Chimeras of Form

Vadde, Aarthi

doi:10.7312/vadd18024

Cited by 12 publications

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“…17 Against this, Vadde argues that modernist fiction goes beyond "the opposition between the idealism of the [internationalist] concept and the reality of the lived situations in which it functions." 18 Chimeric forms reveal to us that the fracture between nations is also the point at which those communities join. In this way, they possess a liberatory energy that resists translation into the language of political realism.…”

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Internationalism after Internationalism: Response to Aarthi Vadde, Chimeras of Form

Hart¹

2019

Postcolon. Lit. inq

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Matthew Hart is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Nations of Nothing but Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2010) and Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction (forthcoming from Columbia University Press). A founding co-editor of the Columbia University Press book series Literature Now, Matt is a former president of A.S.A.P.: Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present and currently vice president of the Modernist Studies Association.

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Internationalism after Internationalism: Response to Aarthi Vadde, Chimeras of Form

Hart¹

2019

Postcolon. Lit. inq

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“…The transnationalism of Anil's and Sarath's associations and experiences produces an alternative awareness of what Vadde characterizes as a "global disaster circuit." 24 What's more, in a masterful reversal, Vadde arrives at a surprising rationale for international human rights work: the sorts of deep time theorized by Wai Chee Dimock make it possible to see that all cultures have suffered catastrophes. If appeals to a (perhaps illusory) common moral consensus prove capricious, recognition of the vulnerability recorded in deep time can reframe the concept of rights.…”

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Modulating Modernist Form (On Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016)

Patnaik¹

2019

Postcolon. Lit. inq

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The texts and figures that populate Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism beyond Europe, 1914-2016 are awkward iconoclasts: instead of James Joyce, posterfigure for modernist cosmopolitanism, we encounter Joyce the grudging chronicler of postcolonial Ireland, alienated from both Irish nationalists and the "overweening pretensions of the 'European family.' " 1 Rabindranath Tagore appears not as the Nobel Prize-winning sage of universal humanism but a beleaguered writer dogged by Indian nationalists for faulty politics and E. M. Forster for flawed style. The other writers gathered here (George Lamming, Claude McKay, Michael Ondaatje, and Zadie Smith) fare little better: McKay suffers the scorn of W. E. B. Du Bois, Ondaatje braves critiques of international dilettantism, and even Smith is admonished for espousing a liberalism that cannot see its way out of the predicaments it names. Part of the appeal of Aarthi Vadde's lucid, innovative account of modernism is her predilection for fashioning objects of study that have taken a few knocks. Teasing out reception histories that complicate attempts to situate writers or their works as stable political and cultural touchstones, Chimeras of Form attends to moments of unease. To borrow Vadde's description of Tagore, the authors and works assembled in this book are "inconvenient figures" that refuse to be slot into nationalist collectives, cosmopolitan milieus, or international movements. 2 Estranging authors and works from their comfortable perches in the annals of twentieth-century literature seems, at first glance, a counterintuitive move. As modernist studies have dilated in the past decade to consider artworks from around the world, its bent has been accretive. In The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, Mark Wollaeger describes such work as "decentered comparison," a process that often involves finding biographical, formal, or political points of convergence between the existent canon of Anglo-European modernist works and texts from other corners of the globe or the century. 3 It will provoke no surprise to note that the resultant shifts in modernist studies produced sites of overlap as well as zones of contention between a newly expansive modernism, postcolonial studies, and comparative literature. Sangina Patnaik is an assistant professor of English literature at Swarthmore College. Her teaching and research focus on global modernism, Anglophone world literature, human rights, and critical legal theory.

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“…Vadde searches out textual counterexamples that can be read as serving a formal riposte to nationalism's "fortress state" in that "they take apart, with language, those walls and fences that are intended to detain racialized migrant bodies and to secure borders that always, somehow or another, end up being crossed." 16 Spahr examines the structural conditioning of literary production, distribution, and reception by the US government and their private foundation partners, and comes to the conclusion that this has done much to limit the reach of political, especially anticolonial and antiracist, literary works and may even explain the present-day isolation of political literature from actual resistance movements. Although Vadde would almost certainly find Spahr's approach to the question of the relationship between literature and politics reductive-and Spahr is frank about not having attended much to "the literature itself nor its content nor aesthetic concerns" 17 -it's difficult not to think that the reception contexts for literary ripostes must matter.…”

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confidence: 99%