Modernism after Postcolonialism. Toward a Nonterritorial Comparative Literature

Mara de Gennaro

John Hopkins University Press

ISBN: 9781421439471

248 p.

34,95 $

PRÉSENTATION

A polemical reaction against a trend in global modernist studies which still privileges European and Anglophone texts.

Existing studies of literary modernism generally read Anglophone Atlantic texts through the lens of critical theories emanating from Europe and North America. In Modernism after Postcolonialism, Mara de Gennaro undertakes a comparative Anglophone-Francophone study, invoking theoretical frameworks from Gayatri Spivak, Édouard Glissant, Françoise Vergès, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and others. Examining transnational poetics of comparison that contest the comparative practices of colonialist, racist, and ethno-nationalist discourses, the book treats these poetics as models for a creolist critical method of reading, one that searches out unpredictable, mutually generative textual relations obscured by geographic and linguistic divides.

In each chapter, de Gennaro pairs a canonical English-language modernist writer (Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf) with a postcolonial writer (Aimé Cesaire, Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, J. M. Coetzee, Edwidge Danticat), interpreting major works of prewar and interwar modernism in light of postcolonial and Francophone literature, cultural theory, and historiography. Read together, these texts suggest a turn—sometimes subtle or conflicted in earlier Atlantic modernist texts, while usually more overt in later Caribbean and postcolonial texts—toward comparative forms marked by irresolution and a wavering sense of authority. With the rise of world literature and global modernist studies, it becomes all the more pressing to examine how comparative forms can alert us to unspoken and misrecognized relations while also confronting us with the difficulty of representing the Other.

By bringing into relation these ostensibly unconnected, often discrepant texts, de Gennaro challenges entrenched territorial habits of literary meaning. An aspirationally nonterritorial comparative literature, she argues, diverges not only from Eurocentric formalist approaches but also from global comparatisms that emphasize incommensurabilities to the point of eliding significant textual and contextual connections. Drawing on interdisciplinary postcolonial efforts, especially in the social sciences, to deterritorialize categories of identity, culture, and community, Modernism after Postcolonialism dispenses with outdated modernist and postcolonial paradigms to reveal how the anxious, inconclusive comparisons of transnational modernist poetics can call us to imagine new solidarities across bounded territories.

SOMMAIRE

Introduction. Anxious Mastery and the Forms It Takes
Chapter 1. Troubling Classifications: Unspeakable Figures of Métissage in "Melanctha" and Disgrace
Chapter 2. Troubling Sovereignties: Intimations of Relation in The Waste Land and Cahier d'un retour au pays natal
Chapter 3. Traversing Bounds of Historical Memory: Dethroning the Narrator and Creolizing Testimony in A Passage to India and Texaco
Chapter 4. Traversing Bounds of Solidarity: Poor Analogies and Painful Negotiations in Three Guineas and The Farming of Bones
Conclusion. The Beauty of a Trembling World