Race, Nationalism and the State in British and American Modernism

Patricia E. CHU, Race, Nationalism and the State in British and American Modernism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007, 208 p.
ISBN-13 9780521869669

SUMMARY

Twentieth-century authors were profoundly influenced by changes in the way nations and states governed their citizens. The development of state administrative technologies allowed modern Western states to identify, track and regulate their populations in unprecedented ways. Patricia E. Chu argues that innovations of form and style developed by Anglo-American modernist writers chart anxieties about personal freedom in the face of increasing governmental controls. Chu examines a diverse set of texts and films, including works by T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Zora Neale Hurston and others, to explore how modernists perceived their work and their identities in relation to state power. Additionally, she sheds new light on modernists' ideas about race, colonialism and the post-colonial, as race came increasingly to be seen as a political and governmental construct. This book offers a powerful critique of key themes for scholars of modernism, American literature and twentieth-century literature.


CONTENTS

Introduction

1. White zombies in the state machinery

2. Set in authority: white rulers and white settlers

3. Soldiers and traitors: Rebecca West, the World Wars and state subjects

4. White turkeys, white weddings: the state and the South

5. Modernist (pre)occupations: modernism, primitivism, and anti-colonial nationalism; Afterword: myths, monsters, modernization, modernism.