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

Abstract

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.