; second, that enlightenment rationality is the proper response to, not the cause of, political inequities. To be sure, Nussbaum and Appiah are not dusting off Kant, ethnocentrism intact, offering his work as a cure for all our modern ailments. In a way, they are purifying Kant’s arguments about cosmopolitanism, making Kant more tolerant of cultural difference than the real Kant could ever be. Nussbaum’s and Appiah’s commitment to enlightenment forms of reason bring them into conflict with many others in the cosmopolitanism debate, especially those who take an extreme view on cultural relativism. Bruce Robbins also makes an impassioned plea for a cosmopolitan perspective, arguing that it will make us better ethical subjects. Rather than sidestep charges of elitism and privilege, he elects to take them head on. He argues that cosmopolitanism provides a vocabulary of dissent for people in powerful nations. Speaking to fellow intellectuals in particular, he suggests it would be dishonest to ignore the forms of privilege they have at their disposal. Instead, it

Cosmopolitanism

67

would be better to use whatever leverage they have to do something good for others: A worldly politics that takes for granted both the need for transnational mobility of viewpoint and action, on the one hand, and the inescapable reliance of such mobility on existing inequalities of power, on the other, will look to some people like a specifically American program—a program that could only be proposed by and for representatives of the most powerful nation in the world, however critical of that nation they may be. . . . The point of this book is to move this already existing worldliness, however slowly and unevenly, from interpreting the world toward changing it. To this end, I argue for a translation or transmutation of cosmopolitanism, usually understood as a detached, individual view of the global, into the more collective, engaged, and empowered form of worldliness that is often called internationalism. But in this effort I assume an understanding of power such that the newly empowered will not feel compelled in good conscience to disavow or abstain from using whatever power they come to possess. (Feeling Global, 4-5) Extending some of the arguments he makes in Secular Vocations, Robbins here claims that intellectuals should neither apologize for, nor abstain from using, any forms of power and privilege they may possess—especially intercultural literacy. At the very least, Robbins cannot be accused of an unthinking elitism. Instead, he freely acknowledges that the university intellectuals who comprise his main audience are part of the global elite. In an ideal scenario, they can use some of the perquisites and specialized knowledge of their profession to make us all more alert to cultural differences and political inequalities. Both Appiah and Robbins are in some ways responding to James Clifford’s rehabilitation of cosmopolitanism in his oft-cited essay “Traveling Culture” (in Routes 1992).1 Clifford encourages us to consider “discrepant cosmopolitanisms” as a new mode of critical engagement. As with Robbins, Clifford is highly sensitive to his disciplinary training and institutional position. As Clifford states the matter, his book “is marked, empowered and constrained, by previous work—my own, among others. And so I’ll be working,

68

Modernism in a Global Context

today, out of my historical research on ethnographic practice in its twentieth-century exoticist, anthropological forms. But the work I’m going toward does not so much build on my previous work as locate and displace it” (18). If one were to offer a criticism of Robbins and Clifford, it would be that they are hyperaware of the status of intellectuals, too eager to insert themselves as institutional actors into the stories they tell. Appiah’s cosmopolitan is a bit more detached from his institutional location—anyone, in theory, should be able to perform the sort of ethical reasoning outlined in his books. Clifford, by contrast, writes as a reflexive anthropologist who is studying himself and others much like him. If this leads us to cosmopolitanism, it is a cosmopolitanism of the self, of the intellectual as the product of a specific disciplinary apparatus. It is not immediately apparent how this sort of cosmopolitanism gets us to the kind of ethical engagement—a recognition of the ethical claims others have upon each of us—called for by Appiah and Nussbaum. On the other side, Clifford and Robbins might say that enlightenment reason is insufficiently self-aware: there is no form of ethical engagement that does not take seriously the status of the people involved. Shari Benstock and Susan Stanford Friedman translate the selfreflexivity and internationalism of Clifford and Robbins into the language of feminism. As with Clifford, who wants to take his work beyond the sort of ethnography he has hitherto practiced, Benstock and Friedman propose to take feminism outside its comfort zone by internationalizing it. Benstock says that the interwar modernists in her study “discovered themselves as women and as writers in Paris,” partly through expatriation (ix). Friedman, like Robbins, offers “an unapologetic focus on feminism in the academy,” but we should not assume that acknowledging one’s status as an intellectual nullifies one’s political efficacy (Mappings, 7). Friedman’s key term is “locational feminism,” by which she means a feminism that refuses static binaries (masculine-feminine, white-black, developedunderdeveloped) but is very attentive to differences in power and cultural situations (5). Her book includes some thick descriptions of particular places, but it insists that local forms of cultural production are always articulated with global processes. Friedman approvingly cites Gayatri Spivak’s call for “transnational literacy” as the way forward for academic feminism. Methodologically, these thinkers provide a bridge between what I have called prescriptive and descriptive cosmopolitanism. Benstock

Cosmopolitanism

69

and Friedman call for more and better forms of transnational engagement, claiming that too many feminists are not aware enough of global cultural geographies. Camilla Fojas also deserves mention in this context for her analysis of gender and sexuality in Spanish American modernismo. As she writes, “The terms cosmopolitan and modernismo and queer are virtually inextricable” in the Americas (131). Both Friedman and Fojas see a form of admirable cosmopolitanism in the writers they study, equating a cosmopolitan outlook with respect for difference. By resituating modernism as a global practice, they are also claiming that modernism is more plural and respectful of difference than the version of modernism canonized by a white, masculine, Euro-American academy. Janet Lyon offers an interesting counterpoint to Friedman and Benstock. Whereas Benstock and Friedman suggest that feminism and cosmopolitanism are closely related formations, Lyon reads cosmopolitanism as a frustrated, utopian longing of modernist women. In her opening discussion of Jean Rhys’s roman à clef, Quartet, Lyon calls it “a perfectly anti-cosmopolitan novel” because the narrative “faults cosmopolitanism for failing to materialize. What should be the setting for cosmopolitan worldmaking—rootlessness in Paris—turns out to support the worst kinds of parochialisms and the most conservative forms of personal coercion” (“Cosmopolitanism and Modernism,” 387). Paris, the city synonymous with cosmopolitanism—where an urbane worldliness and liberal values encourage free cultural interchange—turns out, in Lyon’s reading of Rhys, to be a parochial, insular, snobbish hellhole for people without money and social connections. As Lyon discusses, this was not an uncommon reaction among women, Jews, colonials, and queers artists active in modernism: a cosmopolitanism that ought to exist, in Paris especially, but does not. For pessimistic modernists, such as Rhys, it is easy to see how prescriptive cosmopolitanism can become an indictment, a failure of modernism to deliver on its promises.

Descriptive cosmopolitanism The more descriptive assessments of cosmopolitanism also tend to be invested in the ethical and political potential of the term, but they attempt to convince us that a viable form of cosmopolitanism

70

Modernism in a Global Context

has existed for quite some time—and that it was an integral part of modernism from the very beginning. Against those who would say that cosmopolitanism is a form of elitism, many of these scholars see “actually existing cosmopolitanism” exemplified by writers concerned with systems of oppression and exclusion. Colonial subjects (such as Rabindranath Tagore or Rhys), women (such as Woolf or Larsen), and people with queer affiliations (such as Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Langston Hughes, or Gertrude Stein) have figured prominently in recent examinations of modernist cosmopolitanism. Jessica Berman uses modernist writing to challenge the idea that cosmopolitanism can be imagined as a species of universal subjectivity based on enlightenment reason. “The universal citizen,” she writes, “no matter how theorized, remains tainted by its historical gender and racial construction” (J. Berman, Cosmopolitanism, 22). As much as some prescriptive cosmopolitans would have us correct for gaps in enlightenment reason, Berman suggests that no amount of theorizing can wish away this history of gendered and racial privilege. Instead, Berman finds a workable form of cosmopolitanism in modernist writers who are interested both in our manifest differences as in what we supposedly share. For this reason, the discourse of feminism (and also the limits of feminist discourse) is an abiding interest in her work. In her view, the cosmopolitanism we see on display in modernism “engages with the inadequacies of dominant categories of affiliation, especially regarding gender and nationality” (27). This form of cosmopolitanism has an overriding concern with forms of difference and exclusion. It has the advantage of not presuming, a priori, that universal forms of subjectivity can or should exist. The cosmopolitanism she observes is provisional, fragile, and often purely imaginative or representational in nature. Berman’s analysis also gives us useful interpretive tools for the study of modernism. As she demonstrates, some of modernism’s signature technical features—she points to Stein’s wandering pronouns—can be read as a form of cosmopolitan aesthetics, a way of stretching community across temporal and geographical boundaries. Amanda Anderson allows us to understand how the idea of cosmopolitanism in Victorian writing prefigures what we might observe in modernism. As with Berman, Anderson suggests that questioning gendered and racial hierarchies was an important part of Victorian literary culture. She points to figures such as George Eliot,

Cosmopolitanism

71

who interrogates the position of women and Jews in England, and Wilde, who uses the figure of the dandy to bridge his aesthetic and ethical concerns. Anderson’s unique twist is to suggest that attitudes of detachment and objectivity—rather than excessive attachment to particular identity groups—underwrite much Victorian cultural practice. In many cases, this form of detachment is manifested as a form of cosmopolitanism, an unwillingness to be judged strictly by local, parochial standards. Counterintuitively, perhaps, forms of detachment allow writers to escape the particularities of their own positions, to partially transcend forms of privilege by systematically considering the position of others. Rather than see detachment as a delusion of the privileged, Victorian writers began to recast it as a first step toward ethical engagement. Gayle Rogers provides an account of how specific cosmopolitan modernist networks facilitated translation and cooperation between anglophone and hispanophone regions—especially between Britain and Spain—in the interwar period. The sort of modernist cosmopolitanism Rogers documents is more tangibly international than many other forms of cosmopolitanism. Rogers studies collaborations between Ortega y Gasset’s Revista de Occidente (1923–36) and T. S. Eliot’s Criterion (1922–39), and between Woolf and Victoria Ocampo. His scholarship shows a form of cosmopolitanism that was not merely imagined by modernist writers, but also actually practiced through translation and specific cultural institutions (see also Chapter 4 of the present book). Thus, it provides a productive addition to writing about cosmopolitanism, which often talks about intercultural contact, but less frequently shows it in action. Cosmopolitanism is frequently figured as a style of dissent, the individualist who refuses to accede to local standards, but it can also be found in the concrete forms of exchange between and across cultural boundaries, which became routine in the twentieth century. Rebecca Walkowitz, like many of the other scholars discussed here, regards cosmopolitanism as a form of ethical engagement, what she calls “critical cosmopolitanism” (Cosmopolitan, 2). And similar to Berman, she studies cosmopolitanism primarily as an outgrowth of modernist style, the particular manner in which writing is practiced. Unlike many of her counterparts, however, Walkowitz defines cosmopolitanism as an intellectual detour of sorts, a form of paying attention to things critics often take for

72

Modernism in a Global Context

granted. In analyzing Joyce, for example, she notes his emphasis on “triviality”; the discussion of Woolf, likewise, is grounded in the concept of “evasion.” Thus, when Walkowitz says her goal is “to reimagine the center in terms of peripheries, within and without,” she is not just talking about geographical centers and peripheries, but rather about dominant modes of critique (such as reason) and peripheral modes of thought (triviality) (10). Cosmopolitanism, in this account, means being attuned both to symbolic geographies as well as to affective hierarchies. A critical cosmopolite, we are led to believe, sees the ethical value in stylistic diversions, which allow us to better gauge the distance between centers and peripheries, and therefore to make critical comparisons more judiciously. As we examine some of the ways in which cosmopolitanism is practiced and represented by modernist figures, it will become apparent that these competing definitions of cosmopolitanism are all partial: partial in the sense that any definition of the term is incomplete, but also partial in the sense that every deployment of the term is driven by a set of motives. Cosmopolitan disinterest and detachment, for example, can always be refigured as a form of selfinterested activity practiced by intellectuals. But this partiality is no disabling contradiction in and of itself. As every good cosmopolite will claim, the only way to acknowledge our ethical obligations to others is to properly situate our own material and ideological investments.

Nancy Cunard Nancy Cunard is a poster child for chic European cosmopolitanism of the interwar period. Scion of an aristocratic father (he was heir of the Cunard shipping line) and a society matron, Cunard lived a globetrotting life that many would envy. As an adult, she traveled extensively throughout Europe, the Americas, and North Africa. More important, she was probably the most wellconnected intellectual of the age. She knew, and worked with, an incredible number of writers and artists from across the world: she was on close terms with many Dadaists and French surrealists, especially Tristan Tzara and Louis Aragon; she was friendly with the prominent British, Irish and US writers of the period, from T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Ernest Hemingway to Samuel Beckett,

Cosmopolitanism

73

Aldous Huxley, and Stephen Spender; she could count a number of Harlem Renaissance figures, including Langston Hughes and Alain Locke, among long-term friends; she had many contacts with important black Atlantic figures, such as Nicolás Guillén and Claude McKay; and she also developed strong relationships with writers from South America, most notably Pablo Neruda. Politically, she was no less an internationalist, playing the role of “fellow traveler” throughout much of her life: she devoted herself to protesting on behalf of the Scottsboro boys, nine young African American men wrongly convicted of raping two white woman in Alabama in the early 1930s; during the Spanish Civil War, she became a fervent supporter of the republican cause, and continued agitating against Franco’s regime until her death; and she also used her platform to protest against imperialism, first in her massive Negro anthology, and then in her collaboration with George Padmore, with whom she attacked the US-British Atlantic Charter, which proclaimed that the Second World War was being fought in the name of democracy, but did not discuss extending democracy to colonial territories, which were to remain under British control. These lists are hardly exhaustive. Cunard seemed to be everywhere and to know everyone in the 1920s and 1930s. Cunard’s biography is so interwoven with stories about literary culture in the interwar period that it is sometimes difficult to disentangle the two. The received narrative follows a dilettante writer, Left Bank bohemian, and fashion icon of the 1920s as she morphs into an impassioned and extremely vocal (but probably ineffective) political activist in the 1930s. As her good friend Harold Acton puts it, the 1930s brought “the transformation of what the Press might describe as ‘a popular society girl’ into a militant propagandist for miscellaneous prickly causes, fighting in improbable surroundings, for the Scottsborough [sic] negroes, the Spanish republicans, refugees and down-and-outs of all sorts” (224). Other writers have been less charitable about the turn from 1920s bohemianism to the high-minded activism of the 1930s. George Orwell’s frequent attacks on limp-wristed liberals seem to draw instinctively on figures such as Cunard, without ever naming her. Stephen Spender collaborated with Cunard in the 1930s, but he later described his forays into politics as “shamefully embarrassing” (xiv). But there are good reasons to rethink this narrative, and to question the idea that Cunard’s cosmopolitan detachment of the

74

Modernism in a Global Context

1920s is incompatible with her political activism of the 1930s. Unlike Spender and W. H. Auden, Cunard never renounced her political commitments or her belief in the need for activism. Rather than see these phases of her life as irreconcilable, it is possible to see Cunard’s political activities in the 1930s as an outgrowth of her literary cosmopolitanism of the 1920s. Cunard’s Negro anthology (1934), for instance, offers a striking combination of protest literature and international modernism. The opening pages of the collection present an arresting juxtaposition of a Langston Hughes poem, “I, Too,” and an oversized, grainy photograph of an unnamed black man. The photograph, entitled “An American Beast of Burden,” might be characterized as a documentary. The man, shown in profile, is presented less as an individual than a type. The tendentious caption only reinforces the sense that this is not an individual, but a thing at the mercy of others. Many other contributions to the anthology testify to the dehumanizing treatment of African Americans and other black, colonized people. In Cunard’s preface, for instance, she describes Africa as a “continent in the iron grip of its several imperialist oppressors. To some of these empires’ sons the Africans are not more than ‘niggers,’ black man-power whom it is fit to dispossess of everything” (xxxii). Cunard’s ethical cosmopolitanism is fully on display in these sections of the anthology. It presents racial discrimination and colonialism as global problems requiring an international response from intellectuals. Elsewhere in the collection, however, Cunard emphasizes the cultural accomplishments of black people, as in her inclusion and placement of the Hughes poem. Sitting opposite the photograph, Hughes’s poem makes a bold impression. Like the photograph, the poem protests against discrimination. Unlike the photograph, the poem draws our attention to the uniqueness of the black artist, as opposed to the anonymity of the exploited laborer. The lyric speaker, America’s “darker brother,” is made to eat in the kitchen when white guests come, but he laughs off the insult. There will come a time, he believes, when he will be strong enough so that no one would dare tell him to excuse himself. “Besides,” he thinks, “they’ll see how beautiful I am / And be ashamed” (3). The short, elegant poem, in effect, offers a reading of the image opposite. If the man in the picture is an anonymous, abused laborer, the lyric speaker is an eloquent individual with both pride and hope for the future.

Cosmopolitanism

75

Discrimination in the poem is impermanent, circumstantial, and inhumane. Standards of beauty, by contrast, are more durable and more humane. The speaker’s aesthetic gifts cannot be contained or explained by his circumstances. Discrimination may be ubiquitous. The speaker’s eloquence, however, is not fully explicable by reference to those circumstances. Whatever handicaps black people may face, the most talented among them—artists and writers in particular, the volume suggests—are able to transcend their immediate conditions of existence. This is a form of cosmopolitanism in microcosm: detaching oneself from one’s immediate circumstances, rising above conditions of exclusion to imagine a more ethical way of treating one another, and producing great art. For our purposes here, we might say that Cunard’s cosmopolitan outlook emerges out of this unique combination of ethical engagement, transnational perspectives, and modernist aesthetic sensibilities. Some regard Cunard’s eclecticism as a disabling contradiction (North, Dialect). Cosmopolites, by contrast, might argue that Cunard’s acute aesthetic sensibilities help sustain her ethical engagement (J. Marcus). Being able to appreciate beauty does not redress inequalities, but it does allow us to see inequalities more clearly by enhancing our discriminatory powers. Additionally, Cunard’s aesthetic and ethical faculties do not observe national or regional borders. There are contributors from, and contributions about, the entire black Atlantic region. Rather than assimilate all this material into one, uniform shape, the anthology puts this diversity on display, letting the uneven edges chafe against us as we move from piece to piece. The cosmopolitanism of the Negro anthology involves comparison without complete translation. There is no overarching aesthetic or cultural format into which all the contributions are rendered. Cunard’s best readers, one can imagine, must be comfortable with aesthetic incongruities and cultural dissonance. When the Spanish Civil War erupted, Cunard turned to some of the strategies she had used to protest against the Scottsboro verdict. Cunard assembled a group, including Aragon, Auden, Neruda, Spender, and Tzara, and sent out an appeal to the “writers and poets of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales,” asking them to declare their allegiance, once and for all, to the Republicans or to Franco. As Cunard knew they would, the Republicans received overwhelming support among British and Irish intellectuals. The phrasing of

76

Modernism in a Global Context

the letter is telling: “It is clear to many of us,” the appeal begins, “we are determined, or compelled, to take sides. The equivocal attitude, the Ivory Tower, the paradoxical, ironic detachment, will no longer do” (“Spain: The Question”). From one angle, we might say that Cunard and her cosignatories are repudiating a version of cosmopolitanism widely practiced in the 1920s: the ironic detachment, the equivocal attitude is certainly a part of the charge sheet presented by cosmo-skeptics. From another angle, however, Cunard’s appeal to intellectuals in particular reminds us of the arguments presented by Ortega y Gasset (and echoed by Clifford, Friedman, and Robbins), all of whom suggest that cosmopolitanism ought to be a prominent part of an intellectual’s habits of mind. It is possible to read Cunard’s interest in the Spanish conflict not as turning her back on the bohemian cosmopolitanism of the 1920s, but instead as a tactical defense of artistic and expressive freedoms. She appeals to cosmopolitan intellectuals, even of the bohemian or Ivory Tower variety, precisely because they know the value of intellectual freedom. Fascists present the greatest threat to those freedoms, and so it makes perfect sense that cosmopolitan intellectuals would be on Cunard’s side. Cunard’s attempt to galvanize international opposition to fascism is premised on a very clear sense of what an intellectual is, and what the intellectual’s rights and responsibilities are in a world of armed conflict. Unlike Auden—whose poem, “Spain,” famously repudiated by the poet, Cunard published in 1937—Cunard never renounced her outspoken politics.

Nella Larsen Like Cunard, Larsen is an important woman intellectual from the interwar period who fell out of critical favor for several decades, only for her reputation to be restored years after her death. Also, Larsen straddled the color line both personally and professionally, rejecting racial segregation by cultivating relationships with white and black intellectuals. Unlike Cunard, she was not born into luxury. Although Larsen deliberately misrepresented some features of her early years, it seems that she was born in Chicago to a white Danish mother and a mixed-race father from the Danish West Indies. Her parents’ relationship did not last—Larsen claims her father died, but her biographer, Thadious M. Davis, questions that story—and

Cosmopolitanism

77

her mother married a white Danish man. Larsen reports spending several years in Denmark as a teenager and young woman, but since there is not a paper trail to substantiate her claims, it is not clear how much time she actually spent there. Although she published only two novels and a handful of stories during her brief career—a charge of plagiarism suddenly ended her literary life just as she was reaching her prime—she is now remembered, alongside Jessie Fauset and Zora Neale Hurston, as one of the most talented women of the Harlem Renaissance. As with Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, Larsen’s biography and texts remind us that the Harlem Renaissance is more international in scope than earlier generations of scholars have emphasized. Larsen’s case also demonstrates that the paradigmatic black Atlantic cannot account for all the wanderings of black writers: Denmark, hardly a mecca of the diaspora, occupies a privileged place in Larsen’s imagination. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Quicksand (1928). The partly autobiographical novel follows a young woman, of white Danish and black descent, as she leaves her job as a teacher in the southern United States for stints in Chicago, New York City, and Copenhagen. Larsen represents cosmopolitanism as the antidote to parochialism. Additionally, the novel figures the African American cosmopolite as one who can transcend the rigid racial binaries of the United States. The novel opens with Helga Crane, a teacher at a relatively elite African American school in the South, straining against the values of her strait-laced, hypocritical fellow teachers. As she relates to the principal of the school, who asks her to explain why she is quitting her job without notice in the middle of term, she detests the expectation of conformity about the place: I hate hypocrisy. I hate cruelty to students, and to teachers who can’t fight back. I hate backbiting, and sneaking, and petty jealousy. Naxos? It’s hardly a place at all. It’s more like some loathsome, venomous disease. Ugh! Everybody spending his time in a malicious hunting for the weaknesses of others, spying, grudging, scratching. (19) Helga’s difficulty is less with the place, a fairly unremarkable Southern town, than with the repressive social atmosphere, where any form of deviance or individuality is seized upon by the crowd.

78

Modernism in a Global Context

Colorful clothes, social informality, even kindness to students can lead to a teacher being ostracized by her colleagues. Quicksand’s protagonist is hardly a bohemian nonconformist, but she cannot help revolting against the prim morality that prevails at the school. Part of the problem, as she explains elsewhere, is the project of uplift. For middle-class African Americans, it imposes a deadening social atmosphere, in which a legitimate desire for racial progress becomes a system for policing conduct and enforcing internal hierarchies. As Helga complains, she does not come from a “good” African American family, and will never be fully accepted into the black middle classes as a result. Helga first escapes to Chicago, where she has relatives, and then to Harlem. For a brief while, Harlem gives her everything she was denied in Naxos. Although her life runs along geographically confined tracks—“bounded by Central Park, Fifth Avenue, St. Nicholas Park, and One Hundred and Forty-fifth street”—Harlem offers her all the drama and diversity she lacks in her former life. “Not at all a narrow life, as Negroes live it,” she thinks to herself. “Everything was there, vice and goodness, sadness and gayety, ignorance and wisdom, ugliness and beauty, poverty and richness” (46). Being able to observe these striking contrasts makes Harlem “not at all narrow.” Moreover, Harlem gives Helga a degree of anonymity and social freedom she could not find elsewhere. This version of cosmopolitanism is a specific response to Helga’s experience of racial segregation and her position as an educated woman. Being dominated by people of African descent, Harlem allows her to avoid the worst effects of racial segregation, and yet it is large enough that she need not feel constrained by the narrowmindedness of middle-class society. Before long, however, Helga soon becomes dissatisfied with her life in New York. Harlem, she concludes, is too monocultural, too focused on the persistence of racial segregation in the United States. “Why,” she wonders “with unreasoning exasperation, didn’t they find something else to talk of? Why must the race problem always creep in?” (52). Harlem is not as socially rigid as her school in Naxos, but it becomes tiresome and constricting all the same. The diversity of Harlem encourages her to long for a life that refuses to observe the color line: “It was as if she were shut up, boxed up, with hundreds of her race, closed up with that something in the racial character which had always been, to her, inexplicable, alien” (54–5).

Cosmopolitanism

79

George Hutchinson reads these sorts of passages as a product of Larsen’s transnational, mixed-race heritage. In the United States, with its “one drop” rule, it was difficult for artists such as Larsen to express themselves as both black and white, both American and European. “If their art lives,” Hutchinson writes, “it lives not for racial reasons as such but because . . . [they] challenged the limits of sensibility that their lives presented them.” In choosing to explore another side of her identity—her whiteness—a character such as Helga Crane is not so much rejecting her blackness as rejecting a situation that compels her to identify as black and only as black. Rather than read this as a political betrayal of sorts—turning her back on the black community fighting for equal rights—Hutchinson interprets this as an affirmation of “democratic-egalitarian ideals, ideals in which they believed, daily contradicted by [the] implacable color line” (446). Quicksand explores the protagonist’s multiracial affiliations by appealing to a cosmopolitan sensibility. Escaping the sort of claustrophobia she feels in Harlem, with its heightened forms of racial consciousness, means leaving the United States altogether. Unexpectedly, Helga’s white uncle gives her $5,000 and encourages her to go to Denmark for an extended visit with her relatives in Copenhagen. At first, Copenhagen provides a soft landing spot. Her wealthy relatives pamper her, and the Danish, lacking a resident black population, seem to be free of the worst forms of bigotry. Helga thinks of making her life in Copenhagen permanent. Within a few months, however, Helga becomes dissatisfied yet again—this time, not with the ubiquity of black people, but with their absence from her social world. For a time, unable to choose between the familiarity of the African American community and the relative freedom of Copenhagen, Helga contemplates a transatlantic life: This knowledge, this certainty of the division of her life into two parts in two lands, into physical freedom in Europe and spiritual freedom in America, was unfortunate, inconvenient, expensive. It was, too, as she was uncomfortably aware, even a trifle ridiculous, and mentally she caricatured herself moving shuttle-like from continent to continent. From the prejudiced restrictions of the New World to the easy formality of the Old, from the pale calm of Copenhagen to the colorful lure of Harlem.

80

Modernism in a Global Context

Nevertheless she felt a slightly pitying superiority over those Negroes who were apparently so satisfied. And she had a fine contempt for the blatantly patriotic black Americans. Always when she encountered one of those picturesque parades in the Harlem streets, the Stars and Stripes streaming ironically, insolently, at the head of the procession tempered for her, a little, her amusement at the childish seriousness of the spectacle. It was too pathetic. (96) This longing for a dual life, connected with both sides of her racial heritage, is a form of cosmopolitanism that is not simply a form of detachment, political or otherwise. It comes from her excessive attachment, in fact, to two different facets of her life, as well as an awareness of what she would sacrifice were she to choose one place over another. Copenhagen offers a physical (and even intellectual) freedom she does not believe she has in New York; Harlem offers her spiritual sustenance that only comes with being among her racial peers. She looks with a touch of condescension at fellow African Americans who are unthinkingly patriotic, blissfully unaware of the narrowness of their situation. Unfortunately, as she well knows, her transatlantic fantasy is unworkable. Quicksand’s longing for an impracticable cosmopolitanism is a typical modernist gesture, as Janet Lyon points out. Larsen’s desire to find comfort beyond the boundaries of races and nations is, if not utopian, a version of negative cosmopolitanism. Equally important, Quicksand’s transnational narrative is enabled by a financial windfall, but that does not mean its protagonist is simply a member of the world’s elite, whimsically crisscrossing the ocean. Helga’s perspective is a response to specific forms of exclusion as well. Her ambivalence—expressed as a desire both for group membership and for absolute personal liberty—will be important to keep in mind as we turn to Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood.

Djuna Barnes Barnes lived among and wrote extensively about North Americans in Europe, especially Paris, between the wars. As many critics have stressed, however, Barnes preferred to retain a tactical distance from her counterparts in her journalism from the period. Barnes, it has been

Cosmopolitanism

81

said, was aware of her differences from other expatriates in terms of gender and sexuality (compare her accounts of expatriate Paris to those of Malcolm Cowley, in which the artists are heterosexual men), as well as class background and education (Barnes came from modest circumstances and was an autodidact, in essence). In Nightwood (1936), her ambivalence about the expatriate scene with which she was associated comes through clearly. Barnes is arch and cutting in many of the novel’s descriptions of cosmopolitans and bohemian nonconformists, and yet she clearly values the sort of imaginative freedoms enabled by detachment and non-belonging. Cosmopolitanism gives generously with one hand and revokes with the other. Given this ambivalence, it is not surprising that debates about the text’s cosmopolitanism have yet to be settled. Barnes’s earliest critics tend to cite her cosmopolitanism, on the Joycean model, as evidence of her indifference to politics. More recent critics, by contrast, have been eager to construct their readings of Nightwood around an interpretation of the novel’s implied political stance. On one side, critics such as Jane Marcus argue that that novel projects a radical antifascism through its treatment of misfits and deracinated aliens—Jews, circus performers, and “inverts,” to use one of the period’s terms for homosexuals. As Marcus states the case, Nightwood uses Rabelaisian laughter to fashion “a kind of feminist-anarchist call for freedom from fascism” (86). To translate her argument into the language of this chapter, Marcus treats the novel as an instance of both descriptive and prescriptive cosmopolitanism: it documents, almost ethnographically for the benefit of nonparticipants, a cosmopolitan cast of characters, and it also implies we all ought to respect signs of difference, especially the ungainly and misshapen. On the other side, critics such as Erin Carlston suggest that the novel’s portrayal of aesthetic decadence shares with fascism a language of racial classification and sexual difference. Anyone who would care to read the novel as anti-Semitic could point to its troublesome descriptions of Felix Volkbein, whom the narrator presents in unflattering ways as a rootless, cosmopolitan Jew. Rather than take a firm position in the debate about Nightwood’s rejection of, or links with, interwar fascism, Andrew Goldstone notes that the narrative is fascinated with portraits of circus performers, cross dressers, wanderers, and fabricators of all sorts. The narrator

82

Modernism in a Global Context

persistently emphasizes artifice: nearly every character makes and remakes himself or herself; everyone is a performer of sorts; no one has a true essence or identity to which he or she reverts. Barnes seems attracted to the enormous creative possibilities of such a milieu, where people are free to represent themselves, where old relationships and obligations do not impinge upon the exigencies of the present. There is a price to be paid, however, for such acts of courageous self-fashioning: the characters in Nightwood are lonely, miserable, and extremely vulnerable. Instead of emphasizing group solidarity among a collection of misfits, the novel seems to refuse the allure of group membership. Cosmopolitan detachment, in other words, affords the artist room in which to create but also the isolation in which to perish. The novel’s portrait of Felix Volkbein, for instance, relies heavily on stereotypes about European Jews. Felix is an itinerant banker, moneylender, art dealer, gourmet, aesthete, and social aspirant. He is master of no fewer than seven languages, but his fluency increases rather than decreases his social awkwardness. He is a Christian convert, inventing a patently false genealogy, claiming to be the last heir of an Austrian baronetcy, with fake portraits and family tree as evidence. For all his pretensions, he consorts with circus performers, in whom he sees a likeness. Their ridiculous titles, outlandish costumes, and wandering lifestyle make him feel right at home in their company. As the narrator describes him, “From the mingled passions that made up his past, out of a diversity of bloods, from the crux of a thousand impossible situations, Felix had become the accumulated and single—the embarrassed” (8–9). Barnes’s labored syntax and odd word choice of “embarrassed” combine two usages of the term: the more contemporary meaning, signaling humiliation, and an obsolete usage, meaning blocked or impeded. Felix is so translated, so mobile, such a mishmash of different materials that he is awkward, singular, and in some sense impossibly situated. In picking out Felix for such treatment, as Goldstone argues, the novel emphasizes in him less a form of group belonging (either to a community of Jews or cosmopolites) than a form of ridiculous, impossible singularity. This uniqueness is rich material for satire, but there is an intangible quality about it that resembles the loneliness of the artist, the person who shuttles between cultures, translating, creatively reworking, and, by necessity, standing apart from them. His Jewishness is a form of cultural transcendence—he

Cosmopolitanism

83

is all cultures and races at once, and therefore a member of no culture at all—rather than a species of ethnic essence. Barnes’s portrayals of queer characters and same sex relationships, likewise, do not necessarily lead us to recognize the communal spirit among sexual nonconformists. Robin Vote, who marries Felix before going off with Nora Flood, appears variously as a sleepwalker (la somnambule), a feral animal (one who might lose the scent of home), and an amoral vamp. And yet the novel also figures her as highly desirable and childlike—not in her innocence, but in that people long to care for her and offer her shelter. She is selfish, imbalanced, and fragile. Nora, for her part, is a jealous caretaker. Her salon, which the narrator describes as the “strangest” in the United States, gathers a collection of artists, vagabonds, and freeloaders. But we should not take Nora as a guardian angel of outcasts: “Wandering people the world over found her profitable in that she could be sold for a price forever, for she carried her betrayal money in her own pocket” (51–2). Nora is a fool, in other words, constantly at the mercy of the people whom she takes under her wing. As Robin drifts away, Nora experiences the separation as “an amputation,” and she would rather chase her lover all over the world than give her up (59). Matthew O’Connor, the impoverished transvestite whose ramblings threaten to colonize the narrative, is no more a stable locus of queer identification than Robin or Nora. When Nora asks O’Connor to help her understand why Robin has left her, O’Connor launches into a morbidly funny diatribe about the unremitting loneliness of gay life in bohemian Paris, among other things. As Scott Herring suggests, it is possible to read the portrayal of these characters not as an affirmation, but as the “disarticulation,” of a queer, cosmopolitan community (174). Barnes the artist may admire and make great use of O’Connor’s loquacity, but we should be careful not to assume that she also envies his vulnerability. To put this matter another way, Nightwood implies that cosmopolitanism is more useful as an aesthetic than as political or ethical category. The novel does not suggest that cosmopolitanism is a form of respect for difference, a way of detaching oneself from the particular that allows us to see our obligations to others. Nor does the novel project a clear group identity among the outsiders it depicts. The novel’s cosmopolitan perspective does, however, seem to valorize the creative opportunities enabled by rejecting reciprocal

84

Modernism in a Global Context

social obligations. The possibility of making and remaking oneself, cosmopolitan style, is analogous to the aesthetic impulse. But this is not to say that Barnes’s version of cosmopolitanism lacks an awareness of the social costs associated with detachment. Instead, Barnes shows clearly the isolation and vulnerability suffered by her wandering characters, the price one pays for detachment and the ability to transform oneself at will. Nightwood’s version of cosmopolitanism is more balance sheet, with credits and debits, than fantasy of detachment: creative freedoms come in exchange for isolation and vulnerability.

Eileen Chang In contrast to Barnes, Eileen Chang’s version of cosmopolitan writing is far less interested in exploring the margins of society. Instead, the fictional subjects in the short stories collected in Love in a Fallen City [Qing cheng zhi lian] (1943–7; English 1981–2007) tend to be drawn from the wealthy urbanites of Hong Kong and Shanghai. With relatively well-heeled and attractive young women flitting back and forth between these modern, urban centers— two of the Chinese cities most affected by Western European and Japanese imperialism—Chang’s stories could be dismissed as appealing to a detached, cosmopolitan elite with no grounding in the realities of life for most Chinese people. Moreover, her deceptively light stories often follow plotlines of heterosexual coupling, seeming to avoid difficult political and ethical questions altogether. A more subtle reading, however, might recognize that Chang’s simultaneous attachment to two semicolonial cities gives her an interesting perspective on the problems of national identity and modernity during an especially turbulent period of Chinese history. Additionally, her focus on women’s romantic choices and conflicts has a great deal in common with modernist depictions of the “New Woman” in other areas of the world. Chang’s fiction is clearly in dialogue with these international trends, suggesting that she saw herself in conversation with a range of domestic and international writers. Chang herself was bilingual. Her mother, partly educated in England, was fiercely independent, leaving the children at home for a time while she toured Europe. The writer spent her childhood

Cosmopolitanism

85

in Shanghai before going to university in Hong Kong, where she studied English literature. Her earliest published writings were in English. Her work was influenced by anglophone writers she admired, including H. G. Wells, and also by contemporary and folk Chinese literature. The outbreak of war interrupted her studies. She returned to an occupied Shanghai, where she began her literary career in earnest, writing primarily in Chinese. She returned to Hong Kong in 1952 (her first husband served in the Japanese puppet government, making it difficult for her to stay in Shanghai, even though they had divorced) and went to the United States in 1955. In the 1950s, she wrote two anti-communist propaganda novels for the US Information Agency. Although she became reclusive as she aged, and her work was banned in mainland China for many years, she retained an avid following in the Chinese diaspora. Late in life, with the relaxation of censorship, Chang’s work was reintroduced to mainland audiences to great attention. Chang’s stories “Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier” and “Love in a Fallen City” are set, for the most part, in Hong Kong, but the implied (and original) readers are from Shanghai. We know this not only because these stories were originally published in 1940s Shanghai, but also because Chang’s testimony states as much: “When writing [these stories] I was constantly thinking about Shanghai people, because I was trying to look at Hong Kong from a Shanghai’s person’s point of view” (qtd. Lee, 326). From a North American or British perspective, one might ask, what is the big deal—would a Chicagoan look at New York City, or a Mancusian at Birmingham, as if it were a totally foreign city—but it is important to recall that the two Chinese cities shared a legacy of foreign domination and yet had very different cultural responses to the presence of foreigners. In discussing Shanghai modernism of the 1930s, Leo Ou-Fan Lee claims that these writers never questioned their Chinese identity “in spite of the Western colonial presence” in the city, allowing them to embrace modernity without seeing their national identity compromised (312). The presence of Japanese intellectuals was far more important to Chinese writers. In Shanghai, European colonialism was a fact of life in the foreign concessions, but most Chinese subjects were more or less untouched by it, according to Lee. Hong Kong, by contrast, was more fully colonized. In “Aloeswood,” for instance, Chang describes Hong Kong as a city geared to flatter the British taste for exotica. Schoolgirls

86

Modernism in a Global Context

are decked out “in the manner of Boxer-era courtesans” and high-class pleasure houses are furnished in a “basically Western” manner, “touched up with some unexceptionable Chinese brica-brac” for the benefit of English visitors who imagine China as “exquisite, illogical, very entertaining” (8). This subtle commentary on Hong Kong’s subservience plays out in the story’s romantic plot as well. Should young Chinese women “sell” themselves to their fellow countrymen through marriage without true love, or would concubinage with genuine affection be preferable? Is there any room for love or sentiment when relationships between men and women are unequal? In “Aloeswood,” the marriage market, even among the Chinese, is analogous to colonialism in that daily interactions are framed by structural inequalities. The difficulty of finding companionship and financial stability in marriage is even more pronounced in the collection’s title story, “Love in a Fallen City.” The protagonist, Liusu, is a Shanghainese divorcee who longs for another marriage in order to escape her unsympathetic relatives. She falls for a wealthy, dashing, cosmopolitan playboy in Hong Kong, called Liuyuan. Their courtship is a battle of wits, familiar to consumers of romantic comedies the world over: Liusu wonders if his declarations of love could possibly be genuine; Liuyuan wonders if she plays hard to get because she really loves him or because she is after something else—his money, perhaps. As Liusu points out, however, the pair have unequal weapons at their disposal. When Liuyuan sighs in sadness because Liusu responds indifferently to his overtures, she says, “If someone as free as you are thinks life is unfair, then someone like me ought to just go and hang herself” (139). Elsewhere in the story, Liusu describes herself as a “country bumpkin” (137), but her jousting with Liuyuan shows her to be his match in terms of worldliness. She refuses to be taken in by his flattery, and she remains cool to his displays of wealth and social capital. She earns his respect because her detachment and sophistication are innate: she understands how to play the game of love even though, as a relatively poor and untraveled woman, she stands at a competitive disadvantage. Aside from the cosmopolitanism of Chang’s characters, the story displays a certain cosmopolitan aesthetics through its use of striking juxtapositions. As Rebecca Walkowitz claims, and as we see in Cunard’s Negro anthology and Larsen’s Quicksand, unexpected shifts in perspective speak to a literary form of worldliness, an

Cosmopolitanism

87

ability to make comparisons between different situations. In “Love in a Fallen City,” this jarring shift happens when the Japanese suddenly attack Hong Kong, throwing the plot of innocuous romantic comedy into disarray, putting an ironic twist on the whole affair. Liusu and Liuyuan do marry, after all, but their betrothal (and therefore their courtship) is partly emptied of its narrative and ethical significance by the unexpected intrusion of the “real world” into their romantic journey. Walking down the road after the worst of the bombing, talking of their marriage plans, the couple comes upon a scene of devastation: “They walked into town together. Where the road took a sharp turn, the land suddenly fell away—in front of them was only empty space, a damp, pale gray sky. . . . Liuyuan stopped in his tracks to stare. Feeling the terror of this ordinary scene, he shivered” (166). This is not a conventional end to a love story. Liusu’s “victory” in her quest for a suitable marriage becomes indistinguishable from Hong Kong’s defeat: “Did a great city fall so that she could be vindicated? Countless thousands of people dead, countless thousands of people suffering.” As the story draws to a close, the narrator sums it up as “a tale too desolate for words” (167). Chang’s cosmopolitan viewpoint, therefore, is capable of registering both the subtle and the blatant effects of imperialism on Chinese culture. Sometimes, she reflects on China’s semicolonial status at an angle, by studying Hong Kong from the perspective of Shanghai. Elsewhere, as in her unexpected depiction of the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong, she considers the effects on Chinese people of a war waged by two foreign, imperialist powers. Even though these stories are set largely in one place, and tend to focus on Chinese characters, they are framed by an awareness of how distant places and events can shape even the most intimate relationships.

Concluding summary Pheng Cheah, in his reading of Kant, says that the antonym of the term cosmopolitanism “is not nationalism but statism” (Cosmopolitics, 22). By this, he partly means that ethical problems ought to be decided by a global standard of right and wrong, a perspective that supersedes the state. A true cosmopolitan, in his account, believes that the state cannot be the ultimate arbiter of

88

Modernism in a Global Context

ethical questions. The modernist writers considered in this chapter are not political philosophers, like Kant, but they share with him a sense that aesthetic and ethical questions ought to be settled by international communities, not regulated by individual states. Cosmopolitanism, in a sense, is a convenient name by which a variety of modernist writers imagine their connections to other places and other intellectuals. In considering the cosmopolitanism of Barnes, Chang, Cunard, Larsen, and Woolf, this chapter also acknowledges that the concept of cosmopolitanism may have special meaning for women, affording them a comparative framework in which to reflect on gendered inequalities, racism, and imperialism. The advantage and disadvantage of cosmopolitanism is that it can be experienced as an individual. For someone like Cunard, it allowed her to create a vast network of intellectuals who do not necessarily share direct links with one another. For a writer such as Barnes, cosmopolitanism could also be a condition of relative isolation, self-imposed or otherwise. As we shall see in the next chapter, the most prominent and public transnational cultural institutions of the twentieth century tend to be dominated by men. Cosmopolitanism, by contrast, is a more general set of attitudes and practices, and therefore is open to a wider range of people.

Note 1

See also the essay collection Cosmopolitanism, edited by Carol A. Breckenridge, Shelden Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. It emphasizes the amorphous qualities of the concept. In “The Contradictions in Cultural Studies,” Benita Parry uses the term “postcolonial cosmopolitanism” (41).

4 Cultural institutions

For about a century, scholars have been tracking the urban geographies of modernist writing. Andrei Bely’s St. Petersburg; Thomas Mann’s Venice; Charles Baudelaire’s Paris; James Joyce’s Dublin; John Dos Passos’s New York City; Virginia Woolf’s London: these are a few of modernism’s iconic locations. London, New York, and Paris occupy a privileged place in many accounts of modernism. Scholars have thickened the record by showing that modernism was sustained, both imaginatively and materially, by large cities where artists, journals, theaters, and patrons could operate. Influential studies of the interwar period have diagrammed modernism’s key networks and described important cultural institutions by charting these territories (Benstock; Bourdieu; Lottman; Rainey). Metropolitan modernism was supported by an array of artistic spaces housed in these large cities. Specialty book retailers, precariously funded publishers and magazines, flamboyant patrons, lively salons, fringe theaters, cramped studios, and dedicated audiences, all clustered around a few towering artistic geniuses. The push to globalize modernism has complicated this narrative in two different ways. First, there have been efforts to recognize London and Paris, in particular, as capitals of vast, disintegrating empires (Casanova; Williams, “Metropolitan”). These cities were able to become centers of cultural production during the modernist period, in part, because they were in a good position to attract talent from an enormous, crumbling imperial system. Being able to count on contributions from an international roster of intellectuals greatly enhanced metropolitan power and prestige. Colonial writers were an integral part of London’s intellectual community in the first half of the century (Mulk Raj Anand, C. L. R. James, Katherine Mansfield,

90

Modernism in a Global Context

Una Marson, Olive Schreiner, and M. J. Tambimuttu). Paris was even more successful in recruiting innovative artists from both British and French empires (and from the United States). “Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic,” a recent special issue of Modern Fiction Studies (2005), rightly suggests that France drew black writers from within and beyond its imperial regions—and, given its prominence in anglophone literary histories, we must also note that Paris was for much of the century able to attract intellectuals from beyond its zone of linguistic dominance. Documenting the metropolitan experiences of colonial artists has allowed scholars to diversify modernism, recognizing how the movement has been enriched by contact with many cultures through migrant intellectuals. Second, indigenous or non-metropolitan modernisms have become an important part of the story. Every region, if not every nation, has hosted its own variant of modernism. Strong claims have been staked in Brazil (Madureira; Read), East Africa (Amoko; Desai; Kalliney, “Modernism”), Southeast Asia (Lee; Shih): these areas, peripheral in earlier accounts of modernism, have attracted scholars who have attempted to decenter or resituate modernism, uncoupling it from the major (read: Western) metropolises. The bigger challenge to metropolitan hegemony, however, has come from scholars who have attempted to do for literary history what Dipesh Chakrabarty attempted to do for history writ large: provincialize Europe. This chapter focuses on some of the cultural institutions that have been integral to modernism in both its metropolitan and nonmetropolitan forms. Black Atlantic and European modernisms happen simultaneously, we ought to note in passing; “peripheral” versions of modernism did not simply copy examples that first prevailed in metropolitan regions. This chapter examines a variety of cultural institutions, showing that modernist systems of production were geographically dispersed. Modernism becomes a global cultural movement through the establishment of networks across the world—institutions that have primarily, though not exclusively, served the needs of metropolitan cultural production. Although Paris and London play important roles in this account, their dominance is far from absolute. These cities relied heavily on contributions from colonial and postcolonial intellectuals. And we shall see that not all modernist cultural networks rotate around a metropolitan hub. Many such cultural institutions directly challenge the dominance of the old imperial centers.

Cultural institutions

91

In fact, it seems likely that metropolitan cultural institutions actively benefited from increased political autonomy in colonized regions. Even as imperialism was successfully challenged by colonial peoples, modernism continued to thrive by adapting to and accommodating anticolonial movements. Sometimes, after formal imperialism ended, metropolitan institutions diverted resources away from colonial and semicolonial regions. The Man Booker Prize is an excellent example of this process: for decades, it allowed a limited number of writers from formerly colonial regions to gain access to London’s literary star circuit, and the award has been most effective in enhancing London’s status as a global literary center. Not all modernism’s cultural institutions were geared for metropolitan benefit, however. The 1966 World Festival of Black Arts [Festival mondial des arts nègres] in Dakar was an explicit attempt to give legitimacy to a new national capital as well as to provide a venue for artists from marginalized places to transmit their ideas. The kind of modernism on display at Dakar did not need to be legitimized by the authorities in Paris and London. This chapter uses a fairly capacious definition of cultural institutions. After a review of the secondary literature on the question, it turns to the little magazine, the archetypical space of modernist aesthetics. The creation of online databases such as The International Dada Archive and Modernist Journals Project has given wide access to complete print runs of a number of modernist periodicals. The little magazine is a truly global family, with innumerable offspring across the continents. Knowing a bit about the history of the little magazine will tell us a lot about the modernist movement as a global phenomenon. Examining independent, highbrow publishers—such as Gallimard, Grove Press, and Heinemann—will be equally revealing. It is common to think of independent publishers as small, regional outlets, attached to very local audiences, but a brief survey shows that they were instrumental in recruiting writers from around the world and in bringing modernist aesthetics to international audiences. International conferences, festivals, and organizations have been important venues for fusing anticolonial politics and modernist aesthetics. In the first half of the century, a number of Pan-African conferences (1900–45), the establishment of international PEN (originally Poets, Essayists, Novelists, founded 1921), and the Popular Front (1934–9) galvanized intellectuals in the fight against

92

Modernism in a Global Context

fascism and imperialism. After the Second World War, the first Black Writers and Artists Congress [Congrès international des écrivains et artistes noirs] meeting in Paris in 1956, and a subsequent meeting in Rome in 1959, organized by the Présence Africaine group, drew on the political tradition of the Pan-African conferences as well as the aesthetic traditions of the négritude movement. This inspired similar ventures in anglophone regions: the legendary African Writers of English Expression Conference at Makerere in 1962 as well as the less celebrated Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS) meeting in Mona, University of West Indies, in 1971. The 1966 World Festival of Black Arts represents the high point of this trend, a global tribute to black Atlantic cultural achievements hosted by a founding member of the négritude movement and leading Senegalese statesman, Léopold Sédar Senghor. Contrary to the old wisdom that anticolonial politics and modernist art do not mix, these meetings show strong links between these two distinct projects at mid-century. Finally, this chapter turns to cultural prizes, the now-ubiquitous mechanism for consecrating aesthetic objects and for attempting to bring administrative order to the anarchic field of cultural production. Artistic competitions have been instrumental in the global proliferation of modernist aesthetics (English). Awards such as the Nobel and Man Booker Prizes have helped bring global recognition to a select pantheon of writers. Such awards have displaced or superseded various national agencies—the royal academies and state cultural organizations, for example—as methods of consecrating individual artists.

Pierre Bourdieu and his interlocutors It may seem counterintuitive to structure a review of the secondary literature on global cultural institutions around the work of Bourdieu. After all, his version of reflexive sociology, in texts such as The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field [Les Régles de l’art] (1992; English 1996) and The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (1993), does not seem recognizably transnational in scope. In fact, for a person with research interests in North African ethnography, Bourdieu’s work on aesthetic practitioners and cultural intermediaries is aggressively

Cultural institutions

93

parochial—if due to his restricting himself to French (largely Parisian, in fact) publishers, galleries, museums, and universities we can call his perspective parochial. To adapt a quip from Franco Moretti, a training in Bourdieu’s methods shows us Paris’s Left Bank, with occasional forays into Greenwich Village and other richly endowed cultural precincts, but not much more than that. At first glance, Bourdieu does not seem like a promising lead for scholars hoping to branch out from metropolitan writing or to challenge metropolitan dominance. Yet in another sense Bourdieu is the most informative place to begin such a discussion. It is not simply that his work has directly influenced some of the most foremost practitioners of global literary criticism (Casanova; English; Moretti). Bourdieu’s contention that cultural institutions are relatively autonomous (of economic practices and coercive state structures) has been tacitly accepted by scholars who propose to track the movement of literature across national borders. Starting in the interwar period, and becoming much more pronounced since then, cultural institutions serve as intermediaries between distinct economic and political zones. The whole notion that modernist literary culture transcends national boundaries depends, at some level, on the assumption that modernism’s literary practices are not somehow limited to national markets—that art and literature have a degree of autonomy from national space. To put it succinctly, Bourdieu’s work implies that twentieth-century artists and intellectuals are as likely to share attitudes with one another—as cultural workers—as they are to share attitudes with people from their region of origin. The implication here is that modernist writers from Brazil, France, and Nigeria often think of themselves as part of an international guild of artists first, and as members of national constituencies only after that. A sociological approach to cultural institutions brings this dynamic into focus. Additionally, Bourdieu’s writing has influenced those least invested in his geographies, methods, and terminology. This is especially true of scholars who argue that some modernist networks were intertwined with emancipatory political projects, such as feminism. Groundbreaking feminist studies of modernism tend to refuse the male-dominated networks of modernism theorized by Bourdieu (Benstock; B. K. Scott). Likewise, efforts to reinsert colonial intellectuals into the narrative of modernism and metropolitan

94

Modernism in a Global Context

literatures are not in direct dialogue with Bourdieu’s work (Edwards; Innes; Low and Wynne-Davies). Upon further reflection, however, it is clear that these efforts to expand the gendered and racial basis of a modernist canon stand less as challenges to the idea of modernism than as productive corrections to Bourdieu’s general system. If anything, the expansion of modernist studies’ horizons— discussed in detail in Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers’s introductory volume to this series—has revitalized the field (see also Mao and Walkowitz). Bourdieu’s methods have taken surprisingly well to this globalized environment, where closer attention to institutions helps explain precisely how literature moves around the world. For our purposes here, Bourdieu’s key insight is that the restricted field of cultural production is relatively (though not absolutely) autonomous. Autonomous of what? In The Field of Cultural Production, Bourdieu argues that the “restricted” field of cultural production—translated loosely as high modernism and the avantgarde—seeks autonomy from the mass market, partly by demanding a high degree of individuality or originality. Heteronomous art (art of low cultural status), at the other extreme, is produced on a formula, for entirely commercial reasons; the identity of the artist is irrelevant and the originality of the artwork is minimized as much as possible (genre fiction). In The Rules of Art, Bourdieu suggests that the modern artist must also assert freedom from political pressures, too. As he says in his discussion of Émile Zola, the intellectual intervenes in the field of politics “in the name of autonomy.” Paradoxically, the disinterested intellectual fights political battles “with weapons that are not those of politics,” but instead by appealing to higher ethical needs (129, 131). With this version of autonomy in mind, Bourdieu’s model relies on long-standing narratives of modernism. After all, modernism is associated, by conventional wisdom, with affirmations of autonomy from commercial and political pressures. Modernist and avant-garde movements therefore develop their own systems of evaluation, insulating their practitioners from the strict rule of the market. Scholars of modernism have adapted Bourdieu’s insights to document key anglophone networks, showing how a select group of modernist figures carefully managed their careers so as to accumulate cultural capital (Jaffe; Kalliney, Commonwealth; Low; Rainey). Casanova puts Bourdieu’s model—especially his description of cultural production as a site of competition or struggle between

Cultural institutions

95

various agents—to work on an international field. Casanova is much more explicit than Bourdieu in arguing that the major institutions of cultural production (the bodies that confer distinction or prestige upon particular writers or texts) are transnational in their operations, if not in their central administration. For Casanova, Paris was, for well over a century, the unquestioned center of literary judgment; its values were, in effect, the values of the world. Writers from around the globe sought sanctuary in the French capital and affirmation from its authorities. Paris becomes, in her account, the world court of literary taste, the center of an emerging global literary culture. By attracting talent from around the world, the city functions as an antidote to national literary academies, mired in parochialism of one sort or another. Writers covet consecration in Paris much more than an award by any strictly national body; in fact, Casanova says that writers often seek refuge in Paris from tyrannical national authorities. In The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (2005), James English shares with Casanova an interest in Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology, but his approach is far more geographically decentralized. This reflects the book’s focus on cultural prizes, many of which challenge national cultural authorities. Some high-profile literary awards work well on Casanova’s more restrictive model. Historically, the Booker Prize and the Prix Goncourt, for instance, both draw on an international pool of entrants, but the prizes themselves tend to serve the needs of the people conferring the prize—that is, London’s and Paris’s publishing industries. But as English points out, many prizes do not necessarily work on the strict metropolitan-periphery axis proposed in Casanova’s book. The Nobel is one such prize; its position at the undisputed pinnacle of cultural awards does not necessarily turn the Swedish Academy into the dominant arbiter of literary taste; the Nobel often confirms the consensus opinion, following trends rather than establishing them. With this difference in mind, English’s project is a bit more sanguine about the chances of writers from marginalized regions and groups securing global recognition. In Casanova’s account, the marginalized writer must appeal to the authorities in Paris (or more recently, London or New York); for English, the international prize circuit makes a more diverse repertoire of strategies available to writers from historically subjugated groups or territories (see also Brouillette).

96

Modernism in a Global Context

The Economy of Prestige provides a productive link between Bourdieu’s methods, which, from one vantage point, privilege a very particular brand of intellectual, and various scholars who have broadened the racial and gender dynamics of modernism. Bonnie Kime Scott’s introduction to The Gender of Modernism (1990) contains a well-known social networking diagram with about fifty of modernism’s leading names, each connected to other names by a series of crisscrossing lines. As Scott points out, there are many ways to read the picture; connections cluster densely around Eliot, Joyce, Pound, and Woolf, which indicates “in part that this study takes off from inherited formulations” (10). Some women are relatively isolated, perhaps reflecting their marginalization, but other women are surprisingly central—Nancy Cunard, H. D., Jessie Fauset, Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein, for different reasons, all occupy hubs of lively networks. As with Scott’s collection, Shari Benstock’s work might be said to dispute Bourdieu’s theories of Parisian modernism, but for the fact that it leaves Bourdieu’s basic physical geographies intact. A major insight of these projects—now virtually uncontested—is that women who were vital parts of the modernist moment were retroactively erased from the literary histories of the period (by legendary books like Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era [1971]). Salvaging some women from unjust obscurity— notably Cunard, Zora Neale Hurston, Larsen, Katherine Mansfield, and Jean Rhys—has significantly widened the international dimensions of modernist studies. Over the last twenty-five years, there are dozens of scholars who replicate what Benstock, Scott, Rita Felski, Susan Stanford Friedman, Jane Marcus, and other feminist scholars have done in the field of global modernisms (Arnold; Dalleo; Emery; Gillies, Sword, and Yao; Madureira; Ranasinha; Walmsley). None of these scholars adopts Bourdieu’s methods explicitly, but they all document specific networks of writers and artists. In these accounts, modernism is not simply an aesthetics or a set of attitudes, but an interrelated set of movements facilitated by personal connections and specific intellectual traditions. As I turn to case studies of little magazines, independent publishers, conferences, and prizes that participated in the institutionalization of modernism on a global scale, it will become clear that the question of autonomy was not confined to the Parisian interwar expatriate scene. Writers from colonial and postcolonial regions were equally concerned that their work find autonomous spaces of production

Cultural institutions

97

and consumption. Both metropolitan and non-metropolitan writers searched for autonomy from repressive national authorities and capitalist markets for art. When metropolitan and non-metropolitan writers came into conflict in the context of literary institutions, as they sometimes did, they tended to disagree not on the need for autonomy, but on how such a state of affairs might be achieved. Internationalizing proved a very common way for writers to protect themselves against nationalist and imperialist pressures.

Little magazines Dada provides an exemplary instance of an avant-garde movement with international aspirations and a decentralized structure. Unlike some other avant-garde movements, such as its successor, surrealism, Dada spread quickly (and perished almost as quickly) because it was a very loose network of performers, artists, poets, and impresarios with no clear agreement on the movement’s objectives and methods. Begun during the First World War in Zürich by an assortment of European castaways, most of them finding refuge from the conflict in neutral Switzerland, Dada quickly set up outposts all over the world. It is common to think of Dada largely as a movement of visual and performance artists—it is difficult to forget the bizarre cardboard getup Hugo Ball wore during an early show at Cabaret Voltaire—but as Emily Hage points out, the form of the little magazine was at the core of the Dada project. In Dada (1917–21), 291 (1915–16), and 391 (1917–24), editors such as Tristan Tzara, Alfred Stieglitz, and Francis Picabia, respectively, used print culture to challenge nationalist orthodoxies. As Hage argues, the form of the little magazine “was uniquely suited to fostering [international] connections at a time of censorship as well as restricted travel and exhibition opportunities” (34). During the early part of a war that mobilized nationalist sentiments, small reviews could travel in a way that artists, performers, and plastic artworks could not. Ball used his own Dada journal, Cabaret Voltaire, to announce his internationalist commitments by emphasizing the heterogeneity of the group and by distancing himself from nationalist warmongering: “It is necessary to clarify the intentions of this cabaret. It is its aim to remind the world that there are people of independent

98

Modernism in a Global Context

minds—beyond war and nationalism—who live for different ideals.”1 Ball’s appeal to intellectual autonomy—independent minds, he says—is indistinguishable from his anti-nationalism, one seeming to guarantee the other. Citing French and German editions of the magazine, Debbie Lewer says, “The publication was intended more for international than for local dissemination” (1041). Although Cabaret Voltaire would last only one issue, it and other Dadaist journals blend avant-garde aesthetics with anti-nationalist politics. Following Bourdieu, this fusion of unconventional, shocking, even bellicose aesthetic practices with anti-nationalist politics might be interpreted as a distinctively avant-garde strategy. Symbolic attacks on recognized centers of taste and distinction, especially the national academies—prominent in the manifestos and performances of Dada, surrealism, and many other avantgarde movements—go hand-in-hand with attacks on a nationalist political agenda. The formation of Dada during the First World War only made these latent tendencies more apparent. If Bourdieu’s general model applies (it seems to explain the oppositional stance of Dada), anti-nationalist politics and unconventional aesthetics ought to converge in the space of the little magazine. This helps us understand why Bourdieu sees the little magazine as both highly autonomous (from commerce) and also far removed from the centers of artistic legitimation: its practitioners reject both the lure of the marketplace and the possibility of consecration by national, bourgeois authorities.2 The little magazine invests its resources in an internationally dispersed, hyper-literate audience: a risky strategy, but one that can pay out (in symbolic capital) over the long haul. Dadaist journals are a textbook case of little magazines that ground claims of aesthetic creativity in articulations of freedom from national orthodoxies. Despite the mobility and heterogeneity of Dada, we should not overestimate its radical potential where questions of race and imperialism are concerned. In one of the earliest performances at Cabaret Voltaire, Tristan Tzara and Richard Huelsenbeck composed a program of Negro Songs [Chants nègres] out of ethnographic material collected in libraries, which they attempted to recite in the original African languages, accompanied by rhythmic beating of a drum. Over the next several performances, wild gesticulations were added to the mix (Gale, 50–2). Issue 12 (February 1916) of the New York-based Dada journal, 291, tried to document the relevance of

Cultural institutions

99

African art and culture to the movement. The cover photograph features a Congolese mask or sculpture. The lead article, by Marius De Zayas, explains that Picasso’s discovery of “Negro Art” has “reawakened in us a sensibility obliterated by an education” because it is “completely devoid of the faculties of observation and analysis.”3 This tendency to view African art as a primitive resource for rejuvenating an exhausted European aesthetic tradition shows the boundaries of Dada’s internationalism quite clearly. The Dadaists, like many avant-garde groups, were willing to draw on African (and Oceanic) traditions for inspiration, but they did not see themselves in close dialogue with practicing artists from these regions. African sculpture functions much like the raw ethnographic data they used in their live performances—the actual thoughts, theories, and practices of African artists themselves are barely registered in this appropriation of extrinsic materials. The ethnocentrism of Dada and its print culture should lead us neither to the conclusion that the little magazine was so tightly bound with European modernism that its form would prove unsuitable in other places, nor to the conclusion that its content would remain beholden to exotic racial and cultural stereotypes. As research on Black Orpheus (Nigeria) and Transition (Uganda) shows, the basic form of the intellectual/artistic review travels very widely over the course of the century (Benson; Bulson, “Little Magazine”). Against critics who would read the little magazine as a strictly European or North Atlantic affair, Eric Bulson sees a form that observes no national or regional boundaries: A decentered literary universe: that, in effect, is what the little magazine created in the twentieth century. Writers and critics still had their eye on Western models, but literary production and reception were not dependent, finally, on Western capitals or their editors, critics, translators, and readers. In fact, the proliferation of independent little magazines in some of the more isolated regions of the world is evidence enough of their ability to exist in spite of a capitalist system that would exclude or exploit them. (270) By Bulson’s logic, little magazines show us a version of modernism with no North Atlantic core, no peripheral global South. This perspective is diametrically opposed to that of Raymond Williams

100

Modernism in a Global Context

in “Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism.” Williams argues that modernism establishes itself as a false universalism partly by consolidating institutions of cultural production in metropolitan locations, thereby subordinating vast peripheral territories. Bulson, by contrast, argues that little magazines neither seek nor require metropolitan sanction or patronage. If Bulson’s hypothesis is correct—and we shall turn to the counterarguments below—the little magazine is both prototypically modernist (in its form) and not strictly metropolitan (in its geographies of production and circulation). Transition (1961–75; 1991–) provides a handy example of how metropolitan concepts could be requisitioned by colonial and postcolonial intellectuals for their own purposes. Alluding to the famed interwar journal, transition (1927–38), in its title, Rajat Neogy’s magazine also took inspiration from Ulli Beier’s Black Orpheus (1957–75; 1982), which was itself inspired by Présence Africaine and Jean-Paul Sartre. In connecting his new project with the Parisian review, Neogy attached his venture to the journal most associated with modernist proclamations of aesthetic autonomy. In issue 16–17 from 1929, a declaration called “Revolution of the Word” (Boyle et al., 13) appeared in transition, signed by about fifteen figures associated with the magazine. The manifesto begins by proclaiming its resistance to “the hegemony of the banal word,” then goes on to list a dozen decrees, including: 1. The revolution in the English language is an accomplished fact. 2. The imagination in search of a fabulous world is autonomous and unconfined. . . . 6. The literary creator has the right to disintegrate the primal matter of words imposed on him by text-books and dictionaries. 7. He [the writer] has the right to use words of his own fashioning and to disregard existing grammatical and syntactical laws. As transition’s signature manifesto implies, the journal was very eager to advance the modernist doctrine of aesthetic autonomy. Here, editor Eugene Jolas and his cosignatories are proclaiming the autonomy of the word from conventional meaning and usage: writers have the ability to liberate language from the need to observe grammatical and syntactical conventions, even to use words as pure aesthetic instruments without being constrained or

Cultural institutions

101

contaminated by prosaic referents. The journal’s championing of James Joyce’s Work in Progress (later to appear as Finnegans Wake) only seemed to confirm its attachment to aesthetic innovation through autonomous wordplay. Autonomous language also means autonomy from the marketplace: texts written according to these principles are not likely to sell by the tens of thousands. When Neogy named his new publication, therefore, he selfconsciously invoked one of the Left Bank’s little magazines most devoted to aesthetic experimentation during the interwar period. For readers seeking confirmation of this genealogy, Neogy’s prose poem, “7 T ONE  7 E TON,” in the very first issue provides the link. The piece begins seemingly in midsentence: “myriad existences forgotten over a tense past and a vocabulary future full of new cooked meanings meaning meaning but nothing else.” Like the original manifesto in transition, Neogy’s contribution seems to argue that aesthetic language need not contain any referents beyond itself: the space of the review promises to visit a “vocabulary future” in which “new cooked meanings” would signify as a form of “meaning” and “nothing else.” Jolas’s and other modernists’ belief in the utility of a pure aesthetic language clearly informs Neogy’s early issues of Transition, as if the East African outlet wanted authorization from its interwar predecessors. Reaching back to one of the preeminent little magazines of the Left Bank gave Neogy a foundation upon which to build his own edifice. Yet we should be careful not to read Transition as an unimaginative rehearsal of the tired standoff between high art and mass markets supposedly witnessed first in the early decades of the century. Neogy’s attachment to aesthetic liberties in his fledgling journal was complemented by a firm belief in the need for political autonomy for colonized peoples. In interwar Paris, modernists sometimes used the concept of autonomy to mark their indifference to politics, but Neogy believed that avant-garde magazines in decolonizing situations had political obligations. It is evident that Neogy adapted the modernist doctrine of aesthetic autonomy to supplement his belief in the need for autonomous political—and cultural—institutions in the colonial world. The journal’s interest in modernism was a clever appropriation of the doctrine of autonomy: not an expression of apolitical beliefs, but an affirmation of the need for East Africa to develop independent and indigenous political structures and cultural traditions. As Peter

102

Modernism in a Global Context

Benson points out, this is precisely the combination Transition published: in literary matters, a locally inflected form of modernism, invested in aesthetic freedoms; in political matters, an attachment to postcolonial autonomy, civil rights, and democratic debate. The journal’s willingness to criticize both the departing imperialists and the new autocrats of Africa (early issues of Transition censure Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, and Milton Obote on this front) landed Neogy in detention. It would be possible to read this blend of modernist literary experimentation and robust political debate as a contradiction. But it is equally possible to read it instead as a creative refashioning of modernism’s doctrine of autonomy, here adapted to a nascent postcolonial environment. Before considering the role of independent publishers in the history of global modernism, it is worth returning to Bulson’s claim that the little magazine shows us a “decentered literary universe” in action. We now know that Transition and Black Orpheus were part of a network of little magazines supported by the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which turned out to be a front for the CIA (Benson; Rubin; Saunders; Wilford). Encounter (1953–90) was its flagship publication, but the CCF had outlets all over Europe, the Middle East, South America, and the Indian subcontinent. Andrew Rubin and Frances Stonor Saunders argue that these journals were controlled by CIA interests, and were therefore pawns in a neo-imperialist, Cold War game; Bulson argues that they are fully autonomous little magazines. There is no easy way to resolve this debate, but we ought to note that the CIA’s secrecy meant Neogy did not know the source of the funding; it was only after starting the magazine that he began receiving subventions from the CCF, which had all the appearances of a legitimate cultural foundation, like Rockefeller or Ford, with which the CCF sometimes collaborated. More important, Neogy was not afraid to criticize the United States and its allies in the pages of his review. There is no evidence that the CCF or the CIA ever took an active role in managing the content of Transition. Paradoxically, it may be that a foreign benefactor— a covert political agency, at that—actually afforded Neogy more autonomy in the pages of Transition. Studying the form and distribution networks of little magazines shows the geographical expansiveness of modernism (these magazines were everywhere), but it also reminds us that magazines, for all the talk of autonomy, have clear material limitations as well.

Cultural institutions

103

Independent publishers As with little magazines, scholars of modernism have delved into the archives of independent publishers. Lawrence Rainey’s extensive research shows how modernists coexist with capitalist markets for cultural objects, sometimes resorting to publicity stunts to generate wider circulation, sometimes retreating to systems of patronage in which creative workers would rely on beneficent support from wealthy aesthetes. Rainey’s discussion of how Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare and Company managed the production of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) provides a textbook example of modernists straddling the public-private divide with prohibitively expensive, deluxe limited first editions, signed by the author: “When private readers purchased copies of the first edition, they did not just buy a book, they also assumed some of the functions of patrons. . . . But this economic structure merely reflected a broader effort to restore a more direct, less mediated relationship between author and reader” (64). Such networks of patronage, according to Rainey’s account, are embedded in fairly local geographies, bringing artists into social contact with their principal admirers and benefactors. Within this model of restricted cultural production, however, we should not assume that independent publishers were limited to national or subnational forms of production and circulation, as even the Ulysses example demonstrates. Joyce, the expatriate Irishman, published selections of his magnum opus in little magazines on both sides of the Atlantic; the novel was published in full in Paris by Beach, the expatriate US citizen; Joyce was supported financially by the English feminist, Harriet Shaw Weaver; his text was consumed through a network of bookshops, publishers, and collectors in New York, London, and Paris. There was nothing strictly national about this process. Rather, Joyce’s patronage and distribution networks show how a nascent global market for books could bypass national authorities—some of which famously restricted circulation of Ulysses—by fashioning links between major metropolises. Other independent publishers drew on international rosters of talent and frequently created transnational systems of distribution that far exceeded the types documented by Rainey. The French publisher Gallimard is widely credited with bringing a range of non-francophone writers to global audiences. William Faulkner and Henry Miller had but slight international reputations before

104

Modernism in a Global Context

Gallimard translated their work to great critical acclaim in France. The legendary Roger Caillois, who was trapped in Buenos Aires by the outbreak of the Second World War, is said to have spent the conflict learning Spanish and coming to know the leading figures of Spanish American literature. During his exile, he became involved with the journal Sur and with its founder, Victoria Ocampo. Under the auspices of Sur, he published Lettres Francaises, which included the first French translations of Borges’s stories (Steenmeijer, 145). In 1951, he started the Croix du Sud list at Gallimard, making it the leading international publisher of the Boom (when Latin American literature received significant international attention, culminating in the Nobel for Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez). Caillois’s influence was so great that the French prize for Latin American fiction was named after him. As with Transition, the Latin American Boom was affected by the political geographies of the Cold War, too: English translations of Spanish American writers were frequently fitted into broader cultural diplomacy programs directed at hispanophone regions (Cohn). Cultural diplomacy also played a role as metropolitan British publishers adapted to a postimperial world. Heinemann, with its African Writers Series, offers an example of a publisher that excelled in attracting the best young African writers and selling those books to new markets. What began as a fairly conventional family publisher in 1890, in England, became by the 1960s the biggest seller of anglophone African writing. The company managed this feat by shrewdly capitalizing on global political and educational change: decolonization, coupled with the rapid construction of secondary schools and universities in newly independent regions. With the formation of independent governments across a decolonizing empire, and demand for training in English growing rather than weakening, in the 1950s Heinemann executives identified subSaharan Africa in general, and Nigeria in particular, as a promising new market for their educational department. As series founder Alan Hill tells the story, formal decolonization was crucial to Heinemann’s success. In describing a 1956 trip through the British Commonwealth, Hill imagines a new type of empire rising from the ashes of the old: Three days in Bombay, spent visiting bookshops, schools, the University and Education Department, were enough to convince

Cultural institutions

105

me of the pervasive strength of the English language. The India which the British soldiers and administrators had lost was being regained by British educators and publishers. (93) It is possible to see an old form of paternalism in Hill’s comments, which describe the astute publisher of educational materials in English as a new imperial administrator. But Hill also operates with the knowledge that political decolonization would likely strengthen, rather than weaken, the linguistic and educational bonds between metropolitan Britain and its former colonial territories. Heinemann capitalized on communications channels that were created during formal imperialism, but it also published books that celebrated political independence for African peoples. Heinemann’s masterstroke was adding new fiction to the mix. In addition to selling conventional textbooks, Heinemann signed and marketed a whole generation of African writers, most notably Chinua Achebe, who served as series editor for a decade. Aside from novelists and poets, the series also brought out books by political heroes, such as Steve Biko, Amílcar Cabral, Kenneth Kaunda, Jomo Kenyatta, Nelson Mandela, and Senghor. Heinemann monopolized the list of assigned texts well into the 1980s (Lindfors). Some have read this as evidence of cultural imperialism (Huggan)—a metropolitan publisher acquiring the so-called raw materials (the writers and their manuscripts), manufacturing the finished product in the metropolitan center, exporting the finished product for consumption by ex-colonial subjects, and repatriating profits back to the imperial center—and Hill’s own comments about an empire of English educators and publishers certainly reinforce such a reading. But it is equally important to note that the African Writers Series was an emphatic supporter of anticolonial literature, helping a large number of politically active writers reach like-minded educators and students across the continent, and eventually across the world. It is difficult to read Achebe or Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, two stars in the series, as somehow apologists for or complicit with imperialism. Rather than regard Heinemann as a kind of carpetbagger—imperial profiteer on anticolonial literature—it makes more sense to regard the publisher as ideologically affiliated with anticolonial movements even as it capitalized on communications networks forged during imperialism. In the case of the African Writers Series, the publisher’s channels of distribution and promotion gave it distinct advantages

106

Modernism in a Global Context

over competitors (metropolitan and African alike), but we should not then assume that the series is strictly imperialist in outlook. Heinemann’s ability to attract the best writers and to reach the largest audiences depended on ideological solidarity with anticolonial movements across the region. In the United States, Grove was the publisher that took best advantage of the geopolitical turbulence of the 1960s: anticolonial movements abroad, civil rights marches, antiwar protests, and the sexual revolution domestically. The independent publisher was closely tied to developments in university culture, much as Heinemann was (Glass). It used a diverse range of strategies to become one of the most influential publishers on college campuses in the 1960s: cheap paperback editions; a house little magazine, The Evergreen Review, helping the press reach younger, nonconformist audiences; a deep list of avant-garde writers; an equally deep list of countercultural and revolutionary thinkers; and a physical location in Greenwich Village, which provided easy access to leading universities, to the East Coast intellectual circuit, and to New York’s off-Broadway scene. The massive influx of students and the democratization of access to universities in the 1960s were key demographic components of Grove’s success. Although Grove’s principal market was the United States, it made its name partly by bringing overseas figures to North American campuses. European writers who established themselves in Paris (Samuel Beckett; Jean Genet; Eugène Ionesco; Alain RobbeGrillet) were headliners, but the press also developed an identity as a publisher of writers and revolutionaries from the decolonizing world. Grove’s partner in this part of the business was UNESCO. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Grove cultivated a strong relationship with UNESCO and Gallimard—mainly through Roger Caillois, who began working for UNESCO in 1948—giving Grove the inside track on emerging writers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America who were gaining notice in Paris. Japan’s Kenzaburo Oe, Mexico’s Octavio Paz, Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges, and Nigeria’s Amos Tutuola were some of the more recognizable figures to appear in Grove’s catalog. Adding this roster to their interest in the European avant-garde, Grove became the first US publisher to establish a legitimate claim “as a source of affordable access to the latest developments in world literature” (Glass, 37). Grove’s simultaneous publication of a domestic and foreign avant-garde

Cultural institutions

107

(Beats  existentialism  Boom) gave the impression that readers could track global literary trends in something approaching real time—a new experience in the United States, at least.

Festivals and conferences In addition to little magazines and publishers, festivals and conferences became important mechanisms for internationalizing modernist aesthetics after the Second World War. UNESCO sponsored many such events, most notably Dakar’s World Festival of Black Arts, hosted by Senghor, cofounder of the négritude movement, Senegalese president, and later Académie française member. Senghor asked his old friend, Aimé Césaire, another founding participant in the négritude movement and statesman in his own right, to be the festival’s artistic director. The partnership between UNESCO and a head of state was a piece of straightforward cultural diplomacy: Senghor was interested in suturing his credentials as a global literary figure to his political status, while UNESCO offered its own endorsement of artistic and political autonomy in the decolonizing world. France and Senegal combined to offer state patronage of the gathering, as if to prove that cultural events could transcend the political barriers thrown up by European imperialism. There were a few important precedents for the Dakar Conference. The 1956 and 1959 Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris and Rome, respectively, were groundbreaking events. Sponsored by Présence Africaine (est. 1947), these meetings attracted a wide range of leading black intellectuals: Senghor and Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Jacques Alexis, Jean Price-Mars, George Lamming, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright all made appearances. Journal editor Alioune Diop played the host, publishing conference proceedings in his magazine. It is important to note that these were bilingual affairs, conducted in French and English. On the one hand, we could point to use of these languages as an indication of the complex relationship between the discourse of cultural liberation—these meetings were anti-imperialist in character—and the continued use of metropolitan languages and geographies as mutually accessible meeting-points. On the other hand, we could also note the selfconscious internationalism of these efforts. Even nationalist leaders, such as Senghor, believed that the work of liberating cultural

108

Modernism in a Global Context

production from metropolitan domination required multinational and multilingual cooperation. The 1962 African Writers of English Expression meeting, at Kampala’s Makerere University, was conceptually indebted to the meetings in Paris and Rome, even attracting some of the same attendees. Although the event was international, with participants from all over anglophone Africa as well as the Caribbean, the United States, and the United Kingdom, the exclusivity of English limited the impact of the meeting in non-anglophone regions. The Makerere Conference is perhaps best remembered for initiating the language debate in African letters. In a stinging review of the conference in Transition, Obiajunwa Wali claims it reveals that African literature in English “is merely a minor appendage in the main stream of European literature” with “no means of self-enrichment” (13). Internationally acclaimed figures such as Achebe and Ngũgĩ would later contribute to the discussion, the former to defend his use of English on both pragmatic and theoretical grounds, the latter hoping that African writers could enrich their indigenous languages in the way that Shakespeare and Milton had helped build the literary resources available in English (prefiguring Casanova). Implicitly, we can read the conference as an attack on the preeminence of French as well; négritude was roundly criticized by some Makerere participants as an unworkable aesthetic theory for the postcolonial situation. The festival in Dakar took something from both the Makerere and Présence Africaine conferences. It seems likely that Diop hatched the idea for a festival on African soil as far back as the Rome Conference in 1959. From the Paris and Rome meetings, the Dakar event retained bilingualism and an attachment to négritude. Senghor’s opening address, as if in direct response to the Makerere meeting, defended négritude as the most viable aesthetics of the diaspora (“Defense”). From the Makerere Conference, the Dakar gathering emphasized postcolonial Africa as the natural geographic home of an international aesthetic movement. As John Povey points out in a review of the festival, “The title was very significant because it indicated the total nature of the concept. It was not merely an African Festival; all nations, all continents were to be joined by their acknowledged allegiance to a common racial heritage” (103). With the imprimatur of UNESCO and the cosponsorship of former imperial powers, enlightened African statesmen could help repatriate black cultural production.

Cultural institutions

109

The Dakar festival was opulent in comparison to the conferences that preceded it. Lasting over three weeks, with a surfeit of performances, screenings, exhibits, ceremonies, and presentations, the Dakar showpiece must have satisfied even the most gluttonous cultural consumers. As Davidson Nicol comments in a tribute to Diop, the difference between Paris 1956 and Dakar 1966 could not be explained simply by the passage of time: By then, many of the band who had gathered for the first congress ten years earlier, were now back permanently in Africa, holding positions of responsibility. That decade had been memorable and more had happened then than during the past hundred years. About twenty African states had become independent and intellectuals had either become Cabinet Ministers or were being jailed by their fellow Africans instead of by the British or French. (8–9) The contingent, antiestablishment ethos of the Paris meeting had given way to the sponsorship of UNESCO and cooperation between an independent Senegal and its former imperial overlords. Many of the students, exiles, and itinerant intellectuals who attended the Paris meeting had assumed official positions in the postcolonial state. Although it is tempting to conclude that new forms of cultural diplomacy were merely a way to channel a cultural revolution into postcolonial state building, Nicol’s final salvo reminds us that not all dissidents were fully incorporated and empowered: new rulers in Africa are not unwilling to silence their quarrelsome compatriots for reasons of political expediency. The relative status of modernist aesthetics and European culture was ambiguous at the festival, reflecting the complex, multinational sponsorship of and participation in the event. On the one hand, Senghor opened the proceedings by naming himself “the old militant of Négritude,” describing his objective as host of the historic event as a form of cultural husbandry: “If we have assumed the terrible responsibility of organizing this Festival, it is for the Defense and Illustration of Négritude” (5). This pronouncement might be seen as an affirmation of both modernist aesthetics and cultural nationalism, with the implication that the autonomy of art can bolster the autonomy of the postcolonial state. The list of participants and prize winners roughly bears

110

Modernism in a Global Context

out this preference for modernist aesthetics influenced by the Euro-American tradition: Robert Hayden, Orlando Patterson, Ousmane, Wole Soyinka, and Ngũgĩ were all awarded prizes (Derek Walcott an honorable mention). Elimo Njau, a modernist artist from Kenya, made the most creative comment on the relationship between European traditions and contemporary African art during the festival. Njau appeared on stage for a presentation in a “handsome tribal robe,” then suddenly ripped it off, exposing a tie and collared shirt beneath (described by Povey). A large exhibition of contemporary, modernist-influenced art was on display throughout the festival. On the other hand, there was a competing exhibition of “neotraditional” art, and a number of “folk” performances of drama and music during the festival. These displays proved controversial: many African intellectuals believed that faux-primitive, folksy, or neotraditional art is part of the colonialist tradition, produced for export to European collectors, tourists, and ethnographic museums. Abdallah Stouky, a Moroccan who attended and reported on the festival, argued that these offensive exhibits were there simply to satisfy French sponsors and white visitors: For African artists and intellectuals, it is imperative to avoid the trap of childish aestheticism exemplified by André Malraux, writer and French minister of culture, who regrets that African artists can no longer reproduce the wonderful masks of the past. The pertinent response to the French minister is that nobody ever considered asking European artists to reproduce the no less beautiful cathedrals of the Middle Ages. (Stouky, 173) Stouky’s acerbic remarks on the inclusion of “primitive” African art in the program show the ironies and complexities of European modernist legacies as they were adapted and creatively reshaped by various postcolonial artists and cultural agents. Stouky, in effect, defends one version of modernist aesthetics (contemporary African artists who use abstract forms and borrow freely from Euro-American and African techniques) against another version of modernism, mired in exotic stereotypes about “tribal” Africa.4 The point in observing how these different components of modernist aesthetics combine is not that anticolonial intellectuals expose, for the very first time, the contradictions embedded therein.

Cultural institutions

111

Nor is the point to label Senghor a proxy for the French, simply doing their bidding by satisfying the exotic hankerings of white people. Rather, it is to note that the complex form of global participation secured through the festival leads, inevitably, to disagreements of this sort. It is primarily after the world wars, when global sponsorship of cultural institutions became more common, that the contradictory basis of modernist aesthetics could be brought into the open. In an earlier moment—say in one of Dada’s little magazines—the international but not fully global character of the avant-garde movement means that Hugo Ball or Marius De Zayas never had to test their ideas about African art among African audiences. As some cultural institutions became more fully global and culturally complex—freely crossing the old metropolitan-colonial divide, for instance—disagreements of this sort became an endemic feature of aesthetic evaluations. In one respect, the organizers’ decision to claim neotraditional art as part of a postcolonial legacy reflects a pragmatic choice: the desire to add any available resources to the canon of African cultural practices. But as Stouky and other skeptics are liable to point out, including materials deemed exotic by white people has the potential to dilute, rather than enhance, any claims of cultural autonomy for a resurgent black Atlantic. The debate is one of the cornerstones of postcolonial studies.5 As we shall see in our examination of cultural prizes, nearly every postcolonial writer who wins global acclaim has been accused of selling out to metropolitan audiences and critics.

Cultural awards The Dakar festival also differed from its forerunners at Paris, Rome, and Makerere in its adoption of the cultural prize as a way to organize an array of cultural forces. Independent international authorities (such as the sponsors, UNESCO), the postcolonial state and its president, the state’s bilateral partners (such as the French culture ministry), and a disparate group of artists and judges were all part of the mix at Dakar. The awarding of prizes helped the festival’s organizers articulate the complex relationship between local, national, and international concerns at the event. The literary prizes were segregated into French and English categories, with winners in drama, fiction, and poetry. As English points out,

112

Modernism in a Global Context

prizes are one of the most effective ways to convert or negotiate between different types of capital: economic, political, symbolic, and cultural forms of capital were all being channeled through the festival’s award structure. Moreover, the prizes were part of a strategy to coordinate “symbolic pricing” between different evaluative networks or regions: local, national, and international agents, each with their own preferences and biases and standards, agreed to structure their interactions through the system of awards. Senghor himself presided over the ceremonies, taking himself out of consideration for the prizes. The scene of Senghor, dean and major patron of African letters, bestowing an award on Soyinka, up-and-coming dramatist and later outspoken critic of négritude, foreshadowed their competition to be named first Nobel Laureate in Literature from Africa. As English relates the story, Senghor, who in 1984 was appointed to the French Academy (on which the Swedish Academy, custodians of the Nobel, is based), was considered by many the favorite to bring a Nobel in literature to the continent. Senghor could never quite secure enough support, in part because “the rhetoric of authenticité and specifically black-nationalist identity—which had served as such a powerful weapon during the period of anticolonial struggle and in the early years of independence—was, further on in the postcolonial period, rapidly losing its cultural and political utility” (English, 300). Senghor’s early adoption of what might be called a form of African essentialism, or what JeanPaul Sartre labeled “anti-racist racism”—Senghor’s belief that people of African descent are more intuitive and more artistic, but less bound by analytical thought, than their white, European counterparts—became something of a liability in the era of globalized cultural production, in which some version of liberal humanism or cultural relativism prevails. Moreover, Senghor’s status as a national and nationalist figure might have hurt his chances if the Nobel was becoming more proactive in projecting itself as a truly global device, as English implies in his account. Awarding the honor to Senghor would be sanctioning, in effect, the official choice of the Senegalese state and the French Academy, “nationalist” pressures to which the Nobel was increasingly reluctant to bow. As English puts it, the “global economy of literary prestige . . . often draws upon and makes profitable use of national literary hierarchies and system of value, but without

Cultural institutions

113

simply affirming or reproducing them and at times by discounting them quite radically” (304). If this logic holds, Soyinka’s status both as a political dissident and as a leading critic of Senghor’s négritude might have tipped the balance in his favor. While one would hesitate to say that the Nobel favors only modernist or experimental writers—although both Senghor and Soyinka have strong modernist credentials—the Nobel has supported a good many writers with difficult relationships with the national governments in their place of origin. A large group of Nobel winners since the Second World War, especially those from outside Western Europe and North America, have been dissidents, exiles, or expatriates of one kind or another: Soyinka, Samuel Beckett, Czeslaw Milosz, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky, Nadine Gordimer, Gao Xingjian, V. S. Naipaul, J. M. Coetzee, and Doris Lessing spring to mind. Even if the Nobel has not been an award that endorses modernist aesthetics unambiguously, it does seem willing to perpetuate one of modernism’s powerful myths: that the writer ought not to be an unthinking servant of the state, a booster of nationalist causes. Modernism was full to the brim with exiles and émigrés (Eagleton). Stephen Dedalus’s oft-quoted formulation that the artist’s proper tools would be "silence, exile, and cunning” seems to have retained its relevance into the twentyfirst century (Joyce Portrait, 269). It seems fair to conclude that as the Nobel has expanded its geographical compass, making sure to award the prize to writers outside Western Europe and North America, it has shown a preference for writers who have awkward relationships with their places of origin. Or conversely, as Casanova claims, Nobel candidates officially backed by nationalist institutions often meet resistance from the Swedish Academy (146–53). The concept of aesthetic autonomy from national political authorities has been a basis of globalizing literary culture. This global literary culture, enmeshed in the prize circuit, is not always compatible with national literary judgments, and is sometimes directly opposed to national systems of rating cultural goods. From another angle, however, the difference between Senghor and Soyinka is not so vast. Although Soyinka is a major critic of négritude, famously declaring that a tiger does not proclaim its tigritude, his work uses a complex synthesis of local cultural materials (especially Yoruba mythology, which might be described as a form of folk culture, though certainly not geared for easy export

114

Modernism in a Global Context

to literary tourists) and experimental techniques inspired by various strains of global modernism. Soyinka’s cultural toolkit, therefore, is not markedly different from Senghor’s, with its admixture of local and international resources. And like Senghor, Soyinka is an outspoken anti-imperialist on political matters, although some of his Nigerian critics (most notably Chinweizu) have accused him of being a metropolitan lackey in his aesthetic preferences; Senghor, likewise, has been criticized for being too accommodating of the French in literary matters. When Soyinka was awarded the Nobel, he proudly donned an agbada (a Yoruba costume), announcing that the award is an honor for Africa as a whole and Nigeria in particular. Unlike Elimo Njau at the Dakar festival, however, Soyinka did not rip off his costume, revealing a collared shirt and tie beneath. We could imagine Senghor making many of the same statements had he been awarded the honor. We should not conclude, then, that Soyinka adamantly refused the local or national accolades he received upon winning his prize. As his example shows, the relationship between global and national systems of value can fluctuate, sometimes in unpredictable ways. The tension between local and global marketplaces, with accusations of parochialism on one side and deracinated cosmopolitanism on the other, is by no means restricted to African letters. As Loren Glass notes, the now-defunct International Publishers Prize was instrumental in bringing both Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges to fully global audiences. The prize was effectively a device for translating and leveraging cross-promotion among a consortium of publishers: Grove (United States), Gallimard (France), Weidenfeld and Nicolson (United Kingdom), Einaudi (Italy), Seix Barral (Spain), and Rowohlt (Germany). The award helped establish a working consensus among a group of metropolitan publishers. Timothy Brennan avers this type of expansion has accelerated since the Second World War—and even more dramatically since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989—leading him to conclude that this “new cosmopolitanism drifts into view as an act of avoidance if not hostility and disarticulation toward states in formation” (2). No literary award has been more frequently implicated in these debates than the Booker Prize (now the Man Booker). Launched in the late 1960s, the Booker quickly rose from shaky startup to global behemoth. It is in many respects a conventional novel-of-theyear award, but the eligibility requirements for many years show

Cultural institutions

115

the Booker’s debt to British imperialism and the global division of anglophone book markets: novels have to be written in English, and contestants from the Commonwealth, more or less (Irish, Pakistani, and South African entrants were eligible, although these nations were not part of the Commonwealth at different points, while entrants from the United States were excluded until a very recent change in the rules). For over four decades, therefore, the Booker attempted to capitalize on the global strength of the English language while retaining some sense of cultural cohesion across an empire that had collapsed as a political entity. The victory of John Berger, with his experimental novel, G., brought these debates to the public in 1972, with the award still in its infancy. Prior to Berger’s win, the Booker was struggling to attract press coverage, judges, even entrants; as English says in a pithy summary of the early years, “The minutes from the committee meetings of 1970 and 1971 read like the black-box transcript from a crashed plane” (202). Upon winning the prize, Berger used his acceptance speech to denounce the sponsors of the award: Booker PLC, a multinational agribusiness giant with holdings in Guyana going all the way back to the 1830s, as slavery was giving way to indenture. Berger accepted the prize (the novel also won the James Tait Black Memorial and the Guardian Fiction Prizes that year) but used his remarks to denounce the sponsors, explaining that Booker and firms like it were responsible for gross injustices in the colonial era. He resolved to “turn this prize against itself,” pledging to devote half his winnings to the Black Panther Party of Britain (Berger, 254). Ironically, Berger’s bellicose speech was a boon for the award: the scandal, along with many more in the ensuing years, helped the Booker garner lots of free publicity. Within a few years, the Booker went from the verge of extinction to being the most coveted anglophone literary award. Booker commentators and critics have replayed versions of this debate down through the years. Some observers credit the Booker with deprovincializing the British novel, which was in danger of becoming a strictly insular phenomenon; the recognition of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in 1981 was a watershed moment in this account (Todd). Others, however, see the Booker Prize as an instance of lingering imperialism: its entrants may be drawn from ex-colonial territories, but its judges and patrons continue to be dominated by metropolitan interests; the award tends to package or commoditize

116

Modernism in a Global Context

“otherness” for safe, convenient metropolitan consumption; and the winning novels sometimes rewrite British imperialism in a more positive light (Huggan). The Nobel has generated similar debate: multicultural liberator or neocolonialist perpetrator? By now, it will have occurred to some readers that literary prizes and the other cultural institutions most responsible for internationalizing modernist aesthetics have been dominated not by white writers, necessarily, but by men of various origins. The prize circuit is only the most obvious of these cultural systems: the Nobel, the Booker, and the Prix Goncourt, three of the prizes with the highest international profile, are practically male-only awards. In discussions of the Booker Prize, much has been said about the question of imperialism, and the success of novelists from former colonial regions, but the domination of the award by men has rarely featured as part of the discussion (perhaps because the Orange Prize for Fiction, now with new sponsorship, has given women novelists their own platform in the Irish/UK market). The Nobel has a similar history: the prize has been criticized for lavishing too much attention on Western European and North American writers. The Nobel responded by sprinkling in more awardees from the “global south” (Tagore being the only such winner in the first half of the century), but women have been excluded from consideration just as consistently without the award receiving quite the same sort of backlash. The case of Pearl Buck, Pulitzer winner in 1932 and Nobel winner in 1938, provides an illustration of this basic point. It is difficult to think of another writer credited with two such awards whose stock has been so thoroughly downgraded by contemporary reading standards. Being one of the few women to claim a Nobel might have guaranteed her status for posterity, but the opposite seems to have been the case. Moreover, as someone who wrote in English about Chinese peasants (she was the daughter of US missionaries and lived in China as an adult as well), Buck’s writing roughly conforms to the international humanist values that are thought to prevail in the contemporary literary community. When the Swedish Academy awarded her its highest honor, it did so on terms that might resonate with the multicultural pressures that led to Soyinka being the first African laureate: By awarding this year’s Prize to Pearl Buck for the notable works which pave the way to a human sympathy passing over widely

Cultural institutions

117

separated racial boundaries and for the studies of human ideals which are a great and living art of portraiture, the Swedish Academy feels that it acts in harmony and accord with the aim of Alfred Nobel’s dreams for the future.6 Buck’s reputation, however, has only diminished with the passage of time, her cultural sensitivity notwithstanding. There are complicated reasons, no doubt, why this may be so. The Cold War certainly did not help her reputation in the United States, where her sympathetic portrayals of Chinese rural communities may not have won her admirers, and her very accessible style—she said her imagined audience were the Chinese storytellers from whom she learned, not a band of small, snobby intellectuals in the United States or Western Europe—would not have helped as experimental modernism won over much of the literati. Buck is hardly the only laureate whose reputation has suffered posthumously. But it is striking how even feminists have been flatly uninterested in making Buck’s case, and very few scholars working on Chinese or Asian American literature have considered her plight in any detail. This is partly due to the fact that Buck writes outside the traditions and works outside the networks of an emerging international modernism. That she was awarded the Nobel in recognition of her cross-cultural sympathies, but not as a woman writer, probably makes her a less attractive prospect for some feminists. Buck features in none of the revisionist accounts of modernism written from a feminist perspective. Even with a Pulitzer and a Nobel on her curriculum vitae, she has no connections with the sort of modernist networks in London, New York City, or Paris. The implication here, although it is difficult to document or demonstrate with tangible evidence, is that some modernist networks have been internationally integrated without losing their informal homosocial character. In the case of the Nobel, the internal and external pressure to globalize the prize, by awarding it to a more culturally and ethnically diverse range of writers, has not been matched by a pressure to have more women on the list of honorees (although the list of women laureates in literature has more than doubled since 1991, from six to thirteen). This is an old story, in fact: the literary community which supplies Nobel winners was aware of gender imbalances long before the question of ethnic diversity came to their attention. The prestigious Prix Femina

118

Modernism in a Global Context

was established in 1904 with the explicit aim of giving women a more prominent place in the machinery of literary awards. The Prix Femina has an interesting structure: entrants may be men or women, but the jurors must be women. Male authors, nevertheless, fare well in the contest. Even with an award designed to correct gender bias, the pressure to include men as contestants, in order to secure the legitimacy of the award, is perceptible. Although cultural institutions, especially literary awards, have been very eager to globalize their base of operations, gender inequality continues to be a major point of continuity between more established and newer variants of global modernism. What is true for literary prizes also holds for many of the international cultural institutions considered in this chapter. An examination of Heinemann’s African Writers Series shows a list with very few women; the photograph of the 1956 Présence Africaine Conference at the Sorbonne shows a solitary woman surrounded by dozens of men; the Latin American Boom, at least as it was promoted in France by Caillois (whose collaborator, Victoria Ocampo, was a woman after all), was nearly a maleonly affair. The global literary institutions in which modernist women have been most active are little magazines and independent publishers. Cunard was involved in black Atlantic networks mostly as a publisher and anthologist. The example of Beach shows how a woman could be instrumental in bringing Joyce’s vision of modernism to transatlantic audiences. Magazines such as Little Review, New Freewoman, or Poetry demonstrate how women were the driving force behind little magazines with transatlantic connections. A more complete genealogy of the Paris and Rome conferences would have shown the prominent role of Jane and Paulette Nardal in imagining the multilingual modernism of the African diaspora. On the whole, however, global and feminist reappraisals of modernism have followed different trajectories, at least so far. Since the Second World War, the histories of global cultural institutions— international conferences and prizes especially—suggest that it was much easier to acknowledge the accomplishments of men from formerly colonized regions than it was to bring women into the fold. This may explain why many women modernists, from around the world, have been drawn to the idea of cosmopolitanism, as

Cultural institutions

119

discussed in the foregoing chapter: a cosmopolitan outlook does not make belonging to a cultural institution a prerequisite for global thinking. The evidence suggests that women have sometimes found it difficult to break into the cultural institutions most eager to go beyond metropolitan networks.

Concluding summary Examining modernism through literary institutions shows both the extent of modernism’s global circulation and the debates for which it has served as a catalyst. Studies of little magazines, independent publishers, literary conferences and festivals, and international prize culture show that modernism developed networks across the world. Some institutions in global cultural cities, such as London, New York City, and Paris are geared for metropolitan benefit and prestige even when they include writers from non-metropolitan regions of the world. Some institutions, such as the African Writers Series, are unambiguous supporters of anticolonial literature even with a home base in a metropolitan locale. Other modernist institutions in decolonizing regions, however, neither sought nor gained metropolitan approval. Contrary to many earlier literary histories, this chapter suggests that modernism continued to thrive after the Second World War, partly by expanding global networks to incorporate globally dispersed intellectuals and audiences. As modernism moved, the important but confusing concept of autonomy has been at the center of debates about culture and politics. From the interwar period in Europe, proclamations of aesthetic autonomy were often expressions of independence from commercial and political pressures. In decolonizing areas of the world, however, autonomy frequently takes on another shade of meaning: on the need for political independence in colonial and semicolonial regions. Rather than see this as an irreconcilable contradiction—with metropolitan writers asking to be relieved of political duties, and nonmetropolitans seeking a form of political sovereignty—it makes more sense to observe how the basic concept of autonomy, with its many associated inflections, comes to underwrite a wide range of modernist practices around the world.

120

Modernism in a Global Context

Notes 1

Translated by Irene E. Hoffman. See “Documents of Dada and Surrealism: Dada and Surrealist Journals in the Mary Reynolds Collection.” The Art Institute of Chicago, 2001.

2

See Bourdieu’s diagram in The Field of Cultural Production (49), in which he places the “little review” at the extreme edge, with a very high degree of autonomy (meaning no mass appeal) and a very low degree of recognition by the reigning cultural authorities (the national academies and so forth).

3

Untitled article, no pagination. See International Dada Archive [http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/dada/index.html], Dada Documents page, which contains downloadable images of many Dada little magazines.

4

This is an oversimplification of Stouky’s overall position in the report on the festival. His main argument is that all arts—traditional as well as experimental—should be returned to popular use, taken out of museums and elitist galleries.

5

See Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Is the Post- in Postmodernism?”, which discusses “neotraditional” art in precisely these terms; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, considers the place of the “native informant;” Rob Nixon, London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin, takes Naipaul to task on precisely these grounds; and Graham Huggan, Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins.

6

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1938/ press.html.

5 Media

“Only connect,” commands the famous epigraph of Howards End (1910). Intuition and common sense encourage most readers to interpret this as E. M. Forster’s plea for humane, and more human, relationships. Establishing better, and deeper, connections, it might appear, is what matters to the author of Howards End. The novel itself supports such a line of thinking. But what if we were to read this epigraph as an improbable nod to technology? Written as the first modern media age was in full swing, it could be reinterpreted as an injunction to establish connections, systems for transmitting and recording information, and nothing more. Connect, the words enjoin us, and do nothing but this. Build networks: occupy yourself with little else until this work is accomplished. The inclusion of quotation marks in my version of the novel, and the lack of attribution, nudge us further in that direction: these are disembodied words, seemingly spoken aloud. Appearing at the very start of Forster’s text, this imperative reaches us anonymously—an unidentified voice, decontextualized, transmitted from elsewhere by telegraph, gramophone, or telephone, we might imagine. Read this way, the epigraph becomes a call for better systems of communication, faster and more comprehensive means of getting information from one place to another, one person to another. The frenzy for constructing networks, for building transmitting and recording devices, defines the first modern media age, which coincides roughly with the emergence of modernism in the arts. A few years later, in The Waste Land (1922), T. S. Eliot sounds an altogether different note. “I can connect / Nothing with nothing,” an unnamed speaker declares in “The Fire Sermon,” the third movement of the poem (lines 301–2). The link between Eliot’s poem and sound media, such as the gramophone, is more solid than it is

122

Modernism in a Global Context

with the Forster of Howards End. Earlier in “The Fire Sermon,” one of the poem’s subjects puts on a gramophone and makes smooth her hair, mechanically, as the arm of the record player glides over the grooves of a spinning disk. It is critical commonplace to note that Eliot’s poem lacks contextual cues and includes a number of distinct voices, jostling for attention, resounding and then quieting without much warning. For first-time readers, it is notoriously difficult to tell who is talking to whom. The passage I quote at the start of this paragraph is just one such example: it is bracketed by quotation marks (letting the reader know that it is probably not the main poetic speaker talking) but it neglects to identify the person who says these words aloud. It is as if a gramophone were suddenly switched on, allowing a recorded, unidentified voice to intrude upon the poem. As Juan Antonio Suárez puts it, the poem “aspired . . . to the condition of a sound recorder” (756). Voices drift in and out, seemingly disconnected from one another. Random voices, a surfeit of ambient noise—ample surface, we might say, not unlike the abstract paintings to which Eliot’s poetry would sometimes be compared—but precious little transparent meaning, frustrating our hopes of making those connections pay off. More information can mean fewer mental and emotional connections for the individual— the bewildered speaker in this passage has trouble making any sense of all the information. More densely articulated networks do not necessarily lead to more efficient human processing. Modernist writing swings between these two extremes where new media are concerned. At one pole, modernists believed that new recording and transmitting devices could make the world more connected. Telegraphy, phonography, and photography—three of the nineteenth century’s new forms of “writing,” if the etymology of the words is taken at face value—were to make the world smaller in profound ways. Later, moving pictures, radio, and even television, as systems of mass communication, would accelerate the feeling that a worldwide audience was within reach for those who could make effective use of these new media. If modernism had global aspirations, new forms of communication were an integral part of that claim. Mark Goble concludes that “modernism itself desired communication and the many forms it took, not just as a response to the power of media technologies in the twentieth century but as a way of insisting that this power was already modernism’s own” (3). In his account, we should not read modernism as mere

Media

123

reaction to new technologies of communication and recording: modernists imagined themselves as master recorders and innovative communicators from the very beginning. This belief was sustained by the idea that modernist forms could transgress cultural, linguistic, political, and social boundaries. Against this, modernism also thrives in and among the crossed circuits of modern communications. There are many such misfiring lines. For every instance a modernist imagines better, faster, more extensive forms of storage and networks of communication, it would be simple to adduce a counterexample, a modernist who figures machines as producers of alienation, interruption, and discord, rather than communion, continuity, and harmony. Worse yet, the kind of verisimilitude produced by machines could sometimes feature as an anti-art. Early photographs were deemed too inclusive, registering all kinds of irrelevant details to which no sensitive observer would want to devote serious attention; early sound recordings, likewise, were prone to capture all kinds of ambient noise, with the desired sounds drowned out by cacophonous distractions. The answer to this complaint is not merely better, more user-friendly technology: these new forms of writing threaten the idea of art itself by promising to replace aesthetics with mere information of one kind or another. In faithfully recording the world, so the argument went, these newfangled machines might also make art itself, as an act of deliberate selection and interpretation, redundant, overtaken by mechanical recording devices that would capture the surface, material reality of our world without ever plumbing the interior, symbolic depths (North, Camera Works). Eliot’s famous poem, as I discuss at greater length later in this chapter, straddles both sides of this dialectic, paradoxically suggesting that a plenitude of surface can indeed be a form of aesthetic depth, too. Its engagement with media might help explain its status as a representative statement of its age. This chapter will not take on the challenge of reviewing how modernist studies, in full, has been impacted by the study of media technologies, comparatively old and comparatively new. A forthcoming volume in this series will provide a more comprehensive treatment of this vast topic. Instead, this chapter offers a selective overview of how modernism’s imaginative geography was both enlarged and constrained by new transcription devices and transmission networks. How did new media, in short, make

124

Modernism in a Global Context

modernism more global? Of the new recording and communication techniques, photography, phonography, cinema, and radio receive the most extensive treatment here. Telegraphy, absolutely crucial for the maintenance of modern empires and for the expansion of global commerce, is something I pass over lightly in this treatment, not without regret (Worth). Telephony receives little consideration here, too. Telephones and telegraphs are somewhat anomalous, in that they are neither recording devices nor systems of mass communications: their encryption allows for person-to-person, or point-to-point contact, for the most part. After a review of some of the key scholarly texts on media, technology, and internationalism, this chapter takes a closer look at phonography, photography, cinema, and radio as four rich instances of how modernist aesthetics were affected and extended globally in this media environment. New recording devices and their major means of transmission were the instruments that allowed modernists to dream of reaching more spatially dispersed audiences. The focus will remain on modernist writing, as it has throughout this book. Three salient points inform this chapter’s consideration of media and global modernist literature. First, the new media technologies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fundamentally transformed the human capacity for storing and transmitting information. But storage and transmission do not necessarily work together, seamlessly. Modernist writing frequently explores and exploits the potential disjuncture between these two primary modes of handling data. As in Eliot’s poetry, more storage (in the form of endless allusions) and faster networks (readers transported around the world in a few lines) do not necessarily produce smoother connections or easier transitions. Second, this chapter will note how modernists understand the tendencies toward media centralization, with major broadcasting and communications networks typically managed from select metropolitan locations, and the countervailing desire for more openended exchanges of information. Modernists are fully immersed in the debate between vertical integration of, against horizontal access to, the media. Networks can be vertically controlled (usually by state agencies) or laterally dispersed. As we shall see in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the century’s great radio novel, the fight for hierarchical control and democratic access structures the way modernists represent access to media.

Media

125

Third, modernist texts shuttle between the open networks and closed circuits of the new media. For writers with transnational sensibilities, it might seem as if the idea of the limitless network would offer an appealing model. And yet for a figure such as Samuel Beckett, being part of a hermetically closed circuit—a feedback loop between a mediated present and mediated past self—can be a powerful way of depicting the human as fully mechanized and therefore beyond cultural particularity. Cyborgs, to use contemporary terminology, allow modernists to imagine art beyond cultural particularity.

McLuhan, Kenner, and the mechanic media Marshall McLuhan’s voluminous writings, especially Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), have done more to make scholars aware of the social impact of media and communication technologies than the work of any other scholar. His famous assertion, “the medium is the message,” should warn us of any medium’s limitations: the putative content of any message is determined by the medium in which it is communicated. Human speech that is recorded and transmitted over the radio carries different elocutionary and social messages than a speech delivered without the aid of any transmission devices; both are different again than writing. Hence one of McLuhan’s crucial qualifiers, frequently forgotten: “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium” (19). Just as alphabetic writing, one of the earliest and most powerful of technologies, contains speech as its content, so too do modern, electronic media represent a type of translation and transmission of other types of information, such as speech, writing, images, or thought. It is equally important to recall that McLuhan views the media as a set of prosthetic devices, as the subtitle to Understanding Media reminds us. In explaining his position, he says rather simply that “the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology” (19). Information technologies can serve as

126

Modernism in a Global Context

prostheses in two main ways: enlarging the human capacity to store information (such as the written word, movable print, or computers) or disseminating such information (such as telegraphy, radio, or the Internet). Some technologies do a bit of both, obviously. For modernists with global aspirations, the prosthetic function of new media could be very attractive. In metropolitan Britain between the wars, for example, nearly all the writers we associate with high modernism were involved with radio at one point or another. Some of them were interested in experimenting with this new tool, some in reaching a larger or different type of audience than they might with the written word. It is easy to forget that McLuhan’s work was deeply influenced by his interest in modernism. My copy of the second edition of Understanding Media includes a portrait of McLuhan, dated 1944, painted by Wyndham Lewis, with whom McLuhan became friendly. An even closer associate was Hugh Kenner, although McLuhan later accused Kenner of stealing his ideas. The two reportedly visited Ezra Pound together in the late 1940s, a meeting that contributed to Kenner’s The Pound Era, a book that helped consolidate the reputation of the so-called men of 1914 (Eliot; Joyce; Lewis; Pound). That McLuhan and Kenner shared interests is evident in Kenner’s later book, The Mechanic Muse (1987). Kenner’s reading of Beckett, Eliot, Pound, and Joyce emphasizes how their work is saturated by the technologies of the second machine age, roughly 1880–1930. In Pound’s work, the typewriter looms large; in Joyce, we are witness to a massive recording device, taking in all the disconnected sights and sounds and people of the large city; in Eliot, we encounter the multiple, disembodied voice of the telephone; in Beckett, we get trapped in a massive logic game, an early computer programming language. As Kenner famously says of The Waste Land, it is “a telephone poem, its multiple voices referrable to a massive shortcircuit at the central exchange” (36). Although Mechanic Muse does not refer to McLuhan’s writing—nor Understanding Media to Kenner’s work—the mutual influence is hard to miss. If Kenner’s definition of modernism is determined by forms of technological adaptation, McLuhan’s understanding of developments in media is structured by the way modernist writing makes aesthetic form visible, audible, even tactile. It should be mentioned here that McLuhan’s writings on media are handicapped by some preconceptions he shares with many

Media

127

European and North American modernists. In particular, McLuhan asserts that the “Western” phonetic alphabet has done more than any economic or political practice to create “civilized man.” By “giving to its user an eye for an ear”—that is, by alienating the written word, through an arbitrary system of signs, from the word as it is spoken by one individual and heard by an immediate audience— alphabetic writing has freed us “from the tribal trance of resonating word magic and the web of kinship” (120). In contrast to alphabetic scripts, McLuhan says, “pictographic and hieroglyphic writing as used in Babylonian, Mayan, and Chinese cultures represents an extension of the visual sense for storing and expediting access to human experience. . . . As such, they approximate the animated cartoon, and are extremely unwieldy” (124). This unwieldiness comes from the reputed lack of alienation found in such scripts— words and images and sounds all bound into one, unique signifier— which makes for more difficult storage and transmission. Ease of storage, speed of transmission: these technical advantages of the alphabet, McLuhan claims, explain vast cultural differences. The abstraction of the alphabet gives its users greater flexibility. There are some serious problems with McLuhan’s understanding of “pictographic and hieroglyphic” writing; Rey Chow’s discussion of Jacques Derrida’s misapprehension of Chinese writing provides a brief overview of the many flaws from which this general approach suffers (“How (the) Inscrutable Chinese”). It is not my intention, however, to review all the ways we might complicate McLuhan’s theory of language and writing. Rather, I will here note that many white modernists, who largely share McLuhan’s limited perspective about the differences between languages and writing technologies, are both enabled and constrained by their very imperfect sense of how media could overcome linguistic and cultural barriers. Pound, for instance, was fascinated by the sensual immediacy of images, believing that Chinese writing could provide a sort of model for how poetry in English might be written. In dialectical inversion of McLuhan’s description of the pictograph, the cross-media symbolic unity of the Chinese character would allow Pound to theorize an antidote to the clunky, cluttered adornments typical of poetry in English. Written words, spoken words, symbols, and visual images could be melded into one compact shape. If knowing a little Chinese allowed Pound to get China utterly wrong, at least in its cultural

128

Modernism in a Global Context

particularities, it also gave him a tool with which to estrange the language of poetry for English readers.

Writing by other means As a number of scholars have pointed out, many of the first communications technologies are forms of writing by other means—telegraphy, photography, phonography—suggesting that the written word determined the development of these devices as much as these devices transformed the written word. Lisa Gitelman depicts the turn of the twentieth century as a moment “of particular upheaval and importance in the relations between words and things” (98). Her influential work provides a thick cultural context for this process, showing how these various inventions were determined by existing forms of textual production, but also how these new devices transformed the common definition of textuality. It is no surprise, then, that writers felt this change acutely. If, historically, writers function as the guardians and recorders of words, these new technologies could either serve as powerful new tools, allowing writers to reach audiences in new ways, or they could make oldfashioned script, and old-fashioned writers, redundant. Other critics have taken this insight about writer-media and human-machine interactions a logical step further, suggesting that modernists began to understand these new media not merely as extensions of a writing person, but as integral parts of personhood itself (Armstrong; Danius; Kittler; Murphet). As Alex Goody summarizes, “What the twentieth century reveals about technology is its profound fusion with the human; as the century progressed it became impossible to maintain an absolute distinction between the organic expressions of human nature and the technological processes, forms and devices which recorded and communicated those expressions as culture” (1). These studies debunk the myth of modernist virtuosity, the autonomous author-genius of Kenner’s work. In Goody’s account, the modernist writer is hardly master of (his) medium: at best, the modernist writer strikes a kind of Faustian bargain with a world of technological effects, realizing that without the existence of such technology the idea of modern authorship and modern readership would not exist.

Media

129

If sound recording and transmission devices encouraged some modernists to think more about the function of language, photography and the cinema inspired others to escape their narrow cultural confines. Photography offered a system of representation that could help the artist traverse linguistic and cultural boundaries rather effortlessly (L. Marcus; North, Camera Works; Trotter; WallRomana). Photography and cinema, some hoped, could create a universal system of representation, allowing intellectuals to communicate across vast distances. Different recording technologies, therefore, affected modernist writers differently. Sound technologies tended to produce forms of intensive change. For figures such as Beckett, Gertrude Stein, or Wallace Stevens, sound recording led them to experiment with the nature of literary language. Their recursive, repetitive, sometimes tautological wordplay mimics what sound recording devices show us about our spoken languages. Capturing all the sounds of everyday speech—the stutters, the verbal tics, the repetitions—recording devices sometimes give us language without necessarily transmitting clear meanings. Engagement with photography, on the other hand, tended to produce extensive change in modernist writers. For figures such as Elizabeth Bishop, Blaise Cendrars, and Ousmane Sembène, the camera encouraged them to dream of international communication beyond that made possible by written language.

Media ethics and ecologies The wide use of ecological metaphors in media studies is not accidental. It reflects awareness that media affect the people who use them, but also that people who use them are afforded new ways of thinking about spatial relationships. The new media of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries certainly had the effect of making people more aware of distant places, even stimulating the desire to travel or see more of the world. But these new media did not always, necessarily, expand the mental horizons of the people with whom they came into contact. Control over mass media tends to be centralized in large state bureaucracies, with messages emanating from a ruling administrative group, disseminated to a wide crosssection of people. As Walter Benjamin puts it in “Reflections on

130

Modernism in a Global Context

Radio” (1931), dissenting radio listeners are left with “sabotage” as the main option of resistance: “switching off” their sets (543). The imposition of hierarchical relationships in media control sometimes results in national or regional consolidation and contraction. David Trotter, Mark Wollaeger, and Aaron Worth demonstrate how forms of cultural expansion and national consolidation, through British imperialism, could influence the development of metropolitan modernism. Rather than resisting propaganda, Wollaeger contends, British modernist writers were quick to recognize the genre’s potential. Even Conrad, not known as a mediasavvy intellectual, is recast as unusually sensitive to the proliferation of media. In Heart of Darkness, Kurtz is likened to a demagogue, a leader of an extremist party whose oratorical skills are perfect for dissemination through mass media. In The Secret Agent (1907), information “often functions independently of human agents,” as if controlled by media outlets (35). Long known as chief fictional chronicler of the British Empire, Conrad is now available to us as media theorist as well. Trotter makes the link between imperialism, new media, and British modernism even more explicit in his recent work. Questions of ethics and the composition of the listening public have been ongoing debates in media studies (Avery; Cohen, Coyle, and Lewty; Squier; Williams, “Culture and Technology” and Television). The overwhelmingly centralized nature of radio, with its one-way transmissions, leaves the medium open to criticism from those who would like broadcasting to be responsive to the needs of the audience. Harri Englund’s work on broadcasting in Malawi, however, suggests that some local human rights activists have been able to carve out a space on radio, relatively free from the Malawian state’s bureaucratic control and, equally important, from the interference of international human rights activists who sometimes underestimate the worldliness of the people whose interests they purportedly serve. Although broadcasting in Malawi, as in much of the former British Empire, began as a state service and remained that way long after national independence, Englund’s study of a vernacular news and documentary program shows how local actors can, in the right circumstances, make themselves heard over the airwaves. In Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996), Arjun Appadurai uses the terms ethnoscape, mediascape,

Media

131

and technoscape to describe how mass migration, global media, technology, and identity politics interact on a global stage. Appadurai argues that diasporic forms of identity are coextensive with mass media technologies that allow faster and thicker communications between disparate populations. He concludes that contemporary forms of ethnic identification tend to be “counternational and metacultural” (16). Appadurai’s most provocative contention is that the media have made cultural imagination relatively autonomous from local or national spaces. Ethnic identities now straddle the globe with the use of new media, and this movement is wholly characteristic of modernity. Media liberate the cultural imagination from its geographical roots, spreading out across the globe.

Bearing across Media studies have an uneven presence in scholarship on colonial and postcolonial literary culture. Conrad, Eliot, Forster, and Woolf are major points of reference for anglophone writers, but the significance of media to their work is not always recognized. Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, one of the most central texts of the anglophone postcolonial canon, is deeply influenced by its engagement with radio. Ousmane, a key figure in the francophone postcolonial tradition, was both a novelist and filmmaker. Amos Tutuola’s celebrated first novel, The Palm Wine Drinkard (1952), includes a famous vignette with a television-handed ghostess. Yet scholarly discussions of postcolonial literature and media have been relatively slow to follow. A handful of important texts, such as Harold Innis’s Empire and Communication (1950) and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, have dominated the discussion about imperialism and media. Innis offers a comparative study of some of the world’s great empires—Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and British—arguing that they are all built on information storage and communication technologies. In thinking about the British Empire, Innis makes the wry observation that it “may seem irreverent . . . to suggest that the changing character of the British Empire during the present century [the twentieth] has been in part a result of the pulp and paper industry and its influence on public opinion” (6). A massive reduction in the cost of producing paper, in other words,

132

Modernism in a Global Context

was a boon for journalists and imperialists alike in the latter part of the nineteenth century. But the availability of cheap paper and the abundance of opinionated journalists cut both ways, as both Innis and Anderson observe (see also Kaul). The anticolonialist movement in places such as Indonesia depended on daily newspapers. A national imagination, Anderson argues, can be synchronized by the abstract, temporal regularity of the newspaper. Radio, like print journalism, was used as both an implement of imperialist control and as an instrument of decolonization (Kalliney; Potter). The BBC, for example, was an instrument of imperialist control, especially in white settler colonies such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. During the interwar years, it attempted to foster a pan-British identity among white colonists, doing whatever it could to generate a unified cultural identity among far-flung constituencies. Crucially, it was not until the Second World War that the BBC made serious efforts to appeal to indigenous audiences in their colonial territories, in a belated attempt to stir up loyalty to the British Empire during a period of global conflict. Late colonial and early postcolonial writers proved adept at using the BBC, and other metropolitan cultural institutions, as a means of decolonizing literary culture. Early innovators, such as the Jamaican poet Una Marson and the Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand, used the BBC’s networks to question British imperialism and to collaborate with other anticolonial intellectuals. Frantz Fanon’s writing on radio in Algeria during the war of independence provides a more theoretical account of sound media in revolutionary situations. In A Dying Colonialism [L’ An cinq de la révolution Algérienne] (1959, English 1965), Fanon suggests that the revolutionary movement in Algeria won the symbolic war, in part, by winning the struggle for media access. Before the start of the conflict, in the mid-1950s, Fanon writes that radios were of no interest to most Algerians. Cost, access, and language were the obstacles for many of them—radios being relatively expensive, reliable electricity restricted to a few urban areas, and French being the language of broadcasting—but even French-speaking Algerians with the means to own the device remained indifferent to the medium. Shortly after the start of the revolution, however, when the liberation forces began to broadcast their own material, radios became a hot commodity. Before long, French forces started jamming the broadcasts. A surprising thing happened, however, as

Media

133

Fanon describes it: rather than frustrating listeners, acts of French sabotage made Algerians feel more connected to one another, and therefore more committed to the struggle. More than anything, the radio, even when its words turned to static, challenged the univocality of French as the language of authority: “The Voice of Fighting Algeria [revolutionary program] and all the voices picked up by the receiver now revealed to the Algerian the tenuous, very relative character, in short, the imposture of the French voice presented until now as the only one” (95). Here we see McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” transported to a revolutionary, nonmetropolitan setting: there is no explicit message at all, only a medium. As Ian Baucom discusses, Algerians transformed the social uses of the medium spontaneously. Virtually overnight, the radio went from being a tool of oppression to being an instrument of liberation. In his reading of Fanon’s essay, Baucom teases out some of the implications of this for media studies. Against a figure such as Theodor Adorno, who largely disparages radio broadcasts as hopelessly centralized on the production and dissemination side, and irredeemably passive on the receiving end, Fanon shows us that the radio can participate in the transformation of consciousness: “Crucially, for Adorno agency vanishes in exactly that moment in which Fanon discovers it to reappear—the moment of the listener’s insertion into the ‘public mechanism’,” what we might gloss as the broadcast and its reception (“Frantz Fanon’s Radio,” 28). The voice of the Algerian resistance, primarily by challenging the hegemony of French-language broadcasting, has, in this reading, the ability to change the form and expression of subjectivity among its audience. Fanon’s revolutionary Algerians are part cyborg, to use the lingo of our moment, but this should not lead us to think them passive, their revolutionary agency attenuated by their integration with media devices. The radio functions as both external stimulus and integral tool of the struggle. Sound technologies also form a central part of theories of the black Atlantic sphere (Gilroy). Tsitsi Jaji coins the term “stereomodernism” to describe the relationship between decolonization and modernity. She uses a fairly straightforward definition of modernism throughout the book, describing it “as a simple heuristic device for indexing aesthetic choices that reflect self-conscious choices of ‘being modern’” (15). Dispensing with the

134

Modernism in a Global Context

stagnant dichotomy of modernity versus tradition in sub-Saharan Africa, Jaji’s study suggests that US and Caribbean popular culture of the civil-rights era are appropriated and recombined in the service of a decolonizing agenda in Ghana, Senegal, and South Africa. Recent scholarship on literature and other media has pushed the study of global modernism in new directions. In one camp, there are scholars who suggest that cultural differences can be understood by studying the effect of global media. Although Appadurai, Anderson, Fanon, Gilroy, North, and Williams would seem to concur on very little, their methods suggest that we can account for cultural differences by thinking about the uses to which people put media. Media are tools, in these accounts, manipulated by groups of people to achieve distinct social and political ends. The new media of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries make for a culturally diverse modernism, international in scope but inflected with local distinctiveness. Against this, however, many media theorists emphasize that media effect change in people—changes that the users of media do not always anticipate or control. Danius, Goble, Goody, Innis, Kittler, Kenner, and Wollaeger all imply that expressions of human agency are increasingly shaped by mediated information. If this is true, we might cast modernism not as a way to process and represent cultural differences, but as a way to describe a universal humanity in the age of machines. Comparing Howards End to A Passage to India (1924) neatly summarizes the debate. As David Trotter puts it, “E. M. Forster’s propaganda for connection shifted from mentality and class to race” (21). But there is a crucial difference between them: in Howards End, connection is desirable and possible, whereas in A Passage to India, the two main characters cannot maintain their connections across the imperial divide. In the former novel, “only connect” is the main prescription: cultural, political, and social conflicts may be resolved by constructing better networks of communication. In the latter novel, we find that cultural differences and political disputes cannot be resolved through networks of communication—not yet, at any rate.

Photography In the opening page of Goodbye to Berlin (1939), Christopher Isherwood’s fictional alter ego declares, “I am a camera with

Media

135

its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking” (1). It is a powerful, and by the late 1930s, somewhat conventional description of the modernist artist as a neutral, detached, even passive spectator. John Dos Passos also uses the “Camera Eye” in his USA Trilogy of the 1930s, although his roving camera montages are more cinematic than the photographic allusions in Goodbye to Berlin. Isherwood’s narrator is little more than a recording device, capable of storing images of the world. Isherwood’s narrator lives abroad. He prefers not to remain in his lodgings in the evenings, for the sights and sounds of the neighborhood remind him he is in a “foreign city, alone, far from home” (1). It is a small point, a stray comment, and yet it seems to inform his foregoing remarks. The narrator is not detached in emotional terms; his detachment is that of the expatriate intent on observing closely. He is not simply a camera, therefore, but an ethnographic camera, one whose combination of attentiveness and neutrality is secured by his cultural alienation from his surroundings. The camera is the favored prosthesis of ethnographic writing, as if the interplay between two media better translates the essential features of other cultural formations. Some of the precedents for Isherwood’s narrator-cum-recording device were set about twenty years earlier with the brief but influential imagist movement. Pound was one of its chief theorists, practitioners, and publicity artists. His well-known poem, “In a Station of the Metro” (1913), occupies a privileged place in studies of imagism: The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. At first glance, the qualities of a verbal snapshot seem evident enough. The words promise to capture an instant in time, a moment’s perception, largely visual in nature. The poem’s primary metaphor also works by way of visual allegory: the tenor, the apparition of the faces, is carried by the vehicle, the wet petals, an equally arresting image. This kind of imagery, one might argue, is made possible by recourse to a photographic imagination: click goes the camera in the crowded station, the photograph is developed, and then compared to or superimposed upon another image or photograph. As Daniel Tiffany points out, the poetic trick works by killing, or by metaphorically freezing, the moving images of the poem’s

136

Modernism in a Global Context

tenor, the faces moving in the crowd. The image of the petals on the bough arrests the motion of the first part of the poem. The faces of the crowd, presumably in motion at the moment of perception, become corpses, or as the poem puts it, apparitions. For Tiffany, “The Image, in this respect, is an apparition, a phantom, because it represents the return of a lost or dead object, a moment when the poet is haunted by reality. The spectral Image presents life imaged as death, a living death” (53). Photography seems to do exactly this: preserving visual records by mummifying its subjects, creating a sort of archive of death. Tiffany suggests that the “cryptaesthetics” of Pound extend to recording and radio broadcasting technologies. And as many commentators have pointed out, we should be careful not to take imagism’s talk of transparent, immediate, nonmetaphorical language at face value: unless we insist that this poem is simply two juxtaposed, unrelated images, it is difficult to ignore the metaphorical qualities of its language. In fact, nearly all the critical commentaries on this poem begin by glossing its main metaphor. Photography, sometimes represented as strictly nonmetaphorical, can paradoxically inspire poetry with an increased reliance on metaphorical language. The metaphorical qualities of the poem are amplified if we know a little about Pound’s much-discussed fascination with Chinese script, or what is sometimes called the ideograph. Conventional wisdom suggests that Pound fell in love with the concept of the ideograph because he erroneously believed that it combines verbal and visual attributes into a singular, less abstract, less mediated symbolic form. We see the persistence of Pound’s misunderstandings in figures such as Marshall McLuhan and Jacques Derrida. As Christopher Bush explains in his reading of imagist aesthetics, Pound’s fascination with Chinese writing is in many ways linked to his fascination with the photographic capacities of poetic language. “In a Station” routes its camera-like eye through the figure of Chinese culture, particularly through its written language. Emulating some essential features of both photography and what he believed he saw in Chinese writing, Pound’s verse suggests that seeing as a camera was in some ways perceiving the world as a Chinese person might perceive it. Bush describes the scene in this poem: “The ideograph is not only not really the written language of China—in the end it must not be Chinese at all. [This poem] take[s] Chinese as an aesthetic model in a way that effaces the cultural particularity of

Media

137

that model” (69). To put this reading another way, this literary fastening on China does not tell us much about the reality of Chinese culture—the writing is non-ethnographic, we might say— but we cannot conclude that China is therefore an empty signifier, a place devoid of meaning in Pound’s thinking. Rather, China is paradoxically the scene of “universal visuality,” as Bush puts it (69). Pound does not promise to show us anything about Chinese culture through his poetry. Instead, he glosses China as a place where vision and representation are not divorced from one another. The primal scene of Chinese visuality, the first proof, is their ideographic script, which refuses to divorce signifier from signified. It is therefore not enough to say that Pound’s aesthetics are racist or orientalist and leave it at that. His ideas about Chinese culture are certainly informed by a long tradition of seeing China as backward, insular, and stagnant. But his aesthetic practices show that his ethnographic camera is more mobile than we might otherwise expect. We do not see Pound, the white North American, training his dispassionate eye on Chinese culture. In fact, we see Chinese as the embodiment of ethnographic and photographic perception. Pound’s poetry, in other words, asks us not to look at China and its peoples, holding them up for inspection, but instead to look at the world, and somehow write the world, as he believes a Chinese person might. Pound’s Chinese are photographers without the need for photographic equipment. It is a different and much more complex position than Isherwood’s. In Goodbye to Berlin, we see an Englishman examining Berlin, an ethnographer abroad. In Pound’s text, however, we have a North American who looks not at Chinese culture directly, but at the world through some idea of Chinese culture, however mistaken that viewpoint may be. The medium of photography allows Pound both to obliterate and to preserve cultural difference in this poem. Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room” (1971), as widely read as “In a Station,” also seems to enact a form of ethnographic refusal, perhaps tangentially related to Pound’s. Unlike Pound’s poem, however, “Waiting Room” shows us a lyric speaker who looks at a series of photographs with horror, and yet cannot quite look away from the images, rather than a speaker who emulates a camera after some fashion. The poem’s “Elizabeth,” three days shy of her seventh birthday, waits as her aunt visits the dentist, and whittles away the time by thumbing through a copy of National

138

Modernism in a Global Context

Geographic. In those pages, she sees victims of cannibals, strange looking babies, and “black, naked women with necks / wound round and round with wire / like the necks of light bulbs” (28–30). Their exposed breasts, she reports, are very disturbing, and yet she cannot put down the magazine. Suddenly, a soft cry escapes. At first, she thinks it is a groan of pain from her aunt, who is being examined in another room, and then we find out that it is a cry coming from herself. It sends Elizabeth, the lyric speaker, into a tizzy—she imagines herself falling, falling right off the earth, and somehow merging with her aunt, a prim woman who would be embarrassed by the sight of naked women. As the poem continues, the speaker wonders what makes her like or unlike other people— like her aunt, or like the women pictured in the magazine? “What similarities,” she wonders, “held us all together / or made us all just one?” (76, 81–2). Knowing a little about Bishop’s life, and noting the autobiographical emphasis of the poetic language, makes it tempting to read this as a representation of Bishop’s latent sexuality, or more broadly, as a kind of proto-feminist statement. It is a complex poem. For my purposes, it will be enough to signal that Bishop frames the questions of cultural difference (and similitude) with another medium, photography. Bishop’s poem—as in Pound’s—suggests that translations between media (writing and photography) are analogous to translations between languages and cultures. Bishop’s poem does not, in any neat or obvious way, answer the questions it poses—what makes the self an “I,” what makes us more or less like our family members, or like people from faraway places we claim as neither kith nor kin? The most readily available language for posing such questions is not really a language at all, but a photograph that brings questions of similarity and difference, or similarity in difference, right to the surface of the text. Are these women with horrifying breasts like or unlike the speaker, and for what reason? We could easily assume that it is racial difference that marks their otherness. Yet the poem also suggests that it is their feminine maturity that makes them foreign to her: after all, the poem is also about being nearly seven years old, dwelling on the process of growing older. She says of the women in the photograph, “I scarcely dared to look / to see what it was I was” (63–4). The process of growing old, and coming to self-awareness of that process, is here figured as something utterly strange—much stranger, in many ways, than the signs of cultural difference she registers in women she

Media

139

sees in the magazine. The magazine, perhaps, forces her to look at herself in a new, and not altogether satisfying, way. It is difficult to know whether this is a poem about connection with others, through the medium of photography, or disconnection from others, with the medium of photography marking that distance. The medium is the message in this poem, too, simultaneously highlighting and collapsing cultural differences. In an interesting twist, we may also notice that the poem selfconsciously returns us to the primal scenes of imagist poetry. Although the poem was published much later, a few clues tell us that the setting is the United States during the First World War, the heyday of imagism. To the extent that the poem uses an ethnographic photograph to meditate on questions of identity and similitude, it also references imagist poetry as a kind of immediate ancestor, a poetic lineage that makes the poem’s engagement with photography possible. But Bishop’s reflection on modernist poetry is not simply a reflection or reprise of imagism: in contrast to “In a Station,” “Waiting Room” is far more indeterminate, far less assertive in drawing connections, both real and metaphorical, between the tenor and the vehicle, the subject of the poem (Elizabeth) and the things to which it is being compared (her aunt, her family, and the women in the photograph). If a figure such as Pound is quite willing to assert direct connections between his own aesthetic practices and Chinese writing, Bishop seems far more intent on alerting us to the potential for misunderstanding and dissonance. “In a Station” suggests that the image is a way to transcend languages and cultures; “Waiting Room” implies that photographs supply more culturally ambiguous, more open-ended raw material for the modernist imagination.

Phonography In his essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), T. S. Eliot famously concludes that the best poetry is impersonal, divested of emotional content supplied by the artist. Eliot thinks of the poet not so much as creative genius, but instead as neutral medium: a recorder of sights and sounds, and perhaps of the emotions of others, but not an interventionist, not someone who has a distinct voice of his or her own (Suárez). Although the best-remembered metaphor used

140

Modernism in a Global Context

by Eliot in that essay is that of the poet as catalyst for an electrochemical reaction, he also likens the poet to a medium—that is, to a person through whom the voices of the dead might be channeled: As “I hinted,” Eliot explains, “the mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of ‘personality,’ not being necessarily more interesting, or having ‘more to say,’ but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations” (53–4). To put this in the language of media theory, Eliot describes the artist as someone who records, stores, and transmits data—sound information, especially—without in any fundamental way tampering with that data. At most, the poet is responsible for selecting appropriate objects and “mixing” or editing them into the best possible combination. Among other things, this perspective helps explain some of the basic formal features of The Waste Land, such as its disembodied voices and its lack of transitions. It also helps contextualize the poem’s vast historical and cultural range. Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, London combine, in an unpunctuated burst, as if they were interchangeable venues. Ancient Greek mythology, Elizabethan theater, Buddhist sermons, Biblical allusions, fragments of Upanishads, Wagnerian symphonies, ragtime, music hall songs, and contemporaneous vernacular speech all jostle together in the space of the poem. Of this list, Eliot’s invocations of vernacular speech and popular music have generated the most critical interest in the last twenty years. David Chinitz, for instance, claims that Eliot sounds most like Eliot when he is doing a jazz routine. In this formulation, the erudite and self-consciously difficult poet is also an admirer of jazz and ragtime, borrowing their catchy rhythms to the shore the fragments of the poem against its ruin. Michael North consults the correspondence of Eliot and Pound to read them as blackface performers of sorts, as poets who use the genre of the minstrel show to revolutionize modernist poetry (Dialect). For a North American poet, writing in the vernacular means writing “black.” The proliferation of jazz and race records in the early part of the century increased familiarity with this style of performance. It may surprise some readers that Eliot’s status as a vernacular poet augmented his reputation in the British colonies, where he had an audience who heard him perform, perhaps in greater numbers than in North America or in metropolitan Britain. Eliot

Media

141

read sections of Four Quartets to BBC audiences in India even though he refused to share the material on domestic radio (Coyle). Elsewhere, Eliot’s recording of The Waste Land, distributed via the British Council, had a direct impact on the development of Kamau Brathwaite, arguably the most innovative theorist and practitioner of vernacular writing—what he calls “Nation Language”—in the emerging category of postcolonial or world English literature. Brathwaite’s essay, “Jazz and the West Indian Novel” (1967/68) and his short book, History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (1984), are two of the most important—and technically detailed—assessments of prose form and prosody, respectively, in postwar English literature. Louise Bennett, Jamaican poet, folklorist, television star, and national icon, is one of Brathwaite’s heroes of vernacular writing. In her poem, “Colonization in Reverse” (1966), Bennett’s use of vernacular speech informs us that Caribbean people are settling in England and refashioning the national language. It is hard to tell whether the demographic shift, or the linguistic appropriation, matters more to the lyric speaker. Instead of saying that her heart is about to burst with pride at the sight of so many West Indian migrants, the lyric speaker proclaims “me heart gwine burs.” The written language here takes its cue from the language as it is spoken; the words on the page are more unfamiliar if we read them silently. The poet here writes as if she were a phonograph, faithfully capturing the sonic and idiomatic patterns of English as it is spoken in Jamaica. The form of linguistic play here depends entirely on the poet being an accurate recording device. As Bennett later argues in a radio broadcast called “Jamaica Language,” it is ridiculous to think of Jamaican vernacular English as a corruption of the English language, unless we are willing to think of metropolitan English as a corruption of Norman French, or Norman French as a corruption of Latin. Bennett, like Brathwaite, defends creole vernaculars as both complex and ingenious, taking many of the best features of English but adding all sorts of nuances that give the language greater creative flexibility. Yet Eliot, no less than Bennett, is one of Brathwaite’s vernacular champions. His distinctive voice is what Brathwaite recalls hearing as a young man in Barbados: “What T. S. Eliot did for Caribbean poetry and Caribbean literature was to introduce the notion of the speaking voice, the conversational tone. That is what really

142

Modernism in a Global Context

attracted us to Eliot.” As any number of critics point out, Eliot is not only and not always a crusty guardian of tradition. For Brathwaite, Eliot’s cadence is very much alive and up-to-date, encouraging the aspiring poet to make his own innovations in a vernacular register. Brathwaite continues in a footnote: “For those who really made the breakthrough, it was Eliot’s actual voice—or rather his recorded voice, property of the British Council—reading ‘Preludes,’ ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ The Waste Land and the Four Quartets—not the texts—which turned us on. In that dry deadpan delivery, the riddims of St. Louis (though we did not know the source then) were stark and clear for those of us” who were also listening to jazz (History, 30–1). Where we might expect Eliot’s reading voice to lead to cultural disconnection, a short circuit between disembodied metropolitan speaker and colonial subject, it instead produces a startling insight, a way for Brathwaite to imagine his own poetic practices and discover his own lyric voice. The recorded voice, not the written texts, Brathwaite says, made “us” alive to the poetry. Brathwaite never forgot the power of recording devices to shape his work. He is widely known for his rousing performances, and for that reason, perhaps, used voice recording as a guide to poetic composition. As Gordon Rohlehr tells us, after some early struggles with finding the right pitch for his verse, Brathwaite turned on his tape recorder to compose Rights of Passage, the first book in his epic trilogy, The Arrivants: I decided to read it onto tape: and spent from October ’64 right thru my departure to England (about June/July/August ’65), getting a good reading version of it, and changing the text under pressure from the voice version. At least I relied on the ear to tell me how it should go: and this applied not only to lines and words but to structure, order of sequences, contrasts, that sort of thing. (qtd. in Rohlehr, 63) For Brathwaite, being a vernacular poet means emulating sound media. He describes altering his poetry “under pressure from the voice version” of the verse, allowing recorded sound to guide his creative practices. If McLuhan says that the alphabet substitutes a reading eye for a listening ear, Brathwaite suggests that recording technologies will resuscitate the bardic poet by allowing him or her to reach audiences in a vernacular register. Brathwaite imagines

Media

143

media allowing his work to go beyond mediation. In an interesting twist, Brathwaite names both Bennett and Eliot as interlocutors, vernacular poets engaged in the same project of using media to transcend the inherent limits of the written word. In contrast to Bennett and Brathwaite, who enthusiastically and unapologetically explore the possibilities of vernacular writing through recording devices, both Jean Rhys and Samuel Beckett suggest that recording devices can alienate the voice from its speaker, and alienate the speaking subject from a wider cultural community. In Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), for instance, we are witness to a feedback loop of sorts: we watch a sixty-nine-year-old man listen to a recording of his thirty-nine-year-old self, who has, just before making that recording, listened to the voice of his twenty-nine-yearold self on the device. The voice of the twenty-nine-year old is now a faint echo, whereas the thirty-nine-year old is a distinct but also a disembodied voice, confined to this electronic gadget. The main character shows clear signs of an ambivalent relationship to the machine; he strokes it once or twice with an amorous affection, and yet he also displays consternation with this object that captures and stores his voice. As N. Katherine Hayles points out, the play “demonstrates how the shape of a life—and the shape of the genre—can be affected when body and voice no longer imply each other” (85). If, for Brathwaite, the vernacular poet can be brought closer to his audience by means of a recording device, for Beckett, this method of storage and transmission leads to a highly restrictive audience (of one, in fact) who comes to recognize the alien qualities of the voice he hears played back to him. The tight set and lack of physical mobility demonstrated by Krapp only heightens the alienating, oppressive features of this type of data storage. It is a technology that preserves by killing: Krapp’s mortality casts a shadow over the entire play, and as the lights of the stage dim, we are left with the machine, which the stage directions tell us continues to run, now in silence. In some productions, the recorder’s dim bulb remains visible after the lights go down, an electronic ghost. The machine—as well as the information it preserves—outlives its users. In Jean Rhys’s short story, “Let them Call it Jazz” (1962), the main character is alienated from others not because of the technical qualities of the recording process, but because of the social uses to which recordings can be put. The narrator, Selina, a mixed-race woman from the Caribbean, has settled in London, telling the story in

144

Modernism in a Global Context

a West Indian argot—a notable departure for Rhys, whose narrators are usually white women who do not speak in the vernacular. After a drunken encounter with a racist neighbor, Selina ends up in jail for a brief spell. While there, she hears another prisoner singing broken fragments of a tune, called the “Holloway Song” after the prison in which she is incarcerated. Selina works these scraps into a full-blown melody, a sorrow song after a fashion. The song captures her feelings of loneliness, but it also affirms solidarity with the other women in the prison, white and black. After her release, she meets a white musician at a party who hears her whistling the tune. He plays it on the piano for the assembled guests, “jazzing it up” a bit. She prefers her own version to his, but she thinks little of it. A few weeks later, she receives a brief letter from the musician, with a £5 note, thanking her for the inspiration. In the meantime, he has reworked the ditty into a full song and presumably records it for commercial distribution. Selina is distraught: “I read the letter and I could cry. For after all, that song was all I had. I don’t belong nowhere really, and I haven’t the money to buy my way to belonging” (67). The story as a whole is ambivalent about sound recording as a means of reaching across racial and national boundaries. On the one hand, the white author, Rhys, emulates a recording device by giving over the narrative voice to a mixed-race narrator who speaks in a West Indian vernacular. This is unusual in Rhys’s oeuvre—she does not often employ a vernacular narrative voice or feature nonwhite narrators. Moreover, the song itself allows a target of racial discrimination to identify with other inmates, white and black, who find themselves in prison. On the other hand, after her release from prison, Selina becomes the victim of racial theft, an old story in the recording industry. She believes the songwriter has stolen her identity and her intellectual property. He has privatized what is, for her, an expression of unity across the colonizer-colonized, white-black, haves-have nots system of binaries that organizes the story. If vernacular voices open up the possibility of cross-racial communication, mass media do not always encourage the full realization of this embedded potential.

Cinema Cinema probably influenced modernist writing more than all other technological developments combined (J. Marcus and Wall-Romana

Media

145

offer two of the most recent accounts of this influence). Despite this fact, I tend to agree with North when he argues that cinema, especially the talkies, greatly limited the cross-cultural impact of movies during the interwar period. Although some makers of silent film believed that moving pictures would obliterate all linguistic and cultural barriers, the rapid incorporation of sound in the 1920s and 1930s made cinema a far more insular affair, hemmed in by linguistic barriers and by national systems of production and distribution. “Before the arrival of sound,” North says, “film had become for many artists and writers . . . the most powerful promise of an art form that might become a universal language, mediating between national languages as it mediated between words and images” (Camera Works, 84). After the addition of sound, however, this early promise of a transnational, non-linguistic medium becomes a lost opportunity, a door that shuts firmly in the face of artists with global aspirations: “The unfortunate reality of linguistic difference meant that for a time at least Hollywood’s grip on audiences in other countries was considerably loosened,” North contends (85). If we follow this persuasive account, then, cinema tends to signify in a geographically and culturally limited context throughout much of the period in question. Although national consolidation and linguistic obstacles limited the cross-cultural effect of cinema, an array of avant-garde intellectuals embraced film, especially silent flicks, partly because the medium promised to revolutionize written language. In interwar little magazines such as the famed transition, Eugene Jolas and his collaborators argue that photography and cinema would transform the practice of writing, freeing it from older representational practices—even making our alphabets obsolete. The journal’s use of trilingual writing is merely one facet of this project; Jolas hoped that cinema would help writers go beyond cultural and linguistic particularities of all kinds. The addition of audible speech to moving pictures was not, therefore, universally welcomed by intellectuals of the time. Building on the work of Mary Ann Caws, Christophe WallRomana argues that avant-garde French poets, from Guillaume Apollinaire and Stéphane Mallarmé to Louis Aragon and Maurice Roche, were eager to tap the creative potential of moving pictures. Rather than see the cinema as a direct rival to their writing, French poets “took cinema and film culture to be reservoirs of new textual genres and practices, but they also meditated on the apparatus and the industry as potential fields of poetic expansion

146

Modernism in a Global Context

and actualization” (3). Blaise Cendrars was one such early adapter. Cendrars appeared in films and wrote screenplays, some of which were produced, but he also produced verse with a kind of cinematic flair. His early piece, “New York in Flashlight” (1912), suggests that Cendrars understood that cinema could provide a set of conventions that would help the poet cross national and linguistic boundaries. The text figures the aspiring French poet as part ethnographer, part cinematographer, eager to record the sensual and cultural data supplied abundantly by the vast metropolis. Over the course of his career, he would continue juxtaposing travel writing and cinematic techniques in texts such as The End of the World Filmed by the Angel of Notre Dame [La fin monde filmée par l’Ange Notre-Dame] (1916–19, English 1992), Prose of the Transsiberian and of Little Jeanne of France [Prose du Transsibérian et de la petite Jeanne de France] (1913, English 1972), and The African Saga [L’Anthologie négre] (1927), developing the idea that border-crossing writers have much to learn from the principles of the cinema. Cendrars’s short essay, “The ABCs of Cinema” [“L’ABC du cinéma”] (1917–21, English 1992), lays out, in telegraphic form, human history through the development of media technologies. Anticipating the ideas of McLuhan, Cendrars conceptualizes history as the evolution of reproduction technologies: first, the displacement of hieroglyphics by alphabetic writing; second, the invention of the printing press; third, the recording and transmission devices of the preceding decades. The essay figures modern recording devices as the successors of the great explorers, who bring alphabetic writing to the world at large: “It is the machine which recreates and displaces the sense of direction, and which finally discovers the sources of sensibility like the explorers Livingston, Burton, Speke, Grant, Baker, and Stanley” (25). By juxtaposing disparate images, and by controlling the tempo at which the viewer may apprehend them, cinema in particular has the power to disorient us, but it also has the power to discover new mental territories, bringing out the explorer in us all. Just as the great European explorers facilitated the movement of new ideas, Cendrars speculates that technological advancements will lead to something equally new—a different species of human altogether: The latest advancements of the precise sciences, world war, the concept of relativity, political convulsions, everything foretells

Media

147

that we are on our way toward a new synthesis of the human spirit, toward a new humanity and that a race of new men is going to appear. Their language will be the cinema. (28) Like McLuhan and other theorists of media and cybernetics, Cendrars regards the new machines as prostheses, extensions of human bodies and minds. And yet these media extensions will also produce a form of intensive change: a transformation of the very notion of the human, a type of humanity without cultural preferences and prejudices. Cendrars’s cinematic writing not only connects cultures, it anticipates a post-cultural world that serves the needs of a new type of person—a synthetic humanity that will be made possible by obliterating the boundaries that now separate us from others. The moving image will endow this universal human society with a means of communication, a language of thought. It is a powerful modernist fantasy of global interconnection. Similar to Cendrars, Dos Passos understood writing and cinema to be complementary rather than competing media. Dos Passos was influenced by the montage techniques developed by D. W. Griffith, V. I. Pudovkin, and Sergei Eisenstein, meeting the latter two during a visit to the Soviet Union in the late 1920s. Newsreels and documentaries were equally important to his experimental fiction, first deployed in Manhattan Transfer (1925) and expanded in the USA Trilogy (1930–7). As he puts it in the preface to his trilogy, “U.S.A. is the speech of the people” (vii). To capture the voice of the people, Dos Passos takes a media detour, borrowing form the form of cinema to transcribe the voice of a continent in his fictional texts. The trilogy makes extensive use of short interludes labeled “Newsreel” and “The Camera Eye.” These cinematic sections show their debt to film quite clearly, although the distinct genres create very different effects. “The Camera Eye” sections tend to be written in a stream of consciousness. Punctuation is erratic, characters appear and disappear, as if fragments of conversation were being overheard by a documentary filmmaker. “The Camera Eye (41),” for example, takes us to a radical gathering: “arent you coming to the anarchist picnic there’s going to be an anarchist picnic sure you’ve got to come to the anarchist picnic this afternoon,” the section begins (Nineteen Nineteen, 419). We do not know who speaks and to whom these words are addressed. Once the picnic begins, we hear snatches of verse, recited in French, before

148

Modernism in a Global Context

the writing reverts to English. The poetry alludes to the French Revolution as the anarchist picnickers attempt to connect their struggles with other insurrections. The section concludes, much as it began, in midstream: “She was a nice girl we sat side by side on the roof of the car and looked at the banlieue de Paris . . . under the broad gloom of evening she and I tu sais mon ami but what kind of goddamn management is this?” (420). These brief cinematic sections allow Dos Passos to roam widely with the narrative, to eavesdrop on anyone, anywhere. The “Newsreel” sections, in contrast, blend different voices, many of them taken directly from a variety of media. There are lyrics from dozens of songs in these sections, from national anthems, hymns, First World War soldiers’ songs, ragtime and blues numbers, folk ballads, and Tin Pan Alley ditties (Trombold). In addition to songs, there are newspaper headlines taken from around the world; nearly all the words appearing in these sections are heavily mediated (i.e., taken from or mimicking the language found in newspapers, newsreels, and popular music). In “Newsreel LXIV,” for example, Dos Passos leads us on a short tour of the modern mediascape: “Business Men Not Alarmed Over Coming Election / GRAVE FOREBODING UNSETTLES MOSCOW / LABOR CHIEFS RULED OUT OF PULPITS / imagination boggles at the reports from Moscow. . . . / OUR AIR SUPREMACY ACCLAIMED / . . . / Got myself in trouble / An’ shot a county sheriff down / . . . Completely Lost In Fog over Mexico / . . . For I’m dancin’ with tears in my eyes / ’Cause the girl in my arms isn’t you / 600 PUT TO DEATH AT ONCE IN CANTON” (The Big Money, 433–4). There are no literary characters and no plot in these sections. The narrative voice is given over entirely to other media, completely effacing the voice of the narrator. The song in “Newsreel LXIV” comes from the well-known duo of Irving Kahal and Sammy Fain. The lyrics do not appear to have any connection with the plot of the novel or with the headlines within the section. In fact, Dos Passos usually resists the temptation to create symbolic resonances across these different media: rather than harmonize or translate between media, Dos Passos prefers cacophony, with sounds and words and images and genres jangling against one another. The headlines take us around the world, explicitly connecting Dos Passos’s depiction of the United States with events happening elsewhere. The media make this attentiveness to international contexts conceivable. It is

Media

149

possible to read Dos Passos as one in a long line of modernists who use the techniques of film to record new ways of seeing the world (Spiegel), but his efforts are a noteworthy development in global modernism because his cinematic imagination attempts to place the United States in the geopolitical context of the 1930s. Moving between media allows Dos Passos to represent this diversity in motion. Like Dos Passos, the Senegalese novelist, screenwriter, and director Ousmane admired Soviet cinema, studying filmmaking in Moscow at the Gorky Studios for approximately a year in the early 1960s. A successful novelist as well as director, Ousmane is regarded by most readers as an adherent of social realism in both media. A brief examination of God’s Bits of Wood [Les Bouts de bois de Dieu] (1960, English 1962), published just as Ousmane was turning his attention to cinema, shows the limitations of this strict interpretation. The novel is about the strike conducted by African railway workers along the Dakar-Niger line in 1947–8. In order to capture the multiethnic unity of the strikers, the novel avoids following a central protagonist, instead toggling between the activists in different cities on the line: Bamako, Dakar, and Thiès in what would now be Mali and Senegal. While introducing the central characters in this drama—the cities and their railway workers— Ousmane draws directly on the style of the film treatment. Here, for instance, is how the third-person, roving narrator introduces readers to Thiès: Hovels. A few rickety shacks, some upturned tombs, walls of bamboo or millet stalks, iron barbs, and rotting fences. Thiès: a vast, uncertain plain where all the rot of the city has gathered— stakes and crossties, locomotive wheels, rusty shafts, knocked-in jerricans, old mattress springs, bruised and lacerated sheets of steel. . . . [The entire town] lay buried in a thick coating of dust spewed out by the locomotives. (13) Before meeting any of the human characters of this city, we are introduced to the landscape. It is the visual language of the cinematic treatment that renders this scene most powerfully. Unlike French or Wolof or Bambara, the languages spoken most frequently by characters in the novel (the language of narration is French, by the way), this cinematic sweep has the ability to show

150

Modernism in a Global Context

the reader the physical environment. It is the cinematic eye that allows the narrator, and at this point only the narrator, to see how the inhabitants of this dusty backwater are inextricably connected to the world beyond. Cinema and trains serve analogous functions in the novel, bringing the people of West Africa into direct contact with one another, and with their counterparts in France. Over the course of the novel, the striking railway workers come to learn that their collective interests transcend their cities of origin, their ethnic affiliations, and their status as colonial subjects: Something was being born inside them, as if the past and the future were coupling to breed a new kind of man, and it seemed to them that the wind was whispering a phrase they had often heard from Bakayoko [one of the strikers]: “The kind of man we were is dead, and our only hope for a new life lies in the machine, which knows neither a language nor a race.” (76) Similar to Krapp’s Last Tape, and many theorists of media, Ousmane here writes of the machine as something that transforms the essence of humanity. This machine is a prosthetic device, a tool allowing the workers to reach beyond their immediate contexts, and yet this extension also produces a form of intensive change. This transformation brings fantasies of limitless connection—machines know no languages or races—as well as fears of isolation and death. Media and machines are changing the essence of humanity and their cultures, producing a form of mediated internationalism.

Radio In the English-speaking world, radio broadcasting probably did more to decolonize literary production than any other medium or technology. Even though the BBC was committed to “national interests” (i.e., British imperialism) and mired in paternalism throughout much of its history, colonial intellectuals and their sympathetic metropolitan counterparts used radio broadcasting to build independent, postcolonial literary traditions. Pioneering figures such as Una Marson, Mulk Raj Anand, Henry Swanzy, and Dennis Duerden made use of the BBC to construct literary

Media

151

communities in the Indian subcontinent, in sub-Saharan Africa, and in the British West Indies. When actual decolonization took place, BBC networks and facilities became property of the state in places such as Ghana and India. Lest I overstate the decolonizing thrust of BBC activities, I should also note that the BBC was committed to the dominance of the English language, severely limiting the organization’s ability to foster truly intercultural literary production; this was internationalization through the domination of English. The organization was far more interested in promoting a vision of greater Britishness than it was in reaching out to colonized subjects by using indigenous languages (Potter). It was the advent of the Second World War that greatly accelerated the BBC’s willingness to appeal directly to local audiences in colonial regions. Caribbean Voices (1943–58), the long-running literary serial, began life as a way for West Indian servicemen to send messages back home, over the airwaves. Under the guidance of Una Marson and Henry Swanzy, the program soon became the largest patron of anglophone Caribbean writers (Breiner; Griffith; Kalliney, Commonwealth of Letters). Marson modeled the program on Voice (1942), George Orwell’s literary show for Indian audiences. Marson appeared on Orwell’s show, reading her own poetry, alongside Anand, T. S. Eliot, and other notable personalities, and she thought the program format, with some adjustments, could succeed with West Indian audiences. It ran on Sunday nights for over a decade, with regular contributions from a whole generation of West Indian writers, including Brathwaite, George Lamming, V. S. Naipaul, and Sam Selvon. Submissions of poetry and short stories, mainly, were gathered from all over the region, sent to London for final selection and recording (read by actors with a variety of accents, both metropolitan and identifiably West Indian, from all over the region), and ultimately broadcast to the West Indies through rediffusion technology. The BBC influenced the development of postcolonial African literature, too, with significant figures such as Chinua Achebe and Tayeb Salih having radio broadcasting backgrounds. Programs such as the highly successful Caribbean Voices, the less successful West African Voices, and the influential but short-lived Voice, served both imperialist and anticolonial agendas simultaneously. Such programs were acceptable to the BBC hierarchy because they were literary in nature, rather than

152

Modernism in a Global Context

political, and because they appealed to the most educated sectors of the population. The BBC hoped these cultural broadcasts would inspire sympathy with metropolitan values. Their inception during the Second World War was hardly coincidental: with the British Empire under threat of liquidation, the BBC pledged to do its part for the war effort by making colonial audiences feel more bound to imperial interests. On the other hand, literary programs showcasing colonial writers and intellectuals promoted the belief that colonial subjects no longer need metropolitan tutelage. Here were a group of writers that could match, and in some cases exceed, the accomplishments of their metropolitan counterparts. These programs tended to sidestep political questions, but the act of affording colonial intellectuals a place on BBC airwaves gave a select group of writers real standing—which many of them would use to argue for decolonization in other contexts. In a geographically dispersed place such as the British West Indies, Caribbean Voices also generated a great deal of nationalist feeling. It allowed writers in Barbados and Jamaica and Trinidad to hear what their contemporaries on other islands were doing as they were doing it. In tandem with innovative little magazines such as Bim and Kyk-over-al, Caribbean Voices gave the impression that the West Indies were constructing a distinctive literary culture relatively independent of metropolitan oversight. In the 1960s, the Transcription Centre, a recording and dissemination outlet for anglophone African writing, picked up partly where the BBC left off after decolonization. Dennis Duerden, its founder, was lured to the venture from BBC radio, where he had served as an expert on African art and music. The Transcription Centre emerged out of an improbable set of circumstances: it was a literary radio service, providing cheap cultural programming to African radio stations, but it was covertly bankrolled by the CIA, through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, as part of Cold War maneuvering in Africa (Moore). Even Duerden, its director, was not aware that the money ultimately came from the CIA. Even more surprising, given the source of the funding, is that Transcription Centre recordings, like Caribbean Voices, overwhelmingly confine themselves to literary matters and avoid political discussions (Kalliney, “Modernism”). Duerden strongly believed that any broadcasting with an overt Cold War stance would lack credibility among African intellectuals and audiences, who were neutrals, by

Media

153

and large, and would resent any outside influence. With the legacy of British imperialism still unresolved, most African intellectuals were not particularly open to the idea that their new nations would become client states of the United States or the Soviet Union, even when they were in sympathy with the ideological commitments of one of the Cold War superpowers. Figures such as Wole Soyinka, Ezekiel (later Es’kia) Mphahlele, and Lewis Nkosi had free rein on Transcription Centre projects, and none choose to serve as unambiguous apologists for US foreign policy. Paradoxically, the CIA helped fund the creation of relatively autonomous literary institutions in a decolonizing Africa (including Black Orpheus, Transition, and the Makerere Conference)—for a brief while, at least. When the scandal of CIA funding broke in 1966–7, the days of the Transcription Centre were numbered. How do literary texts from decolonizing regions represent the impact of radio broadcasting in emerging nation-states? Midnight’s Children (1981) is the most celebrated radio novel in English, and if it offers a representative case study, we can say that sound broadcasting was the privileged medium for state-building in postcolonial situations. Rushdie’s depiction of radio broadcasting relies upon many of the great modernist fantasies and fears about new media. The novel is built on the premise that “Midnight’s Children,” that is, the thousand-and-one children born in the first hour of India’s independence (though only 581 survive their first decade), are born with remarkable abilities: children who can fly, travel through time, breathe air or water, change shape or gender. The closer to midnight the children are born, the greater their gifts. Saleem Sinai, the novel’s exceptionally unreliable narrator, is one of two born right on the stroke of midnight, and so to him goes “the greatest talent of all—the ability to look into the hearts and minds of men” (229). Only one mind refuses to open to him—that of his doppelganger and rival, Shiva, also born on the stroke of Indian independence, who possesses the gifts of war. Here, we see the reprisal of the modernist as medium: the person with the greatest gifts is the person who has access to innumerable people, thoughts, ideas, speech, stretched across time and space, living or dead. As with any skill, Saleem’s telepathy needs honing and refining. At first, when this gift is revealed to Saleem, the world is a cacophonous rabble, a radio receiver jammed by innumerable transmissions on

154

Modernism in a Global Context

the same frequency. Only after considerable practice is he able to select and mentally process what is happening in other people’s brains: In the beginning . . . there was a language problem. The voices babbled in everything from Malayalam to Naga dialects, from the purity of Lucknow Urdu to the southern slurrings of Tamil. I understood only a fraction of the things being said within the walls of my skull. Only later . . . did I learn that below the surface transmissions . . . language faded away, and was replaced by universally intelligible thought-forms which far transcended words. (192) Saleem cracks the old modernist chestnut of finding a medium of communications that transcends linguistic and cultural particularity. What many modernists hoped to discover in photography and silent film is rendered here as a form of telepathy put in service of a new national constituency. Saleem entertains the prospect of uniting India’s many linguistic and ethnic groups through primal thought forms that “transcend” the particularities of spoken and written languages. When Saleem later assembles the “midnight’s children” into a caucus of sorts, he imagines their conversations transpiring “not in words at all, but in the purer language of thought” (293). Saleem’s radio, then, is a medium not of words but of thought in its purest, which is to say unmediated, form. This is one of the great ironies of modernist engagement with storage and transmission technologies: the more heavily mediated the information, the greater hope that the information being collected and disseminated will somehow transcend or outlive the medium through which it exists. As his skill increases, Saleem discovers that he can do more than merely hear what other people think, and more than merely transmit messages to others. He begins to assume the role of convener and broadcaster, allowing himself to act as a mind-meeting place for all the “children of midnight”: I should explain that as my mental facility increased, I found that it was possible not only to pick up the children’s transmissions; not only to broadcast my own messages; but also (since I seem to be stuck with this radio metaphor) to act as a sort of national

Media

155

network, so that by opening my transformed mind to all the children I could turn it into a kind of forum in which they could talk to one another, through me. (259) Only connect: this is E. M. Forster’s dream in fictional action, or so the narrator would have us believe. Or, Saleem features as a kind of embodiment of the artist Eliot describes in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” where the artist is all medium, effacing himself as much as possible. From Saleem’s perspective, acting like a radio transmitter means being utterly and selflessly democratic. Although he thinks some of the children boorish, immature, and self-important, he claims to give each the frequency, or bandwidth, to communicate with others. Unlike the highly centralized state broadcasting apparatuses, Saleem’s imaginary radio system operates along egalitarian principles, or so the narrator tells us. Conversely, Saleem, the defender of democratic principles, sometimes displays the other side of his modernist coin: the modernist as snob, the arch and knowing master of words broadcasting to a group of inarticulate, self-interested children. Before long, after the novelty of the “midnight’s children” councils wears off, the children resort to bickering, much as the newly independent India was prone to factionalism of all sorts: sectarian divisions, caste privileges, regional prejudices, political differences, and gender hierarchies all threaten to unravel the collective. Saleem pleads with them to stick together in the name of transcendent principles—“free will . . . hope . . . the great soul, otherwise known as mahatma, of mankind . . . and what of poetry, and art”—but his great rival Shiva shouts him down, saying the “midnight’s children” are good for idle chatter, but not for getting anything practical accomplished (ellipses original 293). The novel presents to us fictional ten-year-olds, rehashing debates from the early part of the century about the proper uses of new technologies, as Raymond Williams summarizes: mass-marketed entertainment and commercial broadcasting, on one side, minority culture and transcendent art elevating its audiences, on the other (“Culture and Technology”). Saleem, the snobbish aesthete, is too credulous to recognize the immense social power of this incredible medium. Shiva, by contrast, is willing to sacrifice aesthetic and ethical ideals for practical values: the “midnight’s children” ought to use this network for their practical, commercial advantage.

156

Modernism in a Global Context

Concluding summary Modernist writing is rife with ambivalence about media technologies. Virtually every writer mentioned in this chapter— from hyper-canonical Euro-American modernists such as Bishop and Eliot, to figures from other parts of the world, such as Bennett and Ousmane—both fantasizes about the types of communication enabled by new media and frets about the possibility that glossy surfaces may replace aesthetic depth. It is evident that there is no appreciable difference in attitudes toward media between writers from different parts of the world. It would be difficult to say that writers from “developed” societies are any more or less enthusiastic about new media than their counterparts from “developing” areas. If anything, writers from former colonial regions—often areas with multiple languages and uneven levels of literacy—tend to be more open to complementing the written word with other media forms. A more viable way to divide modernist writers into separate media camps may be to note the two different species of globalism at work in these texts. Some writers, such as Bishop, Pound, and Rushdie, imply that media provide a model for writing that might transcend linguistic and cultural boundaries. Emulating and incorporating different media encourage some modernists to think about audiences beyond regional or national constituencies. This involves treating media as extensions or as cultural prosthetics: the internationalism of breaking down boundaries. Other writers, by contrast, suggest that media do not so much stretch linguistic and cultural boundaries as transform the idea of the human altogether. Eliot, Beckett, Cendrars, and Ousmane all lead us in this direction. This involves treating media as the cause of intensive change, altering the very definition of human subjectivity. These writers suggest that machines are giving birth to a less innately human, more heavily mediated, and therefore more fully global form of writing.

Conclusion Modernities at large, or one world system?

At the center of Tayeb Salih’s well-regarded novel, Season of Migration to the North [Mawsim al-hijrah ilá al-shamal] (1966, English 1969), is a running argument about the nature of modernity. The main character in the novel, Mustafa Sa’eed, is a Sudanese man who spent many years in metropolitan Britain. Before returning to Sudan, settling in a small agricultural community, and marrying a local woman, he was a scholarly economist of some eminence during the interwar years. We learn that he is author of titles such as The Economics of Colonialism, Colonialism and Monopoly, The Cross and Gunpowder, and The Rape of Africa (137). In those books, he argues that European colonialism is an attempt to pillage the world. Adopting a Fabian perspective, he contends that imperialism creates one world-economic system by subjugating vast territories through an expansion of capitalist exploitation. If modernity is a global condition, it is so because the combination of European colonialism and capitalism establishes political and economic conditions straddling the globe. In the process, they also create an exploited class whose duty it is to contest these arrangements. During his years in England, Sa’eed preyed on white, metropolitan women when he was not writing academic books. As an economist, he explains how the Sudanese and other colonial subjects are the victims of European aggression. As a sexual being, however, he assumes the mantle of violence, treating his victims as he believes colonial subjects have been treated in kind. He explains his actions

158

Modernism in a Global Context

to the narrator as a form of imperialism in reverse, a way of exacting revenge upon the metropolitan order of things: They imported to us the germ of the greatest European violence, as seen on the Somme and at Verdun, the like of which the world has never previously known, the germ of a deadly disease that struck them more than a thousand years ago. Yes, my dear sirs, I came as an invader into your very homes: a drop of the poison which you have injected into the veins of history. (95) The First World War, in his account, is the apotheosis of competitive imperialist-capitalism as practiced by the great European powers. It unleashes its violence upon the world. Colonial and metropolitan subjects alike are formed in this crucible. The violence Sa’eed would wreak upon England is merely an inverted expression of the forms of violence practiced upon him and his compatriots. The unnamed narrator of Season of Migration, however, does not see the world in this way. Like Sa’eed, the narrator spent several years in metropolitan Britain attaining an advanced degree—in the narrator’s case, he earns a PhD in English, with a specialization in Romantic poetry. After returning to Sudan, during the transition to national independence, he takes up a post in the Ministry of Education, becoming an inspector of state schools. Unlike Sa’eed, however, the narrator does not see the world as a system of dialectical conflict, the legacy of European imperialism and anticolonial revolt. When asked to describe his experience in England, he reports: Over there is like here, neither better nor worse. But I am from here [Sudan], just as the date palm standing in the courtyard of our house has grown in our house and not in anyone else’s. The fact that they came to our land, I know not why, does that mean that we should poison our present and our future? Sooner or later they will leave our country, just as many people throughout history left many countries. The railways, ships, hospitals, factories and schools will be ours and we’ll speak their language without either a sense of guilt or a sense of gratitude. Once again we shall be as we were—ordinary people—and if we are lies we shall be lies of our own making. (49–50) Without denying the impact of colonialism, the narrator believes that cultural differences cannot be determined by the scripts

Conclusion

159

of imperial domination and capitalist exploitation. When the imperialists leave for good, he believes, the Sudanese will have the opportunity to use some of the things European commerce and rule brought to the region—the railways, hospitals, factories, schools, media networks, and even the English language will become property of former colonial subjects who will use these implements with neither shame nor gratitude. Whatever cultural differences there are between metropolitan Britain and late colonial Sudan, such differences cannot be explained simply or solely as the product of European imperialism and global capitalism. Culture is both irreducibly local—the date palm happens to be located here, not there—and not fully explicable by reference to the world’s political and economic relationships. Cultures may be affected by contexts, such as colonialism, but they cannot be fully determined by political and economic conditions. This running argument has animated many of the debates about modernism in a global context. On one hand, scholars as diverse as Marshall Berman, Pascale Casanova, Fredric Jameson, Franco Moretti, Edward Said, and Raymond Williams suggest that European imperialism and global capitalism are remaking the world into one economic and political unit, defined by uneven development. The world is a form of structured inequality, and we can best apprehend cultural differences by thinking about the political and economic consequences of such unjust arrangements. Season of Migration’s Mustafa Sa’eed is convinced that the world works precisely in this way. Trying to describe cultural differences without acknowledging the underlying global conditions would be futile or misleading. Regional variants of modernism, in this account, can be best understood as local, situational reactions to structural causes. A singular modernity, in Jameson’s formulation, does not quite mean a singular modernism: because global capitalism produces an uneven world, it makes sense that modernism has varieties. If European and African modernism have distinctive features, for instance, this is because their practitioners occupy different positions in the world-historical system. Against this, some influential theorists of global cultural production, such as Arjun Appadurai, Homi Bhabha, David Damrosch, Susan Stanford Friedman, Paul Gilroy, Jahan Ramazani, and Gayatri Spivak, have theorized global modernism less as a unified system and more as the play of cultural differences across many contexts. Global capitalism may have enabled more

160

Modernism in a Global Context

robust networks of cross-cultural exchange, but we should not then assume that it is pulling all the strings, especially where representational and aesthetic forms are under discussion. Without denying the existence of political and economic inequalities, these theorists are less convinced that global modernity is reducible to the set of conditions determined by structural hierarchies. More important, they are less quick to read evidence of cultural difference as an indirect expression of worldwide economic and political systems. If we tell lies about ourselves, as the narrator of Season of Migration says, it is not always because we have been deceived by the workings of global capitalism—it is quite possible to tell lies about ourselves for other reasons. Not surprisingly, these figures all believe that there is some value in reading texts for aesthetic and cultural particularity. The work of comparison, these thinkers contend, is sometimes most effective when it calls our attention to incompatible differences, ideas and values that cannot be translated seamlessly from one context to another. They define aesthetics, in part, as an order of representation that operates with a degree of autonomy from economic and political systems of domination. These two sides of the debate converge, however, in their descriptions of modernism as obsessed with dissonance, motion, and translation. Season of Migration provides a miniature illustration of this convergence, in which two very different accounts of modernity can be drawn from the same source material. Although Sa’eed and the unnamed narrator disagree about many things, they come together when Sa’eed unexpectedly recites a fragment of a Ford Madox Ford poem, “Antwerp,” about the First World War: These are the women of Flanders. They await the lost. They await the lost that shall never leave the dock; They await the lost that shall never again come by the train To the embraces of all these women with dead faces; They await the lost who lie dead in trench and barrier and foss, In the dark of the night. This is Charing Cross; it is past one of the clock; There is very little light. There is so much pain. (Selected Poems, 85) It is an intriguing moment in the novel. First, we must note that the narrator tells us that Sa’eed blurts out the poem, drunkenly,

Conclusion

161

in English. Of the group assembled for the drinking session, only the two central characters know English: the others present at the gathering all seem to be ignorant of the language, and none but the narrator takes any notice of Sa’eed’s impromptu poetry recital. Also, we should observe that the narrator translates the poem into Arabic for the benefit of the novel’s primary audience—the narrator lets the audience partake in the content of the poem, rather than leaving it printed in English, as Sa’eed speaks it (the poem is then mistranslated into English in my version of the novel). The narrator, at least in this particular moment, allows himself to act as a cultural intermediary between the English literary tradition and Arabic-reading audiences. It is this moment, moreover, that causes the narrator to seek out Sa’eed, extracting a long confession from him about his turbulent time in England. Until that time, Sa’eed had been living incognito among the people of the narrator’s community: none knows anything about Sa’eed’s history. The whole plot of the novel, therefore, hinges on this scene of translation, and later mistranslation. Surprisingly, perhaps, wrenching this poem out of context produces an unlikely bond between the pair. Sa’eed trusts the narrator with his secrets—even trusting the narrator as executor of his will and guardian of his children—not simply because they share two languages and the experience of travel, but because they share knowledge of the metropolitan modernist literary tradition. Not unlike Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “In the Waiting Room,” which I discuss in the previous chapter, Season of Migration selfconsciously returns us to an earlier scene of modernist production. But this shared knowledge does not mean the two men are likely to read the poem in the same way. Both may readily acknowledge that the poem conveys a message of pain and desolation, but it is not at all clear that the narrator and Sa’eed understand the resonance of the poem similarly. Sa’eed, convinced that the First World War epitomizes the endemic violence of European imperialism, implies that his empathy rests with the soldiers who lay dead in the trenches, the men who will never return. The poem foreshadows events later in the novel, as Sa’eed himself disappears, presumed dead, leaving a widow and children behind. Sa’eed identifies very strongly with the men described in these verses. This squares, generally, with Sa’eed’s description of himself as a sexual predator, targeting white women in order to exact a form of revenge on the culture of the colonizers. The perspective of the victimized women is, at best, a secondary consideration for

162

Modernism in a Global Context

him. Sa’eed interprets the aesthetics of the poem, in other words, by thinking about the relation between the men of the poem and the geopolitical order of which they are victims. The narrator, however, increasingly sees Sa’eed from the perspective of Sa’eed’s widow, who occupies a position structurally analogous to the poem’s women of Flanders. Where Sa’eed sees the First World War as the epitome of a nationalist and imperialist conflict, the narrator complicates that perspective by implying that such wars impact men and women unevenly. The narrator’s reservations about Sa’eed’s version of anti-imperialism come partly from his conviction that Sudanese women should be equal partners in the anticolonial struggle. Sa’eed, by contrast, sees anti-imperialism, not unlike imperialist wars, as a man’s business. Reading the poem from the position of the women, who wait forlornly at Charing Cross station, calls to mind Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, in which she declares, “as a woman, I have no country,” considered in greater depth in Chapter 3. These women are also victims of a nationalist war, but they have no material investment in the kinds of political and cultural institutions that could support such a conflict. This feminist position implies that versions of imperialism and antiimperialism do not always recognize that nations—even nations in formation—allow their constituencies unequal access to political and cultural institutions. Being anti-imperialist, the narrator of Season of Migration suggests as the text develops, is not sufficient in and of itself. Another way to comprehend this simmering rivalry between Sa’eed and the unnamed narrator is to figure it as the difference between competitive internationalism and globalism, or what Gayatri Spivak calls planetarity. In Pascale Casanova’s work, competitive internationalism describes a situation in which nation-states are still very relevant for theorizing world cultural production. National literary traditions are constantly engaged in struggle against one another. International exchange happens, to a large extent, in the context of international competition, that is, in the context of pursuing recognition for discrete national traditions. Moreover, the geopolitical and geo-cultural maps of the world do not necessarily resemble one another. A nation such as Sweden has a cultural profile that vastly exceeds its geopolitical influence, while the inverse may be true for a nation such as China. In this general

Conclusion

163

model, we might attribute regional variations to the unequal effects of a single, overarching, hierarchical world system. Globalism implies something different altogether, a way of imagining forms of cultural exchange that evade, bypass, or downplay the lingering significance of national institutions and traditions. As in Spivak’s account, the question of gender difference is not incidental to a planetary perspective. The cosmopolitanism of Woolf and the black Atlantic crucible described by Gilroy are two other variants of antinational worldliness. Such models of the global describe cultural forms that transcend or deny national formations, rather than imagining forms of international exchange within one world system. Some global cultural institutions, for instance, have been developed as an antidote to national systems of evaluation and dissemination. The new media of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provide another example, allowing many writers to fantasize about reaching worldwide audiences, obliterating the boundaries attributable to political, linguistic, and cultural differences. Some of these efforts have been more successful than others. How we understand the function of modernism in a global context depends, to a large degree, on how we see the debates about the relationship between politics and aesthetics—can aesthetic forms be independent of national territories and global capitalism?—and whether we think modernist cultural production tends to shore up or erode national traditions. The study of modernism has thrived in this state of productive tension. It will be fascinating to see how these debates evolve in the coming years.

164

Bibliography

Achebe, Chinua. “The Novelist as Teacher.” 1965. In Morning Yet on Creation Day, 67–73. Garden City: Anchor, 1975. Print. Acton, Harold. Memoirs of an Aesthete. London: Methuen, 1948. Print. Amoko, Apollo Obonyo. Postcolonialism in the Wake of the Nairobi Revolution: Ngugi wa Thiong’o and the Idea of African Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print. Anderson, Amanda. The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Print. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 1983. 3rd edn. London: Verso, 2006. Print. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Print. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: Norton, 2006. Print. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry 17.2 (1991): 336–57. Print. Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso, 2013. Print. Apter, Emily. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Print. Armstrong, Tim. Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Print. Arnold, A. James. Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. Print. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures. 2nd edn. London: Routledge, 1989, 2002. Print. Attridge, Derek and Marjorie Howes, eds. Semicolonial Joyce. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Print. Avery, Todd. Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922-1938. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Print. Baer, Benjamin Conisbee. Indigenous Vanguards: Literary Modernity in Different Tongues. Forthcoming, Columbia University Press.

166

Bibliography

Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood. Intro. T.S. Eliot. New York: New Directions, 1937. Print. Baucom, Ian. “Frantz Fanon’s Radio: Solidarity, Diaspora, and the Tactics of Listening.” Contemporary Literature 42.1 (2001): 15–49. Print. Baucom, Ian. Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Print. Baucom, Ian. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Print. Baudelaire, Charles. The Flowers of Evil. “The Voyage.” 1955. Trans. Robert Lowell. Revised edn, 179–85. Norfolk: New Directions, 1962. Print. Beckett, Samuel. Krapp’s Last Tape. 1958. In Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic Works, 213–23. London: Faber and Faber, 1986. Print. Bely, Andrei. Petersburg. 1913–14. Trans. and Intro. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. Print. Benjamin, Walter. “Reflections on Radio.” 1931. In Selected Writings, Vol. 2, 1927–34, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone and others, 543–4. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Print. Bennett, Louise. “Colonization in Reverse.” 1966. In Writing Black Britain 1948–1998: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, ed. James Procter, 16–17. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Print. Bennett, Louise. “Jamaica Language.” In Aunty Roach Seh, ed. Mervyn Morris, 1–3. Kingston: Sanger’s Book Stores, 1993. Print. Benson, Peter. “Black Orpheus”, “Transition”, and Modern Cultural Awakening in Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Print. Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. Print. Berger, John. “Speech on Accepting the Booker Prize for Fiction at the Café Royal in London on 23 November 1972”. John Berger: Selected Essays, ed. Geoff Dyer, 253–5. New York: Pantheon, 2001. Originally published in Guardian November 24, 1972: 12. Print. Berman, Jessica. Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Print. Berman, Jessica. Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Print. Berman, Marshall. All that Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. 2nd edn. New York: Penguin, 1982, 1988. Print. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Print. Bishop, Elizabeth. “In the Waiting Room.” 1971. In Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters, ed. Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz, 149–51. New York: Library of America, 2008. Print.

Bibliography

167

Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Print. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Ed. and Intro. Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Print. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Trans. Susan Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Print. Bowen, Elizabeth. The Last September. New York: Random House, 1929. Print. Boyle, Kay, Whit Burnett, Hart Crane, Caresse Crosby, Harry Crosby, Martha Foley, Stuart Gilbert, A. L. Gillespie, Leigh Hoffman, Eugene Jolas, Elliot Paul, Douglas Rigby, Theo Rutra, Robert Sage, Harold J. Salemson, and Laurence Vail. “The Revolution of the Word.” Transition 16–17 (1929): 13. Print. Braddock, Jeremy and Jonathan P. Eburne, eds. “Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic.” Special issue of Modern Fiction Studies 51.4 (2005): 731–978. Print. Brathwaite, Kamau. The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. Print. Brathwaite, Kamau. History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. London: New Beacon, 1984. Print. Brathwaite, Kamau. “Jazz and the West Indian Novel.” 1967–8. In Roots, 55–110. Ann Arbor: Ann Arbor Paperbacks, 1993. Print. Breckenridge, Carol A., Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, eds. Cosmopolitanism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Print. Breiner, Lawrence A. “Caribbean Voices on the Air: Radio, Poetry, and Nationalism in the Anglophone Caribbean.” In Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture, ed. Susan Merrill Squier, 93–108. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Print. Brennan, Timothy. At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Print. Brooker, Peter and Andrew Thacker, eds. Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2005. Brouillette, Sarah. Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print. Brown, Nicholas. Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth-Century Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Print. Bulson, Eric. “Little Magazine, World Form.” In The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. Mark Wollaeger with Matt Eatough, 267–87. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Print.

168

Bibliography

Bulson, Eric. Novels, Maps, Modernity: The Spatial Imagination, 1850-2000. New York: Routledge, 2007. Print. Bush, Christopher. Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Print. Čapek, Karel. War with the Newts. 1936. Trans. M. and R. Weatherall. Intro. Ivan Klíma. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1985. Print. Carlston, Erin G. Thinking Fascism: Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Print. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. 1999. Trans. M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Print. Caws, Mary Ann, ed. Manifesto: A Century of Isms. Licoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Print. Cendrars, Blaise. “The ABCs of Cinema.” In Modernities and Other Writings, ed. and intro. Monique Chefdor, trans. Esther Allen with Monique Chefdor, 23–9. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Print. Cendrars, Blaise. The African Saga. Trans. Margery Bianco. Intro. Arthur B. Spingarn. New York: Negro University Press, 1927. Print. Cendrars, Blaise. “Prose of the Transsiberian and of Little Jeanne of France.” 1913. In Selected Writings of Blaise Cendrars, ed. and intro. Walter Albert. Preface Henry Miller, 66–99. New York: New Directions, 1962, 1966. Print. Césaire, Aimé. Cadastre. Ed. and Trans. Emile Snyder and Sanford Upson. Intro. Snyder. New York: The Third Press, 1973. Print. Césaire, Aimé. The Original 1939 “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land.” Ed. and Trans. A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman. Intro. Arnold. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013. Print. Césaire, Aimé. Solar Throat Slashed: The Unexpurgated 1948 Edition. Ed. and Trans. A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman. Intro. Arnold. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011. Print. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. 2nd edn. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Print. Chang, Eileen. Love in a Fallen City. Trans. Karen S. Kingsbury and Eileen Chang. New York: NYRB, 2007. Print. Cheah, Pheng. Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Print. Cheah, Pheng and Bruce Robbins, eds. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Print. Chinitz, David. “T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide.” PMLA 110.2 (1995): 236–47. Print. Chow, Rey. “How (the) Inscrutable Chinese Led to Globalized Theory.” PMLA 116.1 (2001): 69–74. Print.

Bibliography

169

Chow, Rey. Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Print. Chrisman, Laura. Rereading the Imperial Romance: British Imperialism and South African Resistance in Haggard, Schreiner, and Plaatje. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Print. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Print. Cohen, Debra Rae, Michael Coyle, and Jane Lewty, eds. Broadcasting Modernism. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009. Print. Cohn, Deborah N. The Latin American Literary Boom and U.S. Nationalism during the Cold War. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012. Print. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 1899. Ed. Robert Kimbrough. 3rd edn. New York: Norton, 1963, 1971, 1988. Print. Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim. 1899–1900. Ed. Thomas C. Moser. New York: Norton, 1968. Print. Coyle, Michael. “‘We Speak to India’: T.S. Eliot’s Wartime Broadcasts and the Frontiers of Culture.” In Broadcasting Modernism, ed. Debra Rae Cohen, Michael Coyle, and Jane Lewty, 176–95. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009. Print. Cunard, Nancy. Negro: An Anthology. 1934, London: Wishart. Ed. and abridged Hugh Ford. New York: Ungar, 1970. Print. Cunard, Nancy, Aragon, W. H. Auden, José Bergamin, Jean Richard Bloch, Brian Howard, Heinrich Mann, Ivor Montagu, Pablo Neruda, Ramón Sender, Stephen Spender, and Tristan Tzara. “Spain: The Question.” Paris, June 1937. MS Nancy Cunard Papers, box 21 folder 3, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas. Dalleo, Raphael. Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere: From the Plantation to the Postcolonial. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Print. Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Print. Danius, Sara. The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. Print. Davis, Thadious M. Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. Print. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. “Heavy Waters: Waste and Atlantic Modernity.” PMLA 125.3 (2010): 703–12. Print. Derrida, Jacques. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (Thinking in Action). Trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. London: Routledge, 2001. Print. Desai, Gaurav. Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Print.

170

Bibliography

Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Print. Dos Passos, John. Manhattan Transfer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925. Print. Dos Passos, John. U.S.A. (The 42nd Parallel, Nineteen Nineteen, The Big Money). New York: The Modern Library, 1930–7. Print. Doyle, Laura and Laura Winkiel, eds. Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Print. Duffy, Enda. The Subaltern “Ulysses”. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Print. Eagleton, Terry. Exiles and Émigrés: Studies in Modern Literature. London: Chatto and Windus, 1970. Print. Edmondson, Belinda. Making Men: Gender, Literary Authority, and Women’s Writing in Caribbean Narrative. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Print. Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Print. Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” 1919. In The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, 47–59. New York: Knopf, 1930. Print. Eliot, T. S. “The Waste Land.” 1922. In The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose, ed. Lawrence Rainey, 55–74. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Print. Emery, Mary Lou. Modernism, the Visual, and Caribbean Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Print. English, James F. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Print. Englund, Harri. Human Rights and African Airwaves: Mediating Equality on the Chichewa Radio. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Print. Esty, Jed. A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Print. Esty, Jed. Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Print. Fanon, Frantz. A Dying Colonialism. Trans. Haakon Chevalier. Intro. Adolfo Gilly. New York: Grove, 1965. Print. Felski, Rita. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Print. Felski, Rita and Susan Stanford Friedman, eds. Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Print.

Bibliography

171

Fojas, Camilla. Cosmopolitanism in the Americas. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2005. Print. Ford, Ford Madox. Selected Poems. Ed. and Intro. Max Saunders. New York: Routledge, 1997, 2003. Print. Forster, E. M. Howards End. 1910. Ed. Alistair M. Duckworth. Boston: Bedford, 1997. Print. Forster, E. M. A Passage to India. 1924. Ed. Oliver Stallybrass. London: Penguin, 1934, 1979. Print. Friedman, Alan Warren, ed. Beckett in Black and Red: Translations for Nancy Cunard’s “Negro” (1934). Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000. Print. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Print. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Print. Gale, Matthew. Dada and Surrealism. London: Phaidon, 1997. Print. Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Print. Gikandi, Simon. Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Print. Gikandi, Simon. Slavery and the Culture of Taste. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Print. Gikandi, Simon. Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. Print. Gillies, Mary Ann, Helen Sword, and Steven G. Yao, eds. Pacific Rim Modernisms. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Print. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Gitelman, Lisa. Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Print. Glass, Loren. Counterculture Colophon: Grove Press, “The Evergreen Review”, and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. Print. Goble, Mark. Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Print. GoGwilt, Christopher. The Passage of Literature: Genealogies of Modernism in Conrad, Rhys, and Pramoedya. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Print. Goldstone, Andrew. Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Print.

172

Bibliography

Goody, Alex. Technology, Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011. Print. Goyal, Yogita. Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Print. Griffith, Glyne. “‘This is London Calling the West Indies’: The BBC’s ‘Caribbean Voices’.” In West Indian Intellectuals in Britain, ed. Bill Schwarz, 196–208. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Print. Hage, Emily. “The Magazine as Strategy: Tristan Tzara’s Dada and the Seminal Role of Dada Art Journals in the Dada Movement.” The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 2.1 (2011): 33–53. Print. Hart, Matthew. Nations of Nothing but Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Print. Hayles, N. Katherine. “Voices out of Bodies, Bodies out of Voices: Audiotape and the Production of Subjectivity.” In Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies, ed. Adalaide Kirby Morris, 74–96. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Print. Hayot, Eric. On Literary Worlds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Print. Hegglund, Jon. World Views: Metageographies of Modernist Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Print. Herring, Scott. Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Print. Hill, Alan. In Pursuit of Publishing. London: John Murray, 1988. Print. Hitchcock, Peter. The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Print. Hoffman, Irene. “Documents of Dada and Surrealism: Dada and Surrealist Journals in the Mary Reynolds Collection.” Hosted by the Art Institute of Chicago. http://www.artic.edu/reynolds/essays/ hofmann.php (Accessed June 10, 2015). Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. 1944. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1972. Print. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge, 2001. Print. Hutchinson, George. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Print. Innes, C. L. A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain, 1700-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Print. Innis, Harold A. Empire and Communication. 1950. Revised edn. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972. Print. The International Dada Archive. Hosted by University of Iowa Libraries. http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/dada/index.html.

Bibliography

173

Isherwood, Christopher. The Berlin Stories: “The Last of Mr. Norris” and “Goodbye to Berlin”. New York: New Directions, 1935, 1945, 1954. Print. Jaffe, Aaron. Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Print. Jaji, Tsitsi Ella. Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Print. James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. 1938. 2nd edn. New York: Vintage, 1963. Print. Jameson, Fredric. “Modernism and Imperialism.” In Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, by Terry Eagleton, Jameson, and Edward W. Said. Intro. Seamus Deane, 41–66. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. Print. Jameson, Fredric. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. London: Verso, 2002. Print. Joshi, Priya. In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Print. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. Ed. and Intro. Seamus Deane. New York: Penguin, 1964, 1992. Print. Kalliney, Peter J. Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Print. Kalliney, Peter J. “Modernism, African Literature, and the Cold War.” Modern Language Quarterly 76.3 (2015): 333–68. Print. Kaul, Chandrika, ed. Media and the British Empire. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Print. Kenner, Hugh. The Mechanic Muse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Print. Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Print. Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. 1901. Ed. and Intro. Edward W. Said. London: Penguin, 1987. Print. Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Print. Kleingeld, Pauline. Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Print. Larsen, Nella. Quicksand and Passing. Ed. and Intro. Deborah E. McDowell. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986. Print. Lee, Leo Ou-fan. Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Print.

174

Bibliography

Levenson, Michael. Modernism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. Print. Lewer, Debbie. “The Avant-Garde in Swiss Exile 1914-20.” In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, ed. Peter Brooker, Sascha Bru, Andrew Thacker, and Christian Weikop, 1032–56. Vol. III, Europe 1880–1940, Part II. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Print. Lindfors, Bernth. “The Teaching of African Literatures in African Anglophone Universities: An Instructive Canon.” In Canonization and Teaching of African Literatures, ed. Raoul Granqvist, 41–55. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990. Print. Lott, Eric. “The New Cosmopolitanism.” Transition 72 (1996): 108–35. Print. Lottman, Herbert R. The Left Bank: Writers, Artists, and Politics from the Popular Front to the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Print. Low, Gail. Publishing the Postcolonial: Anglophone West African and Caribbean Writing in the UK 1948-1968. New York: Routledge, 2011. Print. Low, Gail and Marion Wynne-Davies, eds. A Black British Canon? Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Print. Lyon, Janet. “Cosmopolitanism and Modernism.” In The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. Wollaeger with Eatough, 387–412. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Print. Madureira, Luís. Cannibal Modernities: Postcoloniality and the AvantGarde in Caribbean and Brazilian Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Print. Mao, Douglas and Rebecca L. Walkowitz. “The New Modernist Studies.” PMLA 123.3 (2008): 737–48. Print. Marcus, Jane. Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Print. Marcus, Laura. The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Print. Marx, John. The Modernist Novel and the Decline of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Print. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. 1848. Ed. and Intro. Jeffrey C. Isaac. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. Print. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995. Print. McDonald, Christie and Susan Rubin Suleiman, eds. French Global: A New Approach to Literary History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Print. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Ed. W. Terrence Gordon. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 1964, 1994. Print.

Bibliography

175

Moore, Gerald. “The Transcription Centre in the Sixties: Navigating in Narrow Seas.” Research in African Literatures 33.3 (2002): 167–81. Print. Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900. London: Verso, 1998. Print. Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1 (2000): 54–68. Print. Moretti, Franco. “More Conjectures.” New Left Review 20 (2003): 73–81. Print. Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The “Bildungsroman” in European Culture. 2nd edn. Trans. Albert Sbragia. London: Verso: 1987, 2000. Print. Moses, Michael Valdez. The Novel and the Globalization of Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Print. Murphet, Julian. Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the AngloAmerican Avant-garde. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Print. Nagel, Thomas. The View from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Print. Neogy, Rajat. “7 T ONE  7 E TON.” Transition 1 (1961): 10. Print. Nicol, Davidson. “Alioune Diop and the African Renaissance.” African Affairs 78 (1979): 3–11. Nixon, Rob. London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Print. North, Michael. Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Print. North, Michael. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and TwentiethCentury Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Print. Nussbaum, Martha C. with Respondents. For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism. Ed. Joshua Cohen. Boston: Beacon, 1996. Print. Nwankwo, Ifeome Kiddoe. Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Americas. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Print. Ousmane Sembène. God’s Bits of Wood. 1960. Trans. Francis Price. Oxford: Heinemann, 1962. Print. Parry, Benita. Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary Frontiers. London: Macmillan, 1983. Print. Parry, Benita. “The Contradictions of Cultural Studies” Transition 53 (1991): 37–45. Print. Parry, Benita. Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2004. Print. Perloff, Marjorie. The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture. 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986, 2003. Print.

176

Bibliography

Potter, Simon. Broadcasting Empire: The BBC and the British World, 1922-1970. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Print. Pound, Ezra. “In a Station of the Metro.” 1913. In Poems and Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth, 287. New York: Library of America, 2003. Print. Povey, John. “The Dakar Festival of Negro Arts and the Commonwealth.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 3 (1968): 103–6. Print. Pramoedya Ananta Toer. This Earth of Mankind. 1975. Trans. Max Lane. New York: Penguin, 1990. Print. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Print. Puchner, Martin. Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Print. Rabinow, Paul. “Representations are Social Facts: Modernity and PostModernity in Anthropology.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus, 234–61. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Print. Rainey, Lawrence. Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Print. Ramazani, Jahan. The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Print. Ramazani, Jahan. A Transnational Poetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Print. Ranasinha, Ruvani. South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Print. Read, Justin. Modern Poetics and Hemispheric American Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print. Rhys, Jean. “Let Them Call it Jazz.” 1962. In Tigers are Better-Looking with a Selection from “The Left Bank”, 47–67. London: André Deutsch, 1968. Print. Robbins, Bruce. Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Print. Robbins, Bruce. Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture. London: Verso, 1993. Print. Rohlehr, Gordon. Pathfinder: Black Awakening in “The Arrivants” of Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Tunapuna, Trinidad: Gordon Rohlehr, 1981. Print. Rogers, Gayle. Modernism and the New Spain: Britain, Cosmopolitan Europe, and Literary History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Print. Ross, Stephen. Conrad and Empire. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. Print. Rubin, Andrew N. Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Print.

Bibliography

177

Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children: A Novel. New York: Random House, 1981, 2006. Print. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1993. Print. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1978. Print. Salih, Tayeb. Season of Migration to the North. 1966. Trans. Denys Johnson-Davies. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1969. Print. Saunders, Frances Stonor. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. New York: The New Press, 1999. Print. Schneer, Jonathan. London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Print. Schreiner, Olive. The Story of an African Farm. 1883. Intro. Doris Lessing. New York: Schocken, 1968. Print. Scott, Bonnie Kime, ed. The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Print. Scott, David. “The Tragic Vision in Postcolonial Time.” PMLA 129.4 (2014): 799–808. Print. Senghor, Léopold Sédar. “The Defense and Illustration of Négritude.” Opening address at 1966 Dakar festival. Translated and reprinted in Negro Digest (September 1966): 4–9. Print. Seshagiri, Urmila. Race and the Modernist Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. Print. Shih, Shu-mei. The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Print. Slaughter, Joseph R. Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. Print. Slemon, Stephen. “Modernism’s Last Post.” ARIEL 20.4 (1989): 3–17. Print. Snaith, Anna. Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Print. Spender, Stephen. The Thirties and After: Poetry, Politics, People, 1933-1970. New York: Random House, 1978. Print. Spiegel, Alan. Fiction and the Camera Eye: Visual Consciousness in Film and the Modern Novel. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1976. Print. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Print. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Print. Squier, Susan Merrill, ed. Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Print.

178

Bibliography

Steenmeijer, Maarten. “How the West Was Won: Translations of Spanish American Fiction in Europe and the United States.” In Voice-Overs: Translation and Latin American Literature, ed. Daniel Balderston and Marcy E. Schwartz, 144–55. Albany: SUNY Press, 2002. Print. Stephens, Michelle Ann. Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914-1962. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Print. Stouky, Abdallah. “The World Festival of Negro Arts, or the Nostalgias of Négritude.” Trans. Maria Moreno. Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture 3.1 (2009): 171–5. Originally published as “Le Festival mondial des arts négres ou les nostalgiques de la Négritude.” Souffles 2 (1966): 41–5. Suárez, Juan Antonio. “T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the Gramophone, and the Modernist Discourse Network.” New Literary History 32.3 (2001): 747–68. Print. Suleri Goodyear, Sara. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Print. Thacker, Andrew. Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Print. Tiffany, Daniel. Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Print. Todd, Richard. Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today. London: Bloomsbury, 1996. Print. Trombold, John. “Popular Songs as Revolutionary Culture in John Dos Passos’ ‘U.S.A.’ and other Early Works.” Journal of Modern Literature 19.2 (1995): 289–316. Print. Trotter, David. Literature in the First Media Age: Britain Between the Wars. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Print. van der Veer, Peter. “Colonial Cosmopolitanism.” In Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice, ed. Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, 165–79. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Print. Vassanji, M. G. The Gunny Sack. Oxford: Heinemann, 1989. Print. Wali, Obiajunwa. “The Dead End of African Literature?” Transition 10 (1963): 13–16. Print. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Print. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond the Nation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Print. Walmsley, Anne. The Caribbean Artists Movement, 1966-1972: A Literary and Cultural History. London: New Beacon, 1992. Print. Wall-Romana, Christophe. Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Print.

Bibliography

179

Wilford, Hugh. The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Print. Williams, Raymond. “Culture and Technology.” In The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, ed. and intro. Tony Pinkney, 119–39. London: Verso, 1989. Print. Williams, Raymond. “Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism.” 1985. In The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, ed. and intro. Tony Pinkney, 37–48. London: Verso, 1989. Print. Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Schocken Books, 1974. Print. Winkiel, Laura. Modernism, Race, and Manifestos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Print. Wollaeger, Mark. Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Print. Wollaeger, Mark, with Matt Eatough, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Print. Woolf, Virginia. Three Guineas. Ed. and Intro. Jane Marcus. Orlando: Harcourt, 1938, 2006. Print. Worth, Aaron. Imperial Media: Colonial Networks and Information Technologies in the British Literary Imagination, 1857-1918. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014. Print. Wright, Richard. The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. Foreword Gunnar Myrdal. Cleveland: World Publishing, 1956. Print.

180

Index

Achebe, Chinua  5–6, 14, 53, 105, 108, 151 ACLALS (Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies meeting)  92 Adorno, Theodor The Dialectic of Enlightenment 61 on radio  133 African Writers Series, see Heinemann Anand, Mulk Raj  3, 25, 89–90 Anderson, Amanda  70–1 Anderson, Benedict  54–5, 131 anticolonialism, see also Bandung Conference; decolonization; imperialism; Présence Africaine and “Bandung modernism” 49–58 and cultural hybridity  20, 27–8, 32–5, 91–2, 110, 112, 114 and imperialist networks  3, 132, 151–2 national movements  48 support from publishers  105–6, 119 and women  162 Appadurai, Arjun  130–1, 134, 159

Appiah, Kwame Anthony  64, 66 Apter, Emily The Translation Zone 19–20 Arnold, A. James  50–1 Auden, W. H.  74–6 autonomy (of art), see also capitalism; cultural institutions; imperialism; politics and global modernity  159–60 and little magazines  98, 100–1, 120 n.2 as modernist myth  128 and Moretti’s “law of literary evolution” 9–10 and nationalism  14 from national space  93–4, 96–7, 113, 131 and postcoloniality  101–2, 109–10, 119, 153 awards, see prizes Ball, Hugo  97–8, 111 Bandung Conference of 1955  26–7, 32, 39, see also anticolonialism; decolonization; imperialism “Bandung modernism”  44, 48–58 and the meaning of imperialism 36 and tragedy  21 Barnes, Djuna  60, 66, 80, 88

182

Index

Nightwood 81–4 Baucom, Ian  133 Baudelaire, Charles  17, 89 The Flowers of Evil 1–3 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) and cultural exchange  3 and T. S. Eliot  140–1 use in decolonization  132, 150–2 Beach, Sylvia  103, 118 Beckett, Samuel  59, 106, 113–14, 125–6, 129 Krapp’s Last Tape  143, 150 Bely, Andrei  89 Benjamin, Walter  129–30 Bennett, Louise  21, 143, 156 “Colonization in Reverse”  141 “Jamaica Language”  141 Benson, Peter  101–2 Benstock, Shari  68–9 Berger, John G. 115 Berlin Conference of 1884–5  26–7, 32, see also anticolonialism; imperialism “Berlin modernism”  39–49, 57–8 Berman, Jessica  20–1, 70 Berman, Marshall  46–7, 159 Bhabha, Homi  7, 33–4, 38, 56, 159 Bishop, Elizabeth  4, 129, 156 “In the Waiting Room”  137–9, 161 the black Atlantic, see also anticolonialism; decolonization; imperialism; Paul Gilroy, race and Aimé Césaire  52 and exoticism  111 and globalism  163

and The Gunny Sack (Vassanji) 56 and Nancy Cunard  73, 75, 118 and Nella Larsen  77 and the 1966 World Festival of Black Arts  92 Pan-African Conference of 1900’s influence on  39 simultaneity with European modernism 90 and sound technologies  133–4 theorization of  16–19, 31 and War with the Newts (Čapek) 47 Boehmer, Elleke  32 Borges, Jorge Luis  104, 106, 114 Bourdieu, Pierre and global cultural institutions  89, 92–8, 120 n.2 and Pascale Casanova  12 Bowen, Elizabeth  27, 49, 58 The Last September 43–4 Bowles, Paul  4 Brathwaite, Kamau  141–3, 151 The Arrivants 142–3 Brennan, Timothy  64, 114 Buck, Pearl  116–17 Bulson, Eric  99–100, 102 Bush, Christopher  20, 136–7 Cabaret Voltaire (magazine)  97–8, see also Dada Caillois, Roger  4, 104, 106, 118, see also Gallimard Cairo 3–4 Čapek, Karel  29, 58 War with the Newts 45–8 capitalism and aesthetic objects  97, 99, 103, 163 and the black Atlantic  31 and cosmopolitanism  60–3 and globalization  14–15

Index

and imperialism  37–9, 45–7, 157–60 and modernity  5 Caribbean Voices 151–2 Carlston, Erin  81 Casanova, Pascale  5–6, 38, 94–5, 113, 159, 162–3 The World Republic of Letters  12–14, 16 Cendrars, Blaise  129, 156 “The ABCs of Cinema”  146–7 Césaire, Aimé  29, 35, 49–50, 58, 107 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land 50 “Ode to Guinea”  50–2, 57 Chakrabarty, Dipesh  90 Chang, Eileen  60, 84, 88 “Aloeswood Incense”  85–6 “Love in a Fallen City”  86–7 Cheah, Pheng  55, 87–8 Chinitz, David  140 Chow, Rey  127 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency)  102, 152–3 cinema, see also technology cinematic writing  135, 145–50 as universal language  129, 144–5 cities, see also Berlin; Cairo; cultural institutions; Hong Kong; Ibadan; modernity; New York City; Paris, Shanghai, technology as centers  8, 10, 59, 84 and decolonization  29, 32, 99–100, 104–6, 107–8 metropolitan modernisms  3–4, 35–9, 89–91, 130, 161 and prize culture  115–16 Clifford, James  67–8 the Cold War and decolonization  49, 152–3

183

and the Latin American Boom 104 and postcolonial solidarity 26–7 colonialism, see anticolonialism; imperialism conferences  26, 91–2, 107–11, 119, see also Bandung Conference; Berlin Conference; cultural institutions; Makerere Conference; Présence Africaine Conference Congress for Cultural Freedom 102 Conrad, Joseph  25–6, 29, 35, 49, 58, 130 comparison to Čapek 46 Heart of Darkness  30, 41–3 Lord Jim 41–3 and media  131 cosmopolitanism and capitalism  61–2 critiques of  64–5 descriptive  60, 63, 69–72 and Djuna Barnes  80–4 and Eileen Chang  84–7 elective 59 and globalism  163 intellectuals’ reclamation of 63–4 and Nancy Cunard  72–6 and Nella Larsen  76–80 prescriptive  62, 66–9 and prize culture  114 and Western European enlightenment 61 and women  88, 118–19 cultural institutions, see also cities; conferences; little magazines; prizes; publishers admission of colonial intellectuals 32

184

Index

autonomy of  11, 71, 93–7, 119, 163 definition of  91–2 and gender exclusion  162 imperialism of  3 use in decolonization  132, 153 Cunard, Nancy  60, 66, 72–4, 88 and modernist networks  96, 118 Negro anthology  74–5, 86 and the Spanish Civil War  75–6 Dada  97–9, 111 Dada (magazine)  97 Dakar 149 Dakar Festival (Festival mondial des arts nègres) 91, 107–11 Damrosch, David  5, 13, 16, 159 disagreement with Moretti 9–11 What Is World Literature?  4, 6–8 decolonization, see also anticolonialism; imperialism effect on metropolitan culture 29 of modernist archives  20 and modernist techniques  35, 50, 101 publishers’ capitalization on 104–6 Derrida, Jacques  127, 136 De Zayas, Marius  99, see also Dada Diop, Alioune  107–9 Dos Passos, John  89 Manhattan Transfer 147 U.S.A. Trilogy  135, 147–9 Duerden, Dennis  150–3 Edwards, Brent Hayes  32, 38 The Practice of Diaspora 19–20

Eliot, T.S.  71, 96, 126 and Brathwaite  141–3 and media  131, 156 “Tradition and the Individual Talent”  139–40, 155 The Waste Land  5, 37, 121–3 Engels, Friedrich  15 The Communist Manifesto 61–3 English, James  111–13, 115 The Economy of Prestige  95–6 Englund, Hari  130 Esty, Jed  22 Fanon, Frantz  3, 107, 134 A Dying Colonialism 132–3 Faulkner, William  13, 103–4 Fauset, Jessie  77, 96 feminism, see also cosmopolitanism; Djuna Barnes; Gayatri Spivak; gender; Shari Benstock; Susan Stanford Friedman; Virginia Woolf and access to cultural institutions 162 and modernist studies  18–19, 68–70, 93–4, 96, 118 and Pearl Buck  117 festivals  91, 107–11, 119 the First World War  63 and Dadaism  97–8 and imperialism  39, 158, 160–2 Fojas, Camilla  69 Ford, Ford Madox  160–1 Forster, E.M.  3, 34, 155 Howards End  121–2, 134 and media  131 A Passage to India 134 Friedman, Susan Stanford  19 and locational feminism  68–9 and remapping modernism  96, 159

Index

Gallimard  103–4, 114, see also publishers; Roger Caillois Gasset, Ortega y  63–4, 71, 76 gender, see also cosmopolitanism; feminism; New Historicism and the black Atlantic  17–18 and criticism of globalization 16 and imperialist maps  30–1 the “men of 1914”  126 and modernist networks  96 and planetary perspective  163 and prize culture  116–18 and racial difference  20–1 in Spanish American modernismo 69 and the “universal citizen”  70 and Victorian literary culture 70–1 genre  9–11, 21–2, 32, 94, see also little magazines; manifestos genre fiction  35 minstrel shows  140 and new media  145 propaganda 130 Giddens, Anthony  62 Gikandi, Simon  34–5, 38, 42 Gilroy, Paul  5, 7, 38, 56, 134, 159, 163, see the black Atlantic The Black Atlantic 16–18, 31–2, 133 Gitelman, Lisa  128 Glass, Loren  114 global (as opposed to national) literature, see also cultural institutions; David Damrosch; Franco Moretti; Gayatri Spivak; national (as opposed to global) literature; Pascale Casanova; Paul Gilroy; race; translation

185

core-periphery relations in  8, 9–10, 13–14, 16–19, 23, 65, 72, 95, 99–100 and media  124–5 “peripheral” modernisms  90 and space and temporality 18–19 theorizations of  5–6, 38–9, 62 globalization  14–16, 21, 130–1, see also anticolonialism; capitalism; cosmopolitanism; cultural institutions; global (as opposed to national) literature; imperialism of modernism  89, 113 of the Nobel prize  117 Goble, Mark  122–4 GoGwilt, Christopher  20, 54–5 Goldstone, Andrew  81–2 Goody, Alex  128, 134 Grove Press  106–7, 114 Hage, Emily  97 Harlem, see New York City Harlem Renaissance  73, 77 Hayles, Katherine N.  143 H. D.  96 Heinemann  11, 104–6, 118–19 Herring, Scott  83 Hong Kong  84–7 Horkheimer, Max The Dialectic of Enlightenment 61 Huelsenbeck, Richard  98, see also Dada Hughes, Langston  70, 74–5, 77 Hutchinson, George  79 Ibadan 3–4 Ibrahim, Sonallah  4

186

Index

imperialism (Western European), see also anticolonialism; the Bandung Conference; the Berlin Conference of 1884–85; capitalism; cosmopolitanism; cultural institutions; decolonization; Edward Said; modernity; Paul Gilroy; postcolonial studies; race alternative cartographies  31–2 cosmopolitanism as  64 and Dada  98–9 deconstructive approaches 33–5 as domination  30–1 European and colonial ambivalence 39–40 and experimental modernism 35–9 and the idea of one world system 157–63 and modernist cultural geography  3–5, 25 and modernist studies  26–9 and new media  130–4, 150–6 and racial difference  20–1 Innis, Harold  131–2, 134 Isherwood, Christopher Goodbye to Berlin  134–5, 137 Jaji, Tsitsi  133–4 James, C.L.R.  17, 89–90 Jameson, Fredric  38, 42–3, 159 “Modernism and Imperialism” 35–7 Jolas, Eugene  100–1, 145 Joyce, James and colonial Ireland  25, 36–7 and Henrik Ibsen  4 and Parisian recognition  12–13 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man  59, 113

and the second machine age 126 and transition 100–1 Ulysses 103 Kafka, Franz  4, 11 Kalliney, Peter  94, 132, 151–2 Kant, Immanuel  61, 66, 87–8 Kenner, Hugh  96, 126, 128, 134 Kipling, Rudyard  35 Kim 30 Kittler, Friedrich  134 Kleingeld, Pauline  61 Larsen, Nella  60, 76, 88, 96 Quicksand  77–80, 86 Latham, Sean  5, 94 Lee, Leo Ou-Fan  85 Levenson, Michael  3 Lewer, Debbie  98 Lewis, Wyndham  126 little magazines  97–103, 106, 118–19, see also cultural institutions; Dada (magazine); Présence Africaine; publishers; 391; transition; Transition; 291 London  3, 13, 89–91, 95, 119, 151 Lott, Eric  64 Lyon, Janet  69, 80 McClintock, Anne  30–1, 38, 40 McDonald, Christie  19 McKay, Claude  4, 25, 73, 77 McLuhan, Marshall  133, 136, 142, 146–7 Understanding Media 125–8 Makerere Conference (African Writers of English Expression)  92, 108, 111, 153 the Man Booker Prize  91–2, 95, 114–16

Index

manifestos  22, 98, 100–1 Mann, Thomas  89 Mansfield, Katherine  25, 89–90 Marcus, Jane  75, 81, 96, 144–5 Marcus, Laura  129 Márquez, Gabriel García  13, 104 Marson, Una  89–90, 132, 150–1 Marx, Karl  15 The Communist Manifesto 61–3 media, see technology Miller, Henry  103 modernity, see also anticolonialism; the black Atlantic; capitalism; cities; cosmopolitanism; globalization, imperialism; technology and the aesthetics of motion  3, 17 alternative cartographies of 31–2 in the colonial imaginary  53 and cosmopolitanism  61–2 and decolonization  133–4 and the desire for development  46–7, 49, 52 and modernism  5–6 and new media  131–2 and the idea of one world-system 157–63 Moore, Gerald  152 Moore, Marianne  96 Moretti, Franco  5, 12–13, 17, 159 Atlas of the European Novel 19 “Conjectures on World Literature”  8–9, 16, 21 critique of distant reading  11 “More Conjectures”  8–10 Moses, Michael Valdez The Novel and the Globalization of Culture 21

187

Naipaul, V.S.  60, 120 n.5 Nardal, Jane  118 Nardal, Paulette  118 national (as opposed to global) literature, see also global (as opposed to national) literature and competition  162 and global success  14, 112–14 and media  132, 156 theorization of  7–8 négritude  14, 49–50, 92, see also anticolonialism; the black Atlantic Senghor’s defense of  108–9 Soyinka’s critique of  113–14 Neogy, Rajat  100–2 New Historicism  6, 19, 26 New York City  13, 78–80, 89, 119 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o  4, 105, 108, 110 Nicol, Davidson  109 Nixon, Rob  60 Njau, Elimo  110, 114 the Nobel Prize  13, 92, 95, 112–14, 116–18 North, Michael  134, 140, 145 Nussbaum, Martha  66, 68 Ocampo, Victoria  71, 104, 118 Orwell, George  3, 73, 151 Ousmane Sembène  4, 109–10 God’s Bits of Wood 149–50 and media  129, 131, 156 Paris  3, 12–14, 59, 69, 81, 83, 90, 95–6, 106, 119 Parry, Benita  30–1, 38, 88 n.1 PEN International  91–2 Perloff, Marjorie  22 phonography  122, 124, 128, 139–44, see also technology photography, see also technology

188

Index

effect on modernist aesthetics  124, 134–9, 145, 154 as writing by other means 128–9 Picabia, Francis  97 Picasso, Pablo  99 politics, see also anticolonialism; cosmopolitanism; feminism; imperialism; postcolonial studies and aesthetic objects  94, 119, 159–60 identity politics  16, 131 and modernist studies  18, 25, 35, 38 and translation  8 of world literary space  8–18 the Popular Front  91–2 postcolonial studies, see also anticolonialism; decolonization; imperialism and modernist studies  15–16, 20, 23, 25, 29, 32–5, 58, 111 Pound, Ezra  96, 140 appropriation of Chinese materials  37, 127, 136–9 reading of Joyce  25 and the second machine age  126, 156 “In a Station of the Metro” 135–6 Pramoedya Ananta Toer  57–8 This Earth of Mankind 52–5 Pratt, Mary Louise  27, 64 Présence Africaine 100 Présence Africaine Conference (Congrès international des écrivains et artistes noirs)  92, 107–8, see also conferences; cultural institutions

the Prix Femina  117–18 the Prix Goncourt  95, 116 prizes, see also cultural institutions; Dakar Festival; ManBooker Prize; Nobel Prize; Prix Femina; Prix Goncourt and gender  116–19 and national/antinational tension 113–16 and prestige  111–12 publishers  89, 91, 103–7, 118–19, see also cultural institutions; Grove Press; Heinemann; prizes race, see also anticolonialism; the black Atlantic; imperialism; négritude; New Historicism and cosmopolitanism  65, 70, 74, 77–80, 88 and exoticism  99 and Immanuel Kant  61 and mass media  144 and Nightwood 81 racial difference and global modernism  20–1, 29, 94, 96 radio 122, see also BBC; Caribbean Voices; Salman Rushdie; technology control of  129–30 and high modernist writing  126, 136 social uses  132–3, 150–5 Rainey, Lawrence  103 Ramazani, Jahan  21–2, 159 Rhys, Jean  25, 70, 96 “Let them Call it Jazz”  143–4 Quartet 69 Robbins, Bruce  60, 66–8, 76 Rogers, Gayle  5, 63, 71, 94 Rohlehr, Gordon  142 Rubin, Andrew  102

Index

Rushdie, Salman  34, 156 Midnight’s Children  115, 124, 131, 153–5 Said, Edward  7, 31, 33, 38, 159 Culture and Imperialism 28–9 on Joseph Conrad  30 Orientalism  26, 28 on Rudyard Kipling  30 Salih, Tayeb  151 Season of Migration to the North 157–63 Sartre, Jean-Paul  3, 100, 112 Saunders, Frances Stonor  102 Schreiner, Olive  58 The Story of an African Farm 40–1 Scott, Bonnie Kime  93, 96 the Second World War internationalizing modernist aesthetics after  107, 111, 113–14, 118–19, 132, 151–2 and the meaning of imperialism 36 Senghor, Léopold Sédar  14, 50, 92, 108–14, see also Dakar Festival; négritude Shanghai  64, 84–7 Shih, Shu-mei  64–5, 90 Soyinka, Wole  35, 110, 112–14, 116, 153 Spender, Stephen  73 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty  5–6, 120 n.5, 159–60 Death of a Discipline 14–17 planetarity 162–3 “transnational literacy”  68–9 Stein, Gertrude  59, 70, 96, 129 Stevens, Wallace  129 Stieglitz, Alfred  97 Stouky, Abdallah  110–11, 120 n.4 Suárez, Juan Antonio  122, 139 Suleiman, Susan Rubin  19

189

Suleri Goodyear, Sara  29, 33–4, 38, 44 surrealism  50, 58, 97–8 Swanzy, Henry  150–1 Tagore, Rabindranath  4, 70, 116 Tambimuttu, M. J.  89–90 technology 23, see also cinema; phonography; photography; radio; telegraphy; telephony; television and colonial and postcolonial literary cultures  131–4 ethics and ecology  129–31 modernism and  121–5, 127–9, 156 telegraphy  122, 124, 126, 128, see also technology telephony  121, 124, 126, see also technology television 131, see also technology 391 (journal)  97 Tiffany, Daniel  135–6 Transcription Centre  152–3, see also CIA transition (1927–38)  100–1, 145 Transition (1961–75; 1991–) 100–2 translation, see also publishers; travel and the aesthetics of motion  3–4, 160 and anticolonial movements 32 debates about  19–20 and media  125, 138 and modernist networks  71 and Nightwood 82–3 and Season of Migration to the North 160–1 and world literature  6–9, 11 travel, see also cosmopolitanism; modernity; translation

190

Index

and the aesthetics of motion 1–4 of texts  5, 11, 97, 99 Trotter, David  130, 134 Tutuola, Amos  131 291 (journal)  97–9 Tzara, Tristan  75, 97–8, see also Dada UNESCO  106–9, 111 Vassanji, M.G.  58 The Gunny Sack 55–7 Wali, Obiajunwa  108 Walkowitz, Rebecca  71–2, 86–7 Wallerstein, Immanuel  12 Wall-Romana, Christophe  144–6 Weaver, Harriet Shaw  103

Williams, Raymond and imperialism  159 and media studies  130, 134, 155 “Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism”  3, 37–8, 99–100 Wollaeger, Mark  130, 134 Woolf, Virginia  70–2, 88–9, 96, 163 and media  131 Mrs. Dalloway 36–7 Three Guineas  59–60, 162 Worth, Aaron  124, 130 Wright, Richard  107 The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference 49

191

192

193

194