Modernism, Race and Manifestos

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MODERNISM, RACE, AND MANIFESTOS

The modernist avant-garde used manifestos to outline their ideas, cultural programs, and political agendas. Yet the manifesto, as a document of revolutionary change and a formative genre of modernism, has received little critical attention. This study reappraises the central role of manifestos in shaping the modernist movement by investigating twentieth-century manifestos from Europe and the Black Atlantic. Manifestos by writers from the imperial metropolis and the colonial “periphery” emphasized very different elements in their recasting of histories and experiences of modernity. Laura Winkiel examines archival materials as well as canonical texts to analyze how Sylvia Pankhurst, Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, Wyndham Lewis, Nancy Cunard, C. L. R. James, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Aime´ Ce´saire, and others presented their modernist projects. This new focus on manifestos in their geographical and historical context allows for a revised interpretation of modernism that foregrounds its cross-cultural aspects. is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

LAURA WINKIEL

MODERNISM, RACE, A N D MA N I F E S T O S LAURA WINKIEL University of Colorado at Boulder

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521896184 © Laura Winkiel 2008 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2008

ISBN-13 978-0-511-41420-6

eBook (EBL)

ISBN-13

hardback

978-0-521-89618-4

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Ali and Atiya

Contents

Acknowledgments

page viii

1 Introduction: manifestos, race, and modernity

1

1906–1914

43

2 Women’s suffrage melodrama and burlesque

45

3 Futurism’s music hall and India Docks

82

4 Vorticism’s cabaret modernism and racial spectacle

121

PART I COSMOPOLITAN LONDON,

PART II TRANSNATIONAL MODERNISMS,

1934–1938

155

5 Nancy Cunard’s Negro and black transnationalism

157

6 Reading across the color line: Virginia Woolf, C. L. R. James, and Suzanne and Aime´ Ce´saire

191

Epilogue: manifestos: then and now

232

Index

238

vii

Acknowledgments

As I search out disavowed modernist collectivities in this book, it seems only fitting that I acknowledge the intellectual and social collectivities that supported and inspired me in its making. It gives me great pleasure to do so. This book was begun at the University of Notre Dame as a PhD dissertation with the support of a challenging, engaged, and generous group of scholars, teachers, and friends: Kathleen Biddick, Joseph Buttigieg, Seamus Deane, Christine Doran, Barbara Green, Glenn Hendler, Anna Jones, Gloria-Jean Masciarotte, Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, and Krzysztof Ziarek. I am so grateful for their continued friendship and support. Since then, many others have helped me to reshape and complete this book: Rita Barnard, Jim Berg, Sarah Brouillette, Sascha Bru, Susan Carlson, Pamela Caughie, Brenda Daly, Susan Edmunds, Mary Lou Emery, Rita Felski, Susan Stanford Friedman, Jane Garrity, Mike Goode, Roger Hallas, Cassandra Laity, Pericles Lewis, Adela Licona, Janet Lyon, Jane Marcus, Gunther Martens, Laura Mielke, Chrisy Moutsatsos, Justus Nieland, Martin Puchner, Amy Randall, Urmila Seshagiri, Linda Shenk, Vincent Sherry, Jessica Shubow, Monika Wadman, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz. Thanks also to the Geomodernisms contributors from whom I have learned so much: Gerard Aching, Ian Baucom, Jessica Berman, Sung-Sheng Yvonne Chang, Patricia Chu, Laura Doyle (especially), Justine Dymond, Ariela Freedman, Susan Stanford Friedman, Simon Gikandi, Janet Lyon, Aldon Nielsen, Fernando J. Rosenberg, Ken Seigneurie, and Eluned Summers-Bremner. This book would not be possible without Ray Ryan, whose support brought the project to Cambridge, Maartje Scheltens, who saw it through production, and Rachel Potter and Michael Thurston who challenged me to make a better book than I had envisioned. I am grateful as well for the financial and institutional support of this project. An American Academy of University Women American Fellowship, a Phillip Moore Dissertation Fellowship, and a Research Fellowship at the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University viii

Acknowledgments

ix

allowed me to write the dissertation without teaching duties and surrounded by a lively intellectual circle at Wesleyan. While finishing the dissertation, I am grateful to the University of Chicago’s Avant-Garde Workshop for their generosity and critique, especially Robert von Hallberg, Jessica Burstein, Lee Garver, Matthew Hofer, and Scarlett Higgins. At Iowa State University, I thank the Department of English for teaching releases that allowed me time to work on this book. I thank the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences for summer research and travel money. Thanks go also to Brett de Bray for inviting me to be part of the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University for a year of exciting and productive scholarly exchange and to Martin Bernal for sharing with me his Bloomsbury connections. An Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship allowed me to conduct research at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. I pay special thanks to Kurt Heinzelman, and to Barbara Harlow for her hospitality and spirit. Gratitude also goes to my family: my parents, Nancy and Joe, and siblings, David, Steven, Gregg, Andrea, Kristin, and Susan, and our extended family (especially Larry, Bridget, Kathleen, and Jen) for being there and especially for their support during a very difficult time. The same goes for Robin, always. This book is dedicated to Raza Ali Hasan, for his poetry, laughter, love, and unflinching critique of the West, and to Atiya Anna Hasan, whose joy opens new paths onto the future. Portions of Chapters 1 and 3 were published in The Invention of Politics in the European Avant-Garde (1906–1940), edited by Sascha Bru and Gunther Martens (New York: Rodopi, 2006) and are reprinted by permission of Editions Rodopi. A portion of Chapter 2 and an earlier version of Chapter 5 were published in Modern Fiction Studies and Modernism/Modernity respectively and are reprinted by permission of Johns Hopkins University Press. An earlier version of Chapter 4 was published in Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity, edited by Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, and is reprinted by permission of Indiana University Press. Permission to reprint Mina Loy’s “Parturition,” Songs to Johannes, “The Ineffectual Marriage,” “Lion’s Jaws,” and “Souvenirs,” from The Lost Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger L. Conover (New York: Noonday Press, 1996), and Mina Loy’s unpublished letter to Mabel Dodge Luhan was kindly granted by her editor, Roger L. Conover. Permission to publish excerpts from Nancy Cunard’s papers was given by Anthony

x

Acknowledgments

R. A. Hobson. Permission to reproduce a solarization of Nancy Cunard in beads by Barbara Ker-Seymer was kindly granted by Barbara Roett. Permission to quote from C. L. R. James’s unpublished material was granted by Professor Robert A. Hill. The cover illustration, by Carlo Carra`, “Composition with Female Figure,” 1915, detail, Ó 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome.

CHAPTER

1

Introduction: manifestos, race, and modernity

From Blackwell Publishing’s Manifestos series to the Zapatistas’ six declarations from the Lacandon jungle, the manifesto continues to generate cultural and political controversy. Short, spirited, and straddling the boundary between theory and practice, the manifesto communicates an experience of crisis and a conceptual break with the past. As its urgent tone pushes ongoing debates and practices to new realms of possibility, it seizes the present moment in order to intervene in history. This history-making self-consciousness reached its apogee in the first part of the twentieth century, when hundreds of political and aesthetic manifestos circulated throughout the world as part of an immense cultural and geopolitical shift. As these manifestos declare a series of breaks from traditional aesthetic, cultural, and political forms, they enact the quintessential gesture of modernity: they proclaim themselves the arbiters of the new and the “now” and reject the past. This call to alter history now is the reason why manifestos provide a crucial interpoint for rereading modernist aesthetics through the lens of transnational racial politics. Modernism, Race, and Manifestos makes the case that we should reappraise the formative role of manifestos in staging alternative modernist communities and producing counter-histories of modernism and modernity. They provide a useful framework for rereading other modernist forms (anthologies, experimental literature, protest novels, and essays) in terms of their shared attempts to interrupt received meanings. Manifestos have too often been regarded by scholars of modernism as: (1) ephemeral documents important only for stimulating the later creation of canonical work, such as The Waste Land and Ulysses (Bradbury and McFarlane); (2) ridiculous, loud advertisements that anticipate the co-optation of avant-garde art by commodity culture (Bu¨rger, Morrisson, Comentale); or (3) platforms that lay out a program of art or politics that rarely reaches fruition (Levenson).1 1

Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930 (New York: Penguin, 1976); Peter Bu¨rger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: Minnesota

1

2

Modernism, Race, and Manifestos

I suggest, however, that critics take manifestos too much at their bombastic word and fail to recognize the work undertaken by this liminal genre as the modernist form par excellence, poised as it is between action and theory, politics and aesthetics, and the new and the old. It – more so than the work of art or literature that follows – seeks to integrate art with life. In this reading, the manifesto is a formative, not merely reflective, genre in imagining and shaping the future. Manifestos signal a crisis in narratives of progress and the temporal dimensions (past, present, and future) that narrative structures. They interrupt the steady flow of history and provide a useful frame for rereading modernism in terms of its performative elements of community formation and historical agency in the present moment. This study asks: how is history imagined in manifestos and other modernist texts, and how does this history construct an alternative community to that which is condemned as oppressive, stale, degenerate, or obsolete? These new communities are usually defined in contrast to another, vilified community, or, as I show in the second part of this book, as porous and inclusive of different groups. But in either case, they are formed in response to worldwide crises of imperialism in which the geopolitical boundaries of the world become shifting and unstable. And whether community is defined through kinship bloodlines or merely through geographical proximity and shared history, community frequently defines itself through a racial dimension. Modernism, Race, and Manifestos suggests that modernists grapple with race in order to imagine revolutionary change and, in the process, make evident the performative – that is, the contested and contingent – nature of race and racial belonging. Though many of the manifestos I examine are staunchly pro-imperialist, their rewritings of history and national myths make visible competing versions of community formation. They thereby open a space for anticolonial contestations of Anglo-European racial myths. Rather than follow a progressivist path from imperial center to colonial periphery, one that unfolds history without interruption, this book tracks a discontinuous history and geography. Its first part critically rereads manifestos and other performative texts circulating in pre-World War One London; its second tracks anticolonial and antiwar protest writing from across England and the Black Atlantic University Press, 1984); Mark S. Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001); Edward Comentale, Modernism, Cultural Production, and the British Avant-Garde (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Introduction

3

world in the 1930s. While the first part reads the ambiguities and instabilities within metropolitan texts as symptomatic of a crisis of empire and imperialism, the second section shows how anticolonial writers translate and transvalue these instabilities from their own location and thereby produce alternative modernisms. In interrupting a continuist literary historical narrative, I hope that this book will prove “eventful” in its own right. Modernism, Race, and Manifestos suggests that modernist scholarship too often follows the canonical modernists themselves by cordoning off colonized writers and colonizer-colonized relations from what counts as modern. Because the recent resurgence in manifesto criticism pays little to no attention to imperialism or racial difference and because interpretations of British modernism and avant-gardism also tend to overlook race, this topic is only beginning to receive the serious treatment it demands.2 This book redresses such racial blindness by considering Duse´ Mohamed Ali’s anticolonial writings in the pre-eminent modernist journal The New Age, Rebecca West’s short story about an interracial marriage in the vorticists’ journal Blast, and the racial dynamics internal to British women’s suffrage manifestos and a movement novel. In addition, it places Nancy Cunard’s neglected anthology Negro as well as C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins within their London environs, teeming with many overlooked anticolonial journals, manifestos, and organizations. In so doing, this study builds upon George Yu´dice’s and Timothy Brennan’s recent arguments that the avant-gardes were in part a response to imperial crises and anticolonial militancy. Brennan, in particular, claims that “[European artists and intellectuals from 1880 to 1939] were working for the first time within a structure of interactive, cross-cultural contacts that combined an aesthetic of ‘primitive art,’ on the one hand, with political uneasiness toward a colonial system, on the other.”3 He 2

3

Janet Lyon, Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Luca Somigli, Legitimizing the Artist: Manifesto Writing and European Modernism, 1885–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). I discuss critical work on modernism, avant-gardism, and race later in this chapter. Timothy Brennan, “Postcolonial Studies between the European Wars: An Intellectual History,” in Marxism, Modernity, and Postcolonial Studies, ed. Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 185–203, here 188–9. See also George Yu´dice, “Rethinking the Theory of the Avant-Garde from the Periphery,” in Modernism and Its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural Modernity from Spain and Latin America, ed. Anthony L. Geist and Jose´ B. Monleón (New York: Garland Press, 1999), 52–80.

4


suggests, and I agree, that anticolonial writers borrow from and transform these European discourses for their own use. By situating colonial resistance next to avant-garde modernism, this book is in dialogue with contemporary critical discussions of globalization. These discussions suggest that modernity should be considered as a form of uneven development that is experienced through time-lags and disjunctions at the imperial “core” as well as the “peripheries.”4 Modernism, Race, and Manifestos contributes to these discussions as it excavates the modernist history of global connection and cosmopolitan engagement with cultural and racial differences. By restoring modernism to a conflictual terrain occupied by colonial writers, flooded by militant women’s movement literature, and fragmented by the avant-garde, Modernism, Race, and Manifestos contests a singular notion of modernism, whether defined by periodization, location, or form. It selects manifestos that cross a range of aesthetic practices, from British women’s suffrage manifestos to the literary avantgarde’s rethinking of linguistic practices and to anticolonial writers’ challenge to racial myths of modernity. My wide-ranging choices reflect a commitment to considering canonical modernism in dialogue with concurrent aesthetic practices that engage modernity differently. These multiple, competing practices of modernism depend, in part, upon the manifesto to delineate what modernism, where, and to what aim. This book reads manifestos as a form that redefines racial difference, reimagines modernity, and outlines new aesthetic practices that imagine a radically different future. Given our contemporary dearth of political alternatives, I believe that a critical return to modernist manifestos, with their stirringly creative calls to action and visions of change and community, might allow for a fresh assessment of the alternative histories and unclaimed future possibilities that lie within our own unevenly experienced modern and postmodern moments. 4

See Perry Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 317–33; Homi K. Bhabha, Locations of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994); Enrique Dussel, “Eurocentrism and Modernity,” in The Postmodern Debate in Latin America, ed. J. Beverley, J. Oviedo, and M. Aronna (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 65–76; Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, “Introduction,” in Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, ed. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1994), 1–33; Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Black British Cultural Studies, ed. Houston A. Baker, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1996), 16–60; Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (New York: Verso, 1989).

Introduction

5

In reading manifestos as a staging of modernist community formation, I treat the manifesto as a constituent feature of modernism. Manifestos, and the little magazines in which they frequently appear, are documents of the archive. Foucault has defined the archive as that which generates the conditions of what can be said.5 In other words, I use the term “archive” to mean a discursive system that regulates the enunciative possibilities, forms, appearances, and intelligibility of particular statements and practices. The analysis of the archive, Foucault says, disrupts linear histories: “it deprives us of our continuities; it dissipates that temporal identity in which we are pleased to look at ourselves when we wish to exorcise the discontinuities of history.”6 It is precisely Foucault’s emphasis on the archive’s breaks in historical continuity that allows us to see the manifesto’s proximity to imagined and real transnational revolutionary change – articulated amidst other archival material: pamphlets and broadsides, posters and little magazines – in ways that disrupt the temporal and spatial parameters that underlay narratives of modernism. Growing critical and pedagogical interest in modernist manifestos is evident in a recent spate of manifesto books. The publication of two anthologies, Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents and Manifesto: A Century of Isms, provides a multitude of manifestos as source documents for modernisms worldwide. Recent textbook publications, The Longman Anthology of British Literature and The Longman Anthology of World Literature, have included early twentieth-century manifestos as part of their survey. In addition, scholarly interest in manifestos has been stimulated by several critical studies on the historical avant-garde. To date, however, there have been no examinations of the manifesto form in terms of race and imperialism. Martin Puchner’s recent Poetry of the Revolution focuses on the global circulation of manifestos and how this worldwide trend leads to a “qualitative change in the conception of the artwork,” especially in terms of art’s engagement in the time and space of modernity.7 Other manifesto criticism can be divided into that which focuses on Anglo-European avant-gardes and that which considers manifestos from the so-called periphery. Investigating the former, Luca Somigli’s Legitimizing the Artist examines symbolist, decadent, futurist, and vorticist manifestos in terms of their attempt to regain artistic legitimacy in the eyes of their public and to differentiate the field of cultural production from other domains. Janet Lyon’s genealogy of the manifesto 5 6

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Random House, 1972), 129. Foucault, ibid., 131. 7 Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution, 6.

6


traces revolutionary artistic and political movements from the English and French Revolutions to contemporary radical lesbian and feminist groups. Investigating avant-gardes on the “periphery,” Vicky Unruh’s work on Latin American manifestos focuses on their status as a form of activity.8 Though all of these studies have deepened a critical estimation of the role of manifestos in modernism, none has focused on how manifestos underscore the political and aesthetic conflicts between various locations along the color line and their relations to global modernity. Modernism, Race, and Manifestos suggests that the Eurocentric presumptions that such studies reproduce need to be critically examined, and it demonstrates how they were challenged from within modernism itself. The rest of this chapter outlines the manifesto’s history in relation to race and modernity by tracing the manifesto from its earliest appearances to anticolonial manifestos that critique and adapt Enlightenment theories of modernity. Following this overview, the subsequent chapters explore how the manifesto’s shock of the new interrupts received meanings and allows for a recovery of the overlooked transnational and racial dimensions of modernist texts. Specifically, the discontinuous temporality of the manifesto provides the methodological focal point for demonstrating that modernist texts: (1) open the present moment to temporal reconceptualizations of history and historical agency; (2) stage alternative cosmopolitan and transnational communities through the structure of feeling of racial belonging; and (3) move across spatial and temporal boundaries in ways that reflect nonsynchronous but contemporaneous positionalities within modernity and express a range of alternative modernisms. My argument concludes with a brief discussion of the manifesto’s contemporary legacy through an examination of the Caribbean manifesto “In Praise of Creoleness” (1989). There, I suggest that manifestos continue to challenge modernity in the postcolonial era, where the new universalism has become transnational difference, formed in the course of articulating the occluded history of the present. This notion of transnational difference, as Aihwa Ong argues, signifies less a state-imposed national identity than an ambivalent allegiance to global labor markets. Transnational difference suggests a flexibility between the demands of state, capital, and kinship ties. It denotes, as Ong suggests, “a cultural interconnectedness and mobility across space” that alludes “to the transversal, the transactional, the translational, and the 8

Vicky Unruh, Latin American Vanguards: The Art of Contentious Encounters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

Introduction

7

transgressive aspects of contemporary behavior and imagination that are incited, enabled and regulated by the changing logics of states and capitalism.”9 I begin the next section by offering a genealogy of the manifesto that follows the historical developments of the black diasporic world and European colonialism. The manifesto, in my estimation, is a predominantly transnational form and reflects the uneven developments of modernity worldwide. It moves across nations, transgressing, translating, and transacting dreams of modernity within a wide range of modernizing societies. The manifesto is crucial in reconceiving the relation between modernity, race, and modernism. THE

“N O W”

TIME OF THE MANIFESTO

This section extends the brief survey of recent work on manifestos made above to argue that existing scholarship on the manifesto and Western metropolitan modernisms more generally has tended to exclude racial difference from being considered constitutive of modernity. The “now” time of the manifesto has been critically appraised as constituting a break from the past and heralding the new. But this understanding of the manifesto’s rupture is informed by a Eurocentric notion of history that sees it advancing unproblematically forward, steadily improving. In proposing the view that European manifesto writers attempt to transcend history – as well as racial and gendered embodiment – critics neglect a very different understanding of history and rupture that manifestos from the colonial “periphery” propose. In re-examining modernist manifestos, I apply a postmodernist understanding of historicity that goes against the grain of history understood in the Hegelian sense of a progressive unfolding of a rational system of world history. This revision of progressivist history, or historicism, was begun with modernists themselves. In trying to awake from “the nightmare of history,” modernism, as Robert J. C. Young suggests, “self-consciously [set] itself against the past, and reject[ed] forms of historical understanding.”10 This awakening is not rupture as novelty, a simplistic “improvement” over the past. Rather, it takes the form of an event that, to draw on Foucault’s description of discontinuous history, “suspend[s] the continuous 9 10

Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 4. Robert J. C. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (New York: Routledge, 1990), 23.

8


accumulation of knowledge, interrupt[s] its slow development, and force[s] it to enter a new time, cut[s] it off from its empirical origin and original motivations, cleanse[s] it of its imaginary complicities.”11 These literary events – of which the manifesto is exemplar – can alter the framework through which history is represented. In interrupting historical narratives, modernists sought to reconceptualize modernity and its relation to the past. For instance, the modernist cultural critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin developed a methodology of historical materialism to critique the “homogeneous, empty time” of rationalized societies and their understanding of history as progress.12 Benjamin called this understanding “historicism” and argued that it removes attention from the historical present because it reduces history to an instrumental flow that seamlessly advances from barbarism to civilization and from the primitive to the modern. This narrative reproduces the past – as it flows steadily onwards – and thus helps to reproduce existing power structures and beliefs. For instance, historicism understands racialized societies on the colonial “periphery” as being less than modern because they are dissimilar to (and therefore irrational in comparison with) Western societies. In contrast, Benjamin’s historical materialism does not simply invert this paradigm by privileging the heterogeneity of “primitive” peoples who are “outside” modernity and therefore might yet redeem it. Instead, Benjamin argues that the task of the historian is, as Keya Ganguly puts it, to understand the “collective temporal catastrophe” of both past and present that “betokens the predicament of modernity.”13 Benjamin understands modernity to be the totality of the present moment as a product of the past that has become a tool of the ruling classes. In other words, history is written by the victors to rationalize the present order of things. Benjamin famously summarizes the racial unconscious of modernity that results from this rationalization as: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”14 In accounting for this dilemma, histories of both imperial “center” and colonial “periphery” must be taken into account. Benjamin’s historical materialism – in which civilization and barbarism coexist catastrophically – is crucially important for reclaiming alternative modernisms. This is so precisely because the dialectical tension of historical materialism is not simply a reclamation of the nonsynchronous 11 12 13 14

Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 4. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Harcourt, 1968), 261. Keya Ganguly, “Temporality and Postcolonial Critique,” in The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, ed. Neil Lazarus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 176. Benjamin, Illuminations, 256.

Introduction

9

(the fact that modern and traditional societies exist coevally, a formulation that allows for primitivist and racist formulations because “the traditional” is still considered anachronistic). Rather, Benjamin believes that historical materialism may yet create a just society by means of “the time filled by the presence of the now [ Jetztzeit].”15 Historical materialism makes visible the various temporal positions that range from the modern to the primitive within modernity, and potentially allows for “primitive” knowledge and practices to generate alternative modernisms and to reconceptualize modernity itself. This fashioning of alternative modernisms occurs when “the time of the now” appears as scraps of the past and present that might, Benjamin argues, “seize hold of memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger” in order to “wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.”16 As powerfully suggestive as Benjamin’s historical materialism is, he critiques history from within a European frame of reference. The “other” who lies outside of the totality of history remains excluded (whether marked by gender, sexual, and/or racial differences) from the frame of history. In contrast, Homi K. Bhabha demonstrates how colonized subjects writing from occluded historical locations can displace Eurocentric narratives of modernity. Drawing on the work of Frantz Fanon, Bhabha is concerned to historicize founding categories of modernity, such as “Man,” reason, progress, race, and the nation, because they were constituted when most of humankind was considered not fully human. Rather, it was deemed primitive, irrational, superstitious, and outside of history. In received meanings of modernity, then, a metaphysics of race and nation prevails, one that totalizes (fixes and delimits) who can be modern by means of ahistorical and ideological categories that exclude on the grounds of race as well as gender categories. For instance, as I discuss later in this chapter, the Haitian Revolution was removed from histories of modernity and the Age of Revolution (French and American) because the notion of a sovereign, black, modern nation was unthinkable at the time.17 Seeking to redress the erasure of black peoples from the modern, the Caribbean novelist, journalist, political theorist, and cultural critic C. L. R. James, writing in London in the 1930s, rethinks the manifesto as an interruptive event from the perspective of the Haitian Revolution. He does this in order to project a 15 17

Benjamin, ibid., 261. 16 Benjamin, ibid., 255. Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 22.

10


modernity that might have been and perhaps will be possible in the future. This fold in time, expressed through the future anterior tense, suggests the complex rethinking of modernity and history offered by anticolonial writers as a simultaneous recuperation of the disavowed histories of modernity and alternative vision for the future. C. L. R. James’s future anterior, Benjamin’s “time of the now,” as well as the temporalities theorized by poststructuralists Bhabha and Jacques Derrida, offer alternative understandings of history. Their interruptive temporalities interrogate a modernism predicated on a totalizing metaphysics of race and nation that excludes non-Western peoples from the modern. Their complex notions of time allow other positionalities within modernity to interrogate Western hegemony. For example, in his essay “‘Race,’ Time and the Revision of Modernity” Bhabha draws upon Fanon’s observation of the belated emergence of colonized subjects to modernity (always coming after the white man). He develops the notion of a “time-lag” that forms a new temporality in which formerly colonized subjects can articulate themselves in ways other than those assigned by the colonizer. Through the time-lag, colonized subjects can transform the narratives produced by and about “the center.” The time-lag allows formerly colonized writers to displace progressivist historical narratives and to produce an understanding of the past as a future anterior (Bhabha says it acts as a projective past).18 Writing through the time-lag, they recover the disavowed histories of modernity and point to “forms of social antagonism and contradiction that are not yet properly represented, political identities in the process of being formed, cultural enunciations in the act of hybridity, in the process of translating and transvaluing cultural differences.”19 In Bhabha’s formulation, the time-lag interrupts closed dialectical systems that generate history’s totalizing narratives. It allows, as Sibylle Fischer argues in her study of the Haitian Revolution, for “a revision of the concept of modernity itself so that past struggles over what is means to be modern, who can claim it, and on what grounds can become visible again.”20 The manifesto, of all genres, makes visible this struggle to claim and define the modern. A critical reappraisal of manifestos from the colonial “periphery” as well as from the “center” revises modernity by revealing its occluded history of racial, gendered, and geographical exclusions. These exclusions have shaped the very meaning of modernity. 18

Bhabha, Locations of Culture, 252.

19

Bhabha, ibid., 252.

20

Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, xi.

Introduction

11

To revisit forgotten or overlooked struggles, it is necessary that we locate singular events rather than sweeping narratives or systems of thought. By “event” I mean textually mediated occurrences such as revolutions or localized conflicts in which received historical meanings and narratives are fundamentally transformed. In reconceiving meanings, the event creates the possibility for racialized and gendered voices and histories to be heard and unforeseen future possibilities to be seized. Over time, the event is narrated so that its meanings are sedimented into “official” history, but I seek to recover its potentialities: moments in which time and history exceed the bounds of conventional representations, meanings, and narratives (the avant-garde event aestheticizes this transformation, as I discuss a little later.) The event injects heterogeneity into closed systems of reference. Instead of systems where the “other” reflects the “same” (that is, the master’s point of reference), the singularity of interruptive, unassimilated events can potentially generate new knowledge and narratives in contestation with, rather than in subordination to, those of the “center”. This poststructuralist heterogeneity, at first glance, takes us far from the manifesto, but what I next show is how I read the manifesto through a poststructuralist lens that revisits the manifesto to reveal a more complex engagement with modernity and history that has heretofore not been acknowledged. This method of reading manifestos will allow me to make clear how and why I link manifestos to other modernist texts that foreground their event nature. First, what exactly is a manifesto? The manifesto’s history begins with its paradoxical participation in both absolutist and democratic forms of government. It arises out of two contradictory sources: statist institutions (military, religious, academic, and monarchical) and their popular counterpart (the demos). The English use of manifesto derives from the Italian manifest. In Italy, the manifesto was used primarily for military purposes and religious proofs. More broadly, European heads of state, military and other public officials, and clergy used the manifesto to announce to the literate public academic axioms, character defenses, and state decisions such as executing political prisoners, going to war, and passing decrees. While the primary definition of manifesto, as a printed declaration, explanation, or justification of the policy of an individual or group of public relevance, carries with it an emphasis on rational communication, the root sense of manifest suggests otherwise. Manifest presents a literalness that seemingly does not require interpretation. It is a piece of evidence that is clearly revealed to the eye, open to view

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or comprehension. Its deictic nature arrests attention on the seemingly unmediated here and now. The manifesto’s evidential quality contributes to its tendency to wield words as weapons in which the absolute certainty of its message contains the threat of violence. The manifesto’s refusal to accommodate differences of opinion and its often aggressive, militant stance is suggested also by an OED etymology of “manifesto” in which the word comes from “manus” (hand) and “festus” (cf. infestus, dangerous, which is the root of of-fendre and de-fendre). The primary meaning of this derivation would thus be “palpable” or, more literally, “hostile hand,” which carries with it violent overtones. This threatened spillage of mere words into the category of deeds relates to manifesto writers’ impatient desire to change history with their words. In contemporary usage, “manifesto” is often used metaphorically to indicate a strident intervention in a debate (as in Blackwell Publishing’s Manifestos series, Alain Badiou’s Manifesto for Philosophy, and a New Yorker cartoon from several years ago in which a prospective employer tells a job candidate that his re´sume´ is “an impressive manifesto”). I avoid such generic dilutions and instead confine myself to considering manifestos more closely defined as activist texts that seek to generate urgent, immediate action. Generically, then, the manifesto contains the following defining features: (1) it seeks to break from the past; (2) it draws attention to the present moment in order to generate a radically different future, changing the world and starting the revolution (in arts, politics, or social organization) now!; (3) it organizes oppositional collectivities, a “we,” by speaking directly to its audience as if they were face to face; (4) it raises consciousness by narrating a foreshortened history of oppression and outlines a program of action that is often enumerated for clarity and brevity. These taxonomic categories, however, are merely heuristic devices. The formal features of manifestos change: historical conditions shift and produce new generic configurations. In addition, the term “manifesto” retroactively claims a wide range of texts, whether for their functional similarities to manifestos, as in Wordsworth’s “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads” or Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, or to indicate texts that lack most or all of the manifesto’s defining features but call themselves manifestos anyway (as in the metaphorical manifestos mentioned above). Breaking down the manifesto genre still further, my study considers subsets of manifestos: “straightforward” political manifestos, avant-garde manifestos that parody the pretensions of political manifestos, and hybrid texts that incorporate manifesto conventions within larger documentary projects so as to reflect and expand on the manifesto’s function as an activist text.

Introduction

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By calling manifestos activist texts, I suggest that they function through the citational, reiterative practice of performativity. By that I mean that manifestos depend upon a repetition of previous scripts in order to achieve the effects they name. The effects of the text depend upon the historical location from which subjects speak and the impact of their utterance on their audience. Unlike historicism’s continuist flow of history that is complicit in reproducing power structures and hegemonic representations, an emphasis on performativity interrupts the flow of historical narratives; it fragments and multiplies the points from which history can be made. It draws attention to the present moment, in which historical agency is possible, and under what conditions. In multiplying and delimiting historical points d’appui, the experience of time becomes discernable as uneven and disjunctive. Performativity, then, conveys a contingent quality that – depending on how the manifesto repeats those previous scripts – can be either normative (effective in reproducing the dominant order) or resistant (repetition that inserts difference). At its most resistant, the performativity of language can take on the quality of the avant-garde event. To define the avant-garde event, I turn to Peter Bu¨rger, who discusses the event-nature of avant-garde collage: The insertion of reality fragments into the work of art fundamentally transforms that work. The artist not only renounces shaping a whole, but gives the painting a different status, since parts of it no longer have the relationship to reality characteristic of the organic work of art. They are no longer signs pointing to reality, they are reality.21

The insertion of reality fragments in collage produces a break in reception of the work of art, “the interpretation of meaning is renounced.”22 The avant-garde event interrupts received meanings. It aims to step outside the confines of conventional representations, including abstract understandings of time that unfold always and everywhere the same. The event gestures toward the unrepresentable; as Krzysztof Ziarek says, it “exceeds the bounds of representational thinking” and provides “a temporal excess or incompletion” and “a certain untimeliness.”23 This untimeliness also relates to the event-nature of avant-garde art forms that figure experience (and therefore historical agency in the present moment) as open-ended and

21 23

Bu¨rger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 78. 22 Bu¨rger, ibid., 81. Krzysztof Ziarek, The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 9.

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excessive in relation to its representation.24 The event, as it unworks representation, seeks to undo the instrumental rationality that characterizes the barbarisms of modernity. As with Benjamin’s historical materialism, it intervenes in representations of modernity’s progressive unfolding. I suggest that the manifesto can be read as an event even though it has no claim to aesthetic autonomy. Ziarek argues that we should refrain from isolating the avant-garde from discussions of modernism: “Avantgarde art explicitly distances itself from the concept of aesthetic experience as a separate, ‘higher’ or ‘more essential’ moment of experience; it has to be kept distinct, therefore, from the aesthetics of autonomy characteristic of high modernism.”25 Avant-garde manifestos, I propose, more so than the work of art to follow, seek to bridge the gap between art and life, theory and action, politics and aesthetics through the event-nature of their utterance. Similarly, other modernist texts also attempt to exceed the bounds of representational thinking. Indeed, my intention in examining activist texts such as Three Guineas and The Black Jacobins is not to promote the manifesto as metaphor. Rather, I wish to draw attention to how the manifesto as an event can alert us to the ways in which other modernist texts become significant in opening up the present moment to an untimeliness that unworks representation and opens a space for other accounts of modernity to emerge. Accordingly, my objects for analysis include not only manifestos but also narrative fiction and essays, an avantgarde closet drama, poetry, and play that borrows from transcripts of women’s suffrage political oratory. The common feature of the event unites all of these texts in the way in which they advance an undoing of conventional representation. They open the present moment to overlooked possibilities that usher in forgotten histories and reconfigure now time, the modern moment and its historical agency in the present. In addition to outlining the event-nature of manifestos themselves, it is important to consider the received temporal meanings associated with the terms “modernism” and “modernity” because they define who gets to be modern and thus provide the contexts in which manifestos – especially those from the colonial “periphery” – intervene. I start with Marshall Berman’s classic reading of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, which Berman rightly calls “the archetype of a century of modernist manifestos and movements to come.”26 Berman argues that the Manifesto 24 26

Ziarek, ibid., 9. 25 Ziarek, ibid. Marshall Berman, All That’s Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988), 89.

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conveys deeply and brilliantly “a mode of vital experience – experience of space and time, of self and others, of life’s possibilities and perils” that he calls “modernity.”27 To be modern, Berman states, “is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and our world – and, at the same time, threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.”28 Modernity can be defined as the historical experience of socio-economic modernization that occurs in the form of capitalist expansion of markets, scientific and technological development, industrial revolutions, urban expansion, migration, geographical exploration, and mass social movements. These modernizing forces, as Marx and Engels’s Manifesto suggests, sweep across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, nationality and class, and religion and ideology. Modernization, here, unifies the world through the world-system of capitalist modernity, but it is a unity of perpetual transformation. To experience the space and time of modernity, then, is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx and Engels famously said, “all that is solid melts into air.”29 It is to live in a world in which stable, continual, cyclical seasons, holidays, births, and deaths are constantly interrupted by cataclysmic, unforeseen events. In the face of such sweeping change, the activity of modernism that Berman traces in Marx and Engels’s Manifesto becomes empowering: “These world historical processes have nourished an amazing variety of visions and ideas that aim to make men and women the subjects as well as the objects of modernization, to give them the power to change the world that is changing them, to make their way through the maelstrom and make it their own.”30 That is, those who electively participate in modernism take a proactive and generative part in modernity’s perpetual revolution. In describing this active process, Marx and Engels’s prose makes the reader feel the lively – but also horrific – stress and strain of modernity, as in this passage: “Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.”31 Modern subjects participate in the accelerated tempo of modernity that presents continuous novelty in which perpetual capitalist revolution severs the present from the past. 27 29 30

Berman, ibid., 15. 28 Berman, ibid. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto [1848] (New York: Penguin, 2002), 223. Berman, All That’s Solid, 16. 31 Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 223.

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As captivating as this model may seem, with its tight narrative drive and romance of revolution that holds out the promise of the modern subject’s triumphant overcoming of the problems of modernity, there are two problems with the temporality of Berman’s reading of Marx and Engels’s Manifesto. The first is that modernity’s time is not homogeneous; in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, participation in its revolutionary energies was considered to be available only to those located in historically privileged positions. Take, for instance, this statement made by Sir Henry Maine in 1875 on “The Effects of Observation of India on Modern European Thought” in which he describes the paradoxical temporal nature of ruling people thousands of miles away: As has been truly said, the British rulers of India are like men bound to keep time in two longitudes at once. Nevertheless, the paradoxical position must be accepted in the extraordinary experiment, the British Government of India, the virtually despotic government of a dependency by a free people.32

Modernity, organized through liberal democracies with their commitment to securing individual liberties, rights of property, and freedom of expression and assembly, produces its dark double on the other side of the planet in the colonial terra nulla (or closer to home in Ireland or minority urban enclaves). That a liberal democracy fully committed to fulfilling the promises of modernity could reasonably carry out an experiment in ruling a dependency through despotic governance made sense, given the different temporality Indians were believed to inhabit, one that was outside modern history. If Europeans, such as Hegel, believed that modern history began in Europe, then Indian society was premodern. According to Hegel, Asian history ended as it gave birth to European history: “Asia is . . . the region of origination . . . but as Europe presents on the whole, the centre and end of the old world, and is absolutely the West – so Asia is absolutely the East.”33 Asia is the birthplace and antithesis of Europe, which is both the culmination of the old world and the center of modern history, the birth of the new. This narrative, Dipesh Chakrabarty explains, depends upon a progressivist notion of historical time “as the measure of cultural distance . . . that was assumed to exist between the West and non-West.”34 Fueled by 32 33 34

Quoted in Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 13–14. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History [1837] (New York: Dover, 1956), 99. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 7.

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Enlightenment thought, modernity – the transition from superstition to scientific knowledge and from individual slavery to “freedom” – was believed to be something that originated in Europe and spread throughout the world over time. But as the quotation from Sir Henry Maine suggests, this narrative stalls – and meets its despotic double – in the colonies. Bhabha calls this paradox the time-lag of modernity. In the colonies, Bhabha writes, “despotic time, as Althusser has brilliantly described it, is ‘space without places, time without duration.’ In that double-figure which haunted the moment of the enlightenment in its relation to the otherness of the Other, you can see the historical formation of the time-lag of modernity.”35 Colonized subjects are historically not the subjects of modernity, but rather, they are the objects of the British experiment in social engineering. As Berman suggests, modernism participates in history emplotted as a romance in which subjects of modernity eventually overcome the obstacles to their freedoms, but he ignores the constituent function of the time-lag of modernity – the repression of the otherness of its colonial objects – in producing that vision of modernity and those Western modern subjects in the first place. This occlusion of a crucial temporal fold brings me to the second problem of temporality in Berman’s reading of Marx and Engels’s Manifesto, namely that he irons out much else. Recent rereadings of the Manifesto demonstrate that modernity does not proceed, even in the imperial center, even in this ur-manifesto of modernism, in terms of an unimpeded forward unfolding of time. For instance, Derrida, in Specters of Marx, extrapolates from the manifesto’s famous opening line, “A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of Communism,” to build a case for reading Marx outside of progressivist Marxist historiography and against those who promote “the end of history,” i.e. the totalizing presence of global capitalism, political liberalism, and the complete defeat of socialism.36 An aporia of temporality informs Derrida’s spectral reading of Marx and Engels’s Manifesto. The appearance of the specter interrupts the forward momentum of modernity and makes visible the haunting of the past in the present. The ghost tropes temporality as conflict, as a frisson of horror and paralysis, that impedes a too-easy forward momentum. The specter transgresses the boundary between life and death, it collapses the distinction between past, present, and future and between immaterial 35 36

Bhabha, Locations of Culture, 246. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994).

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absence and lived presence. This collapse produces the present moment as always unevenly experienced, shot through with the unredeemed past and tense with future possibilities as well as with self-reflection or analysis, a sifting through of memories and experiences to find a way past them. Rather than abstracting the present moment by means of a narrative of progress (that sees the whole from the vantage point of an omniscient narrator), the specter grounds the present moment as a space for constrained agency as well as for reflection. It allows for the possibility, as Wendy Brown argues, of “relocating historical meaning into some other space and idiom,” some other way of perceiving the relations between past, present, and future that does not depend upon a discourse of progress.37 As is well known, the manifesto’s supernatural scene borrows from Hamlet. The specter of communism haunts Europe much as Hamlet is haunted by his father’s ghost. Both urge revolutionary action and both create a crisis in the subjects whom they haunt. This reference to Hamlet, as Martin Puchner has recently argued, along with “the dramatic and theatrical insertion of different voices [of objection]” later in the text of the Communist Manifesto, marks a moment of hesitation, of reflection and theatricality within a manifesto dedicated to the straightforward action of making a world-historical revolution.38 Like Hamlet himself, Marx and Engels’s manifesto is caught between analysis of and reflection on the past and incipient action in the future. The preamble’s ghost marks the unevenness of temporality, that which forced in Hamlet a split between the need for action in the present moment (a carryover from his father’s warrior generation) and the need for reflection on past and future possibilities (the introspection that marks Hamlet’s generation’s modern individuality). At the formal and discursive level, Shakespeare’s oeuvre is uneven and hybrid. Marx praised Shakespeare’s plays for their “peculiar mix of the sublime and the base, the terrible and ridiculous, the heroic and the burlesque.”39 The hybridity of form and discourse that attracted Marx to Shakespeare was symptomatic of how Marx prophesied revolutionary change, with its ghostly haunting, impurities, and unevenness. Marx characterized proletarian revolution as a heterogeneous, grubbing, material, subterranean activity. In this form of historical change, revolutionary collectivities, in Marx’s words, 37 38 39

Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 144. Martin Puchner, “Manifesto¼Theater,” Theater Journal, 54 (2002), 463. Quoted in Peter Stallybrass, “‘Well grubbed, old mole’: Marx, Hamlet, and the (Un)fixing of Representation,” in Marxist Shakespeares, ed. Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow (New York: Routledge, 2001), 20.

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criticize themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continuously in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again, more gigantic, before them, recoil ever and anon from the indefinite prodigiousness of their own aims, until a situation has been created which makes all turning back impossible.40

Stallybrass argues that for Marx, the ghost points to the coming revolution as one of “hesitancy, an awareness of inadequacy, and . . . the realm of the fairy tale.”41 In fairy tale – like the mythical Antaeus in the quotation above, who gains strength and largesse from the earth – supernatural elements of fantasy and magic forge new, heterogeneous, and unforeseen paths from past to future. Hamlet’s contact with the supernatural, for instance, occasions his famous lament: “The time is out of joint. O, cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!”42 This passage suggests the unpredictability of rupture that enforces a disjunction between past and present and opens the future to what Derrida calls its “irreducible heterogeneity” and its dialogism.43 From Marx onward, modernist manifestos intervene in modernity’s smooth unfolding by plunging into the present moment via hybrid forms and discourse that interrupt any automatic pilot – as in Berman’s exhilarated paean to modernity – that simply rides the crest of modernity wherever it may take them. This interruption makes visible heretofore overlooked possibilities. But while it is my critical task to demonstrate how the haunting, hesitancy, and impurities in European manifestos make evident the disavowed racial ground of modernism, for writers in the colonized world, it is the stark incommensurabilities between worlds that make plain the racial inequities of modernity and the need for alternative modernisms. The writing of history from a colonized vantage point necessitates a confrontation with modernity’s antique dreams (its racial myths), that which places the colonized in a belated position in relation to the colonizer’s progressivist narratives of modern unfolding. The dreamlanguage of an anticolonial alternative modernity interrupts these linear narratives and introduces a hallucinatory, alogical, spatial syntax that conveys colonized experiences of modernity’s uneven development and

40 42 43

Quoted in Stallybrass, ibid., 21. 41 Stallybrass, ibid., 21–2. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (New York: Washington Square Books, 1992), I. 5. 188–9. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, 33.

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displaces Eurocentric narratives of modernity. Anticolonial manifestos return to colonized experiences of modernity in order to reconfigure them in a manner that can redeem the past through action. For instance, Aime´ Ce´saire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, from which “In the Guise of a Literary Manifesto” is taken, imagines the slave ship on which “Negridom . . . rediscovers the sour taste of freedom in its spilt blood.”44 The temporal trajectory returns to the past – figured as a ghostly slave ship – in order to imagine a different future. This rediscovery of the past galvanizes action in the present moment: “Negridom is standing / . . . standing / and / free / and the lustral ship intrepidly advances upon the crumbled waters.”45 After a detour to the past, the manifesto’s collective “we” may form: “I give you my abrupt words / devour and coil around me / . . . embrace me into furious we.”46 It recrosses an uneven terrain (“crumbled waters”), courageously negotiating the relation between past and present, “premodern” and “modern,” African and Western. Its recursivity appears as words “coil,” freedom is rediscovered, and it tastes sour from a painful past, still present. The temporal relations between colonizer and colonized and between metropolis and colony are realigned through a writing out, a disturbing, of the narrative of progressivism. MANIFESTOS, RACE, AND THE ANXIETIES OF EMPIRE

I return now to standard accounts of the manifesto’s history in order to make the case for the necessity of examining the manifestos of colonized subjects that these accounts exclude. In general, the manifesto has been read as breaking from the past tout court. The manifesto’s announcement of a signal event of dissent proclaims the novelty and unfamiliarity of what it conveys. More than anything, these manifestos are documents of rupture. Whether geared toward political revolution or a new aesthetic, they aim to change the course of history. Claude Abastado, in one of the first critical reassessments of the manifesto genre, asserts that the manifesto “undoes history and remakes time.”47 The manifesto’s language of rupture attempts to lift its statements out of historical continuity and the weight of tradition, and, as such, the manifesto’s pronouncements become self-generative. It creates the new through reference to itself, and its time is now. It remakes not only future possibility but the present 44 45 47

Aime´ Ce´saire, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 1995), 131. Ce´saire, ibid., 131. 46 Ce´saire, ibid., 133. Claude Abastado, “Introduction a` l’analyse des manifestes,” Litte´rature, 29 (1980), 3–11, here 6.

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moment in its severed relation to the past. As the manifesto announces a break from the past, it serves as a crucial tool in advancing the rhetoric of modernity. Despite their rhetoric of rupture, manifestos also invoke a long history of other manifestos. Their “iterable structure,” as Lyon argues, “activat[es] the symbolic force of the form’s role in earlier political confrontations: to write a manifesto is to announce one’s participation, however discursive, in a history of struggle against oppressive forces.”48 That the genre’s form and rhetoric were established long before its use in popular revolutions and the bourgeois public sphere, Lyon adds, indicates its stability as a signifying form. The twentieth-century manifesto takes its place within “a long-standing diachronic narrative of exclusion and oppression.”49 This history of manifesto interventions, Lyon claims, “serves as a rebuke to modernity’s narratives of progress” that promise liberty and equality for all.50 Lyon’s study of manifestos focuses on the rise of the bourgeois public sphere as Ju¨rgen Habermas has conceptualized it, as a sphere of normative reason that seeks universally valid truths by means of intersubjective communicative action. And while Lyon extends Habermas’s Enlightenment discourse to consider how women were historically excluded from the public sphere of democratic participation, both overlook the Eurocentricism of this critique, and especially how European ideas of culture and race not only produced the promises of modernity, but also justified the racial and economic violence of the colonies. Challenging Habermas’s Eurocentric Enlightenment discourse, anticolonial writers have argued that the occluded history of the colonial “periphery” allowed for the development of Western forms of political modernity and the overcoming of racial particularities for only certain subjects of modernity. In 1938, C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins drew attention to the economic basis of slavery and the slave trade in supporting the political modernity of the French Revolution. James cites Jaure`s’s Histoire Socialiste de la Re´volution Française (1922) which remarks on the “sad irony of human history . . . [that the] fortunes created at Bordeaux, at Nantes, by the slave-trade, gave to the bourgeoisie that pride which needed liberty and contributed to human emancipation.”51 But this emancipation did not extend to France’s colonies. When the slaves asked for their equality and freedom during the French Revolution, James writes, “the maritime bourgeois, frightened for their millions of 48 51

Lyon, Manifestoes, 10. 49 Lyon, ibid., 30. 50 Lyon, ibid. Quoted in C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (New York: Vintage, 1989), 47.

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investments and their trade, went red in the face and put the Rights of Man in their pocket whenever the colonial question came up.”52 James’s formulation emphasizes the exclusionary nature of political modernity based on Enlightenment theories of universalism in the service of capitalist accumulation. Pointedly, in recounting the Haitian Revolution and the role of Toussaint Louverture, James remarked that “Toussaint’s failure was the failure of the enlightenment, not of darkness.”53 Analyzing the legacy of Enlightenment philosophy through the lens of racism and racial science, Paul Gilroy warns that “modernity’s new political codes must be acknowledged as having been compromised by the raciological drives that partly formed them and wove a deadly, exclusionary force into their glittering universal promises.”54 He suggests that modernity’s universality was from its inception invalidated by its collusion with racial terror in the colonies. The contradictions between the ostensible universalism of Enlightenment discourse and the racial exclusions permitting colonization and trade to benefit nascent AngloEuropean republics and monarchies extended fully into the twentieth century. These contradictions – between race and modernity – are inherited by the historical avant-garde and other groups despite their proclaimed break from the past and the wide spectrum of political positions they ostensibly hold. The contradictions between race and modernity, too, should be understood as what Gilroy terms “rational irrationalism,” the mythic assumptions about race that produce the very apex of Enlightenment rationalism.55 In examining these racial myths of modernity, he argues that racialization produces the philosophies of the Enlightenment themselves. That is, theories of racial difference made possible such a concept as political modernity. In permitting violence and differential treatment in regard to those peoples not marked as universal or rational and who are located on the “periphery,” European national communities are differentially constituted as modern, rational, universal communities that are bounded by a clearly demarcated territory. The manifesto genre, too, has long depended upon racial myths to ground its creation of communities who break from the past in order to realize their liberties. As a document of modernity’s ruptures, the 52 54 55

James, ibid., 68–9. 53 James, ibid., 288. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 62. Gilroy, ibid., 65.

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manifesto’s dual functions of “manifesting” self-evident truths and breaking from the past hold together the contradictions of modernity: between history and myth, and universality and particularity. They rely on “recognizing” community and its destiny, often in racial terms. In periods of revolutionary activity, when the public sphere is expanded as pamphlets, manifestos, newsletters, journals, posters, and broadsides increase exponentially, the rhetorics of race and liberty are conjoined. For instance, the English Revolution of the seventeenth century animated its protest of Norman legal and economic structures by invoking the myth of AngloSaxon liberty.56 Tracing Anglo-Saxon roots to Teutonic origins, revolutionary pamphleteers cited Tacitus’s Germania, which propounded the idea that Germans are a freedom-loving race, “untainted by intermarriage with other races, a peculiar people and pure, like no one but themselves.”57 This “pure” race had, so the pamphleteers claimed, a high moral code and a profound love of freedom and individual rights. Radical thinkers in England eagerly extended these ideas to England’s preconquest past in order to argue for a return to its freedom-loving roots. These Anglo-Saxonist ideas traveled to the United States and appeared in the doctrine of manifest destiny, a myth carried forward into the modern future as a racial destiny to be free. The phrase “manifest destiny” suggests a kinship with the manifesto’s rupture from the past and embrace of a new future, legitimizing its purpose through the creation of a mythic racial community, clear and obvious as “a peculiar people and pure.” In “manifest destiny,” political modernity is delineated by theories of racial difference, especially in terms of those races capable of transcending local particularities by means of abstract ideas such as liberty. In particular, these mythologies of race serve to justify modernity’s reference to itself as a normative principle. The manifesto’s newness is self-generational and therefore subject to a legitimation crisis. The new aesthetic, political idea, or movement must present itself as the solution to a present crisis that is constructed as urgent and threatening to a community, implicitly or explicitly defined along racial lines. Recent modernist and postcolonial studies attempt to address the occlusion of racial difference in definitions of modernity. Lyon concludes her outstanding genealogical study of the manifesto genre by remarking 56

57

This analysis draws from Laura Doyle, “Liberty, Race, and Larsen in Atlantic Modernity: A New World Genealogy,” in Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity, ed. Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 51–76; and Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). Horsman, ibid., 12.

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that the mixed results of the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804 (which achieved the end of slavery but continued an economic and political bondage to the West) exposes “the varying simultaneous ‘times’ of unevenly developed and unequally valorized revolutions.”58 She continues: “the absence of manifestoes elsewhere in the European empire at this time suggests even more sharply how uneven was the implementation of universal rights bodied forth through modernity.”59 Societies, she warrants, must have the proper conditions under which to wage a successful revolution: they need “autonomy, freedom, and literacy.”60 But this holds out a catch-22 for the colonized world: how to catch up with modernity when it is invested in its subordination? According to Fanon, it cannot and should not play the “catch up” game. Rather, colonial modernity, of which national culture is the expression, “takes its place at the very heart of the struggle for freedom,” and, in the case of Algeria, takes on “form and content as the battles are being fought out, in prisons, under the guillotine, and in every French outpost which is captured or destroyed.”61 For Fanon, the possibilities for autonomy, freedom, and literacy can occur only during and after revolution; they are not preconditions. Furthermore, Lyon’s work on manifestos holds out the ever-deferred completion of modernity and its universal subject as the goal of the manifesto and of revolution. This promise, as a teleological goal that aims for a differently articulated modernity, is a worthy one that impassions many manifesto writers. As the ever-deferred completion of modernity pushes society forward, progressing toward its utopian goal, it holds out a liberal model of society to adapt and use. But it also fatally obscures the violence and subjection of the colonial and postcolonial world that is the flip-side of the gold coin of modernity, a bifurcation built deeply into the very structure of modernity. In this chapter, I begin where Lyon leaves off, with the belatedly added Haitian Revolution and its manifestos that articulate the colonial time-lag of modernity. How does this history of the manifesto alter an understanding of modernity? The manifesto, of all literary genres, plunges to the heart of the present moment in order to rethink the relations between the past and novel expectations of the future. More than a literary reflection on the past and future, the manifesto demands urgent action in order to remake the world in accordance with this temporal realignment. Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach – written just prior to 58 61

Lyon, Manifestoes, 204. 59 Lyon, ibid. 60 Lyon, ibid., 205. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 233.

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the Communist Manifesto – alludes to this revolutionary urgency: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”62 That is, the manifesto gives expression to a particular experience of modernity at a certain moment and location that includes the demand to realize a novel future through action in the present. This moment and location is by no means an isolated one. Rather, I insist on understanding the manifesto as an articulation of modernity, a local instance of a global phenomenon that is both similar and dissimilar to other locations. An articulation, as Stuart Hall defines it, means both “joining up” or interrelating (as in the articulation of a joint in which two distinct parts work together) and “giving expression to.”63 Hall cautions that “joining up” does not mean the mere juxtaposition of two autonomous entities, but rather, drawing from Marx, Althusser, and Laclau, he argues that articulation always involves “hierarchical as well as lateral relations.”64 In this Marxist reading, modernity is structured through relations of dominance and subordination; it does not spread uniformly or progressively throughout the world. Brent Edwards glosses this notion of articulation further: it “involves a process of linking or connecting across gaps.”65 The gaps, he continues, referring to Hall’s reading of Marx, are formed “between two modes of production, the one ‘capitalist’ in the true sense, the other only ‘formally’ so.”66 For instance, articulation describes the differences and similarities in economic as well as political modernity between Paris and Port-au-Prince. In short, the term allows for similarities to be tracked across global modernity, but it also insists on crucial differences – gaps in development where societies are “structured in dominance” – that describe Eurocentric narratives of modernity justified by the colonial time-lag.67 And if we begin with the notion of uneven development in which all parts of the world-system are understood to be contemporaneous, the story of the manifesto’s achievements and failures looks different. Its movement across the colonial divide brings with it altered experiences and effects of modernity and registers the urgency of formulating alternative modernisms.

62 63 65 66 67

Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1987), 145. This point is a central theme in Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution. Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Societies,” 41. 64 Hall, ibid., 42. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 11. Edwards, ibid., 11, quoting Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Societies,” 33. Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Societies,” 33.

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I next consider how C. L. R. James renders this uneven relationship in his account of the Haitian Revolution. I do so in order to claim that writers from the colonial periphery are attuned to the blind spots of modernity. Their activist texts often register future expectations through a recovery of disavowed aspirations of modernity. They thereby open history to different temporal configurations, making visible conflicts over who gets to make history and be modern. In the case of Haiti, James claims that Enlightenment thought and the French Revolution allowed for the powerful social redress of unjust practices and institutions; in this case, of slavery in Haiti. Yet the West denied social, political, and economic development to Haiti as a society “structured in dominance.” In James’s view, the gap between the West and its colonies defers and constrains the possibilities that Haiti’s revolutionary manifestos envision. Only now, James writes in 1938, on the brink of a worldwide anticolonial nationalist movement might Toussaint Louverture’s vision, as announced in his manifesto, be realized. Let me next turn to The Black Jacobins. On August 29, 1793, Toussaint Louverture issued the following call to his fellow San Dominguan (the prerevolutionary name for Haiti) blacks: Brothers and friends. I am Toussaint Louverture, my name is perhaps known to you. I have undertaken vengeance. I want Liberty and Equality to reign in San Domingo. I work to bring them into existence. Unite yourselves to us, brothers, and fight with us for the same cause, etc. Your very humble and very obedient servant. (Signed) TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE General of the Armies of the King, for the Public Good68

Louverture sends this manifesto, according to C. L. R. James, at the turning-point of the French Revolution. Just after Louis XVI was executed in January 1793, James writes, the revolutionary armies began winning against the ruling classes and the revolution overflowed the boundaries of France. This tidal wave “flowed down the plain” and swept up Louverture, who “begins to emerge as the man of the future.”69 As the “new man” of the revolution, Louverture turns his back on his forty-five years of slavery and pledges to remake himself and his world in a manner inspired by the Enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality. Louverture promises to “work” to bring liberty and equality into existence. He asks that his fellow blacks join him to “fight” for the same ends. 68

James, The Black Jacobins, 125.

69

James, ibid., 124.

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His manifesto attracts its followers by drawing attention to the urgency of the present moment. It announces the birth and transformation of a new society by imagining the present as already moving, working, and fighting to realize a radically novel future. As Louverture “works” and “fights,” he underscores the present moment as contingent and filled with abundant possibilities for realizing the future that he envisions. His revolutionary name, Louverture, the opening, realizes itself as he calls to his fellow revolutionaries to join him in creating a hitherto unimaginable future. In so doing, his manifesto promises to bring something into being in San Domingo that did not exist before. The manifesto is both a founding act of nation-building and a signal of great formative activities to come. Its break from the past combines future expectations and speechact efficacy (doing things with words) in the present. It marks an imaginative stirring of new ideas and practices and provides a script for action that will unfold in unforeseen ways. Louverture’s manifesto makes central the racial margin in its narrative of political modernity, and, in so doing, opens the modern to the occluded history of the colonial “periphery.” It makes the “periphery” crucial to a modernist vision of the future. This imaginative temporal and spatial stirring depends upon a cross-fertilization between the West and its colonies. As James makes clear, the San Dominguan Revolution was integrally tied to the French Revolution. The “tidal wave” of revolution flowed beyond French boundaries, sweeping the slaves first in a revolt and then in a revolution: “The Paris masses were for abolition and their black brothers in San Domingo, for the first time, had passionate allies in France.”70 The events in France paralleled those in San Domingo. As the revolution degenerated in France, it would abandon San Domingo to its fate of being swallowed economically and politically by France (and by the West more generally) once again, though slavery was never reinstituted. And, importantly, the transformation of Haitian society and its long, horrific War of Independence, James argues, crucially affected the outcome of the Napoleonic wars in Europe.71 This effect – the successful slave revolt and failed political and economic modernization in Haiti – marks the uneven nature of modernity. James remarks: Toussaint’s failure was the failure of enlightenment, not of darkness. It needed another 150 years before humanity could produce and give opportunity to men who could combine within their single selves the unrelenting suspicion and 70 71

James, ibid., 120. C. L. R. James, A History of Pan-African Revolt [1938] (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1995), 43.

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ruthless ferocity necessary to deal with imperialism, and yet retain undimmed their creative impulses and their respect for the attainments of the very culture they fought so fiercely.72

In examining the successful but politically and economically circumscribed Haitian Revolution from the vantage point of mid-1930s London, James recognizes that anticolonial revolutions must adapt the ideals of political modernity from the West in order to fight imperialism. But also, drawing from Trotsky’s idea of the revolution stemming from spontaneous peasant uprisings, James wrote that colonial subjects also must learn from “the sub-soil from which they came.”73 If they do not look to their own locations and histories, then their revolutions “are a meaningless chaos and lend themselves to infinite caprice and romanticism.”74 In essence, James’s The Black Jacobins seeks to understand the local history of Haiti and its relation to the West, “the very culture they fought so fiercely.”75 Without an understanding of the local (of societies “structured in dominance”), he says, revolution will descend to “infinite caprice” and “meaningless chaos.” In terms of Haiti’s particular social and economic location as a colonial plantation society, the revolution called for in Louverture’s manifesto and realized only partially made visible the “failure of the Enlightenment.” To begin with, James’s epic narrates the tragedy of Louverture’s firm belief in the Enlightenment ideals of Diderot, Rousseau, and Raynal.76 Louverture universalizes the stirring sentiments of liberty, equality, and fraternity from his location. His manifesto has a power that James finds incomparably greater than European and American declarations: Pericles on Democracy, Paine on the Rights of Man, the Declaration of Independence, the Communist Manifesto, these are some of the political documents which, whatever the wisdom or weaknesses of their analysis, have moved men and will always move them, for the writers, some of them in spite of themselves, strike chords and awaken aspirations that sleep in the hearts of the majority in every age. But Pericles, Tom Paine, Jefferson, Marx and Engels, were men of liberal education, formed in the traditions of ethics, philosophy and history. Toussaint was a slave, not six years out of slavery, bearing alone the unaccustomed burden of war and government, dictating his thoughts in the crude words of a broken dialect, written and rewritten by his secretaries until their devotion and his will had hammered them into adequate shape.77

72 73 77

James, The Black Jacobins, 288. Last sentence omitted in the 1938 version. James, ibid., x. 74 James, ibid. 75 James, ibid., 241. 76 James, ibid., 198. James, ibid., 197–8.

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Local history conveyed in a “broken dialect” combines with European revolutionary thought on the violent “periphery” of modernity, where the economic, social, and political disparities of modernity are most strikingly felt. But, according to James, this very unevenness produces manifestos most able to raise the aspirations of the colonial world. Louverture’s words convey the possibility for the greatest transformation of existing society, from slavery to a history-making revolution and a transformation of Enlightenment thought. In many respects, James is optimistic regarding anticolonial revolutions (past and future) and their appropriation of Enlightenment ideals. Because of the more complicated class structures of Western societies, European and American writers often “had to pause, to hesitate, to qualify” in their writings.78 With the extreme poverty of the Caribbean and African colonies in mind, James holds Louverture’s manifesto and the collective will to achieve its vision as morally more persuasive. Louverture, says James, writes with “neither bombast nor rhetoric but the simple and sober truth,” something which the French bourgeoisie could not fathom, and therefore “rivers of blood were to flow before they understood.”79 The determination of the slaves to be free necessitated great sacrifice and violence, and produced a manifesto that, for James, is greater than all other declarations of freedom: “Toussaint could defend the freedom of blacks without reservation, and this gave to his declaration a strength and singlemindedness rare in the great documents of the time.”80 The outcome, for James, is both stirring heroism on the part of the San Dominguan slaves, manifested through their vernacular songs and rituals and in their physical courage to enact freedom in the face of death (as I discuss further in Chapter 6), and tragedy, given Haiti’s continued unequal treatment by Western powers. In fact, in Louverture’s Enlightenment beliefs lies his fatal flaw, namely, as Edward Said argues, “his willingness to trust European declarations, to see them as literal intentions rather than class and history-determined remarks of interests and groups.”81 His manifesto, based on these ideas, helps to produce a far different effect on the colonial “periphery” from what it would have had in Europe. It results in Haiti’s underdevelopment and failed political and social transformation. For instance, James argues that imperial greed drove the British to insist that Dessalines (Toussaint’s replacement after he was taken prisoner by the French) massacre the remaining French on the island, promising that only 78 81

James, ibid., 198. 79 James, ibid. 80 James, ibid. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 246.

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then would Britain begin trade relations with Haiti. But the massacre was subsequently interpreted by the West as an act of brutal black savagery, and Haiti was henceforth isolated economically, politically, and socially.82 James charts the relationship between Enlightenment thinking and the local history of the Haitian Revolution not only to show the uneven effects of modernity in societies “structured in dominance” but also to argue for the deferred action of manifestos. James returns in 1938 to the Haitian Revolution in order, as he says in a 1975 interview, to show “how the [future] African revolution would develop.”83 James’s historiography, as Cedric Robinson states, “was a declaration of war for liberation.”84 Part archive of previous manifestos, part historiography, and part manifesto itself, it tells the story of a previous colonial revolution in order to link the past to the present and transform the future. Its hybrid form mirrors the complexity and uneven nature of the capitalist world-system. Furthermore, James’s notion of historiography recalls Benjamin’s historical materialism, in which history bursts from the continuum of progressivism in order to spark a revolution. Benjamin’s “time of the now” occurs when the sense of historical continuity stops in a “Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for an oppressed past.”85 James’s retelling of the Haitian Revolution is less a romantic tale of an overcoming of oppression than, as Benjamin writes, a historian’s “fanning the spark of hope in the past . . . convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.”86 In the face of revolution, history is retold from the perspective of the once oppressed, a deferred and bitter victory for the long forgotten. The Haitian Revolution’s manifestos, archived long ago on dusty, hidden shelves, re-emerge at the “borders of time” to begin to speak for future peoples of the colonized world so as to redeem the past.87 By attending to marginal subjects who are perceived by the West as excluded from modernity as it already exists, I suggest that manifestos in both the “center” and the “periphery” reveal a crisis of modernity. This crisis is articulated through the interruptive temporality of manifestos written by colonized subjects whose presence by the early twentieth century in London – the primary site of my case study – cannot be denied. 82 83 84 85

James, The Black Jacobins, 373–4. Quoted in Kent Worcester, C. L. R. James: A Political Biography (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 36. Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed Books, 1983), 384. Benjamin, Illuminations, 263. 86 Benjamin, ibid., 255. 87 Foucault, Archaeology, 130.

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RACE, MANIFESTOS, AND THE ANXIETIES OF EMPIRE

I turn to early twentieth-century London because, first, the pre-World War One period was, in the words of Mary Ann Caws, the “poetic shout of the Great Age of the Manifesto,” and, second, as the center of the largest empire, London saw the close confluence of socialist, women’s suffrage, avant-garde, and pan-African manifestos circulating before and after World War One.88 It serves as an excellent site for studying the effects of democratic and anticolonial movements on avant-garde aesthetics and vice versa. I ask in the first part of the book: How do British women’s suffrage, futurist, and vorticist manifestos reflect anxieties of empire? The period covered by my study, from 1906 to 1914 and from 1934 to 1938, marks two very urgent and threatening times in British history. I choose these noncontiguous moments to foreground two historical moments when collectivist struggles and international crises produced hundreds of manifestos. The first period was marked by bitter, violent contestation over women’s suffrage, protracted class struggle over the passage of the Parliament Act of 1911, and imperial anxiety in the face of Sir Edward Carson and the Orangemen of Ulster’s open threats of civil war over Irish Home Rule. Less remarked, but none the less visible, were pan-Africanist, pan-Asian, and other nationalist organizations assembled in London to promote racial equality and autonomy across the empire. These threats sometimes emerged as outright violence. In 1905, Indian students in London formed the Indian Home Rule Society. Their activities were brought to a halt in 1909, when, despite police surveillance, one member of the society, Madan Lal Dhingra, assassinated Sir William Curzon Wyllie, the political aide-de-camp to the Secretary of State for India. Sir Harry Johnston and other imperialists therefore saw a need to “foster a more sympathetic spirit” and “to remove certain social disabilities,” as they expressed it, in order that anticolonial sentiments might be extinguished and the British Empire preserved.89 Such defensive gestures gave evidence of a wider turning-point in the geopolitical relations between races. The 1896 defeat of Italy by the Ethiopian Emperor Menalik II at the battle of Adowa and the 1905 defeat of Russia by Japan exposed the myth of white invincibility. These defeats 88 89

Mary Ann Caws, “Poetics of the Manifesto: Newness and Nowness,” in Manifesto: A Century of Isms, ed. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), xxi. Hakim Adi, West Africans in Britain, 1900–1960 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1998), 13.

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were widely viewed as blows to European prestige and had global implications for the relations between colonized peoples and Europeans.90 Moreover, Britain’s contested and disastrous Boer War (1899–1902) fanned the flames of colonial nationalist and anti-imperial movements in South Africa, Ireland, Bengal, and Egypt.91 The Boer War also stimulated the militancy of the British women’s suffrage movement, as I argue in the next chapter. In investigating the relation between the aesthetic autonomy of modernism and its historical ties to imperialism and empire, I have been influenced by important work in this area. This work draws its inspiration, to some extent, from Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, in which he notes that the “post-realist modernist sensibility” in works by Conrad, Forster, Malraux, and T. E. Lawrence “radiate an extreme, unsettling anxiety” in regard to the “triumph of empire.”92 In addition, Said notes, other modernist hallmarks of formal innovation such as self-consciousness, discontinuity, self-referentiality, and corrosive irony present in the major works of Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Proust, Mann, Yeats (and, I would add, Woolf ), “include a response to the external pressures on culture from the imperium.”93 According to Said, the importation of the foreign into Europe that manifests its imperial entanglements – whether narratives of travel and contact by explorers and ethnographers, geologists and geographers, merchants, soldiers, and art collectors or the migrant presence of colonial students, sailors, workers, and settlers – began to suggest a new vulnerability of Europe to its imperial rivals as well as to its subject races. Raymond Williams, too, maintained that the “metropolitan perception” of modernism arose in tandem with imperialism. On the one hand, the metropole displayed “the magnetic concentration of wealth and power” and, on the other, it allowed for “the simultaneous cosmopolitan access to a wider variety of subordinate cultures.”94 This uneven mixture created a sense of “strangeness and distance,” a sense of disjuncture and difference, which, Williams argues, created the formal experimentation of modernism that defined its community through their medium and practices.95 Williams avoids the hierarchical center/periphery model of metropolis/colony to note 90 91 92 94

Frank Fu¨redi, The Silent War: Imperialism and the Changing Perception of Race (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 29–30. Elleke Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 4. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 188. 93 Said, ibid., 188. Williams, The Politics of Modernism, 44. 95 Williams, ibid., 45.

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instead “a very marked unevenness of development” within Europe itself.96 These metropolitan locations were not only centers of aesthetic production, with their academies and museums that would become targets for avantgarde iconoclasm, but were also “within the new kind of open, complex and mobile society, [places where] small groups in any form of divergence or dissent could find some kind of foothold.”97 These footholds occurred within the very unevenness of the metropolitan terrain: between wealthy patronage and salons, bohemian enclaves of often impoverished immigrant artists and writers, the offices and meeting halls of militant political groups, the strange sights and sensational effects of music halls, variety theater, and other modern entertainment forms, the economically destitute and often racialized denizens of London working-class neighborhoods and docks. Williams’s desire to understand how imperialism and colonized cultures impact modernism focuses solely on Anglo-European culture. This Eurocentric preoccupation has been challenged by some postcolonial critics.98 Postcolonial critics, unlike Williams, look to the literary and aesthetic developments of the early twentieth century from the point of view of the history and aesthetic activities of colonized cultures and subjects. As mentioned earlier, Timothy Brennan and George Yu´dice have argued for a recognition of anti-imperialist impulses in critical understandings of modernism and the avant-garde. George Yu´dice argues that by bracketing together the full range of the avant-garde (the Africans, African Americans, Brazilians, Chileans, Peruvians, Jamaicans, Martinicans, Senegalese, Turks, Greeks, and others), critics such as Marjorie Perloff – whose work on futurist manifestos has influenced subsequent critics of modernist manifestos, including myself – find it difficult to make sense of the “stubborn nationalism” that limited the “internationalism” of the avant-garde.99 When put into the context of imperialism and anticolonial movements, Yu´dice writes, the hegemony of European prestige was defensively asserted as a series of fractured nationalisms and tenuously held. Yu´dice argues: “If the relative coherence of nineteenth-century narrative modes were premised on the intelligibility and stability provided by the national frame of reference, the imminence of international political upheaval and global conflict is registered in the fragmentation of 96 98 99

Williams, ibid., 44. 97 Williams, ibid., 45. See, for instance, Gauri Viswanathan, “Raymond Williams and British Colonialism,” The Yale Journal of Criticism, 4, 2 (Spring 1991), 47–66. Quoted in Yu´dice, “Rethinking the Theory of the Avant-Garde,” 59.

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narrative representation.”100 Conversely, Timothy Brennan argues that the avant-garde’s fascination with “primitive” cultures signaled “the political danger of independence in the periphery as well as the eventual relativization of European thought.”101 This danger, he argues, is “foreshortened” by critics such as Marianna Torgovnick, Adam Kuper, and Christopher Miller into the “guilty pleasures” of “the primitive.” Avant-garde and modernist fascination with the primitive was, in his view, “part of a longer process in which the colonies imaginatively invaded the European Continent, and under assumed identities, achieved a clarity whose contexts were decidedly geopolitical, although not always understood that way.”102 Yu´dice concurs that avant-garde primitivism “stems from the embrace of other life experiences, such as those of subordinated classes and regions as well as colonized peoples,” and was a response to anticolonial nationalisms that embraced vernacular cultures to articulate a differential relation to modernity.103 Whether as a reaction against or an ambivalent, racialist embrace of subordinated peoples, modernist manifestos express a structure of feeling of an empire in crisis. Beyond the metropolis, the manifesto, as it travels from Europe to the New World, Africa, and Latin America and back again, each time founds a different kind of modernism: a combination of developed and undeveloped economies, of abstract European ideas and local vernacular culture. It was, as Puchner argues, “a genre that uniquely exemplifies modernism and . . . was responsible for the distribution of modernism across different locales.”104 As it returns to the modern metropolis, the manifesto, appropriated by the avant-garde and stripped of its political aims in favor of aesthetic interventions, becomes the war-like instrument par excellence in this increased global competition. Pascale Casanova argues for reading literature within the context of a world marketplace whose history is one of “incessant struggle and competition over the very nature of literature itself – an endless succession of literary manifestos, movements, assaults, and revolutions. These rivalries are what have created world literature.”105 The manifesto uniquely articulates this rivalry, stretched as it is between publicity announcement and foundational aesthetic doctrine. What I show in my chapters on pre-World War One London is that writers show a fascination with modernity’s expansive, appropriative 100 103 104 105

Yu´dice, ibid., 58. 101 Brennan, “Postcolonial Studies,” 197. 102 Brennan, ibid., 197. Yu´dice, “Rethinking the Theory of the Avant-Garde,” 62–3. Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution, 175. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 12.

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force as it creates national identity, but that, conversely, the need to acknowledge these forces also expresses an anxiety concerning the nation’s potential degeneration and weakened competitiveness. As in national identity, so, too, in aesthetic ambition: in Chapter 4 Wyndham Lewis’s manifesto (co-written with Ezra Pound) aestheticizes political language. One recalls the stirring, active demands that conclude the Communist Manifesto: “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!”106 In contrast, the first vorticist manifesto is more reflective and individualist: “Beyond Action and Reaction we would establish ourselves” and “Our Cause is NO-MAN’S.”107 This more reflective manifesto seeks to cordon art off from the very forces of modernity (political democracy and the expanding literary and artistic marketplace) its authors invoke. Such intense ambivalence – between the need to compete and the disgust at having to do so – clearly provoked by global modernity, as I show below, registers in the quintessential modernist irony in Lewis’s and Pound’s manifesto. Much of the competitive threat to English literary prowess came from the increasing numbers of educated colonial subjects and their publications. The visibility of colonized writers within institutions of modernism can be attested to by Duse´ Mohamed Ali’s contributions to The New Age. Ali, the son of an Egyptian army officer and his Sudanese wife, published eleven articles in The New Age. The journal maintained a line of reformist anti-imperialism emerging at the time. Denouncing the barbarism of imperialism, it none the less generally assumed the unquestioned superiority of British civilization and historical progress. Ali’s articles, however, disrupted this assumption by inverting its presuppositions. For instance, Ali’s essay “ ‘White Women and Coloured Men’: The Other Side of the Picture” reverses the “Asiatic” threat to white women (increasingly felt in Britain, given the growing numbers of colonial subjects attending British universities and the strict color line maintained in Britain) by offering an anecdote of a “coloured” planter in the British West Indies who “declined to allow his daughter to marry a white man whose relatives could not receive her on terms of absolute equality.”108 106 107 108

Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 258. Wyndham Lewis, ed., Blast, 1 (June 1914) (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1981), 30–1. Duse´ Mohamed Ali, “ ‘White Women and Coloured Men’: The Other Side of the Picture,” The New Age (January 21, 1909), 263.

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In response to the growing prominence of racialized persons and cultures in the metropole, Wyndham Lewis expanded an issue of his journal The Enemy into a book-length polemic, Paleface, in which he bemoaned the increasing fashionableness of black culture in the white world. There, among his many targets, he excoriates Mr. Knopf, the New York publisher, who brought racial themes and African American publications to mainstream Anglo-American attention. Lewis turns with special attention to Dark Princess (1928), a novel by W. E. B. Du Bois. He relates how the protagonist, Matthew Towns, journeys to Paris and encounters at a dinner party members of a pan-Afro-Asian organization led by Princess Kautilya of Bwodpur, India, who has “started to fight for the dark and oppressed peoples of the world.”109 During dinner, an Egyptian member asks the princess, “Ah, Your Highness, . . . what is the fad today? What has followed expressionism, cubism, futurism, vorticism?”110 To which the princess replies confidently that, “The Congo . . . is flooding the Acropolis.”111 In reading and commenting on this reference to his own art movement, vorticism, Lewis performs a mise en abıˆme in which he discusses black fictional characters discussing his art movement. His movement is relegated to a fictional has-been, an outdated fad. He scathingly reveals how vorticism functions in the novel to draw lines of cultural capital among the “dark races” of the world. (Matthew Towns, an impoverished African American, feels excluded from the cosmopolitan group’s conversation because of his unfamiliarity with the art movements in question.) Lewis cannot control the dissemination and effects of his own work or the rise of the black middle class. His antimodern advice to whites is to maintain superiority at all cultural and political levels and to ignore black culture. In this manner, he believes defensively that it is possible to stem the tide of modernization. THE TRANSNATIONAL NETWORKS OF ANTICOLONIAL NATIONALISM

The increasing presence of black writers who competed within the literary marketplace was acknowledged (however backhandedly) by a wide range of British writers. They made the modernity of the “periphery” 109 110 111

W. E. B. Du Bois, Dark Princess: A Romance [1928] (Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson Organization, 1974), 34. Quoted in Wyndham Lewis, Paleface: The Philosophy of the “ Melting-pot” [1929] (New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1969), 33. Du Bois, Dark Princess, 20.

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impossible to ignore even in their efforts to disparage it. For instance, the vorticists “blasted” Rabindranath Tagore in their first manifesto, presumably for winning the 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature. Such disdain in literary circles was also evident when Claude McKay, who wrote for British former women’s suffragette leader Sylvia Pankhurst’s leftist newspaper The Worker’s Dreadnought from 1919 to 1921, had his collection of poems, Spring in New Hampshire, published in England in 1920. The Spectator reviewer remarked anxiously that: “Perhaps the ordinary reader’s first impulse in realizing that the book is by an American negro is to inquire into good taste. Not until we are satisfied that his work does not overstep the barriers which a not quite explicable but deep instinct in us is ever alive to maintain can we judge it with genuine fairness.”112 In his autobiography, McKay recounts other challenges to his ambition to become a successful writer. George Bernard Shaw, whom McKay greatly admired, reportedly asked him why he had not become a boxer instead of a poet.113 McKay retorts in his autobiography that Negro boxers faced discrimination in England as much as writers did, perhaps more. Some colonial writers took to sparring verbally with English writers as a marker of their literary ability to compete. C. L. R. James recounts a literary spat with Edith Sitwell in Bloomsbury over the question of poetic form in which he holds his own by means of his thorough knowledge of English literary history.114 While formerly colonized writers jostled for a place within the British literary scene, colonized subjects from all walks of life traveled to the imperial metropolis to work, study, and live. Once there, students, activists, workers, and professionals from all parts of the British Empire came into contact with one another. In organizations such as the League of Coloured Peoples, the West African Student Union, and the International African Services Bureau, they learned about political developments in the scattered colonies. They exchanged and developed ideas within a diverse, interconnected network of resistance formations. In thinking about these exchanges, I follow a transnational approach to the study of modernism, empire, and modernity. This interactive conception of empire, as Elleke Boehmer suggests, “undercuts the notions both of top-down and of bottom-up discursive impacts that still organize 112 113 114

Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home (New York: Harcourt, 1970), 88. McKay, ibid., 71. C. L. R. James, The C. L. R. James Reader, ed. Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 43–4.

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definitions of the colonial relationship.”115 Rather, in focusing on London between 1906 and 1914 and between 1934 and 1938, I trace new organizational networks afforded by international socialism and communism, anticolonial nationalisms, avant-garde aesthetics, and antiimperial activism (for instance, on behalf of Ethiopia). I ask: how did these transnational networks make themselves felt as writers appropriated the manifesto form? How did the manifesto spread around the world, intervening in modernity within various, unevenly experienced locations? Yet, at the same time, how did the manifesto continue to promote the best aspirations of modernity? To conclude, I sketch a brief history of pan-African manifestos. My sketch is not intended to be inclusive, but, rather, to suggest other points of critical entry into the overlooked history of manifestos, race, and alternative modernisms. The manifesto has traveled from Europe to the New World, Africa, and to the Far East. It marks the beginning of a new era of liberation and generates the belief by which that new era will live. I have already discussed Louverture’s 1793 Enlightenmentinspired manifesto. But there’s a second strand of black manifestos such as African American Robert Alexander Young’s messianic proclamation, “The Ethiopian Manifesto: Issued in Defense of the Black Man’s Rights in the Scale of Universal Freedom” (1829). In this manifesto, Young (calling himself Rednaxela, Alexander spelled backwards), foretells the coming of a prophetic liberator of the African race, who would be white in appearance though born of a black mother and marked by “webbed and bearded” middle toes. Drawing from the earlier use of the manifesto as prophetic revelation, Rednaxela instructs “the degraded sons of [Africa] to submit with fortitude to your present state of suffering . . . [until] the time is at hand, when, with but the power of words and the divine will of God, the vile shackles of slavery shall be broken asunder from you.”116 Young’s manifesto invests in the “power of words” combined with a supernatural will to break the bonds of slavery and to achieve the apocalyptic cessation of history. In the same vein, David Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America (1830), which saw three editions, also draws upon the manifesto’s powerful prophetic tradition, but he combines this tradition with an 115 116

Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 5. William Jeremiah Moses, ed., Classic Black Nationalism: From the American Revolution to Marcus Garvey (New York: New York University Press 1996), 66.

Introduction

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analysis of the history of black peoples, complete with footnotes and archival documents. His revisionary history extends to the Carthaginians and their general, Hannibal, whom he claims for the African race. He states that Carthaginians “were dis-united, as the coloured people are now,” and this division ensured (and continues to ensure) victory to the enemies of colored peoples.117 He confidently predicts that “all coloured men, women and children, of every nation, language and tongue under heaven, will try to procure a copy of this Appeal and read it, or get some one to read it to them, for it is designed more particularly for them.”118 More grounded in secular history than Robert Alexander Young’s “Ethiopian Manifesto,” Walker, too, recognizes the power of words to unite the dispersed race and to overthrow white domination. He seeks to redeem a history of suffering and defeat for “coloured citizens” around the world. In the twentieth century, black manifestos follow more closely the ideas of European Enlightenment and socialist manifestos. For instance, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote a manifesto for the 1921 Pan-African Congress called “The Declaration to the World or the London Manifesto” that advocates the absolute equality of races, education for colonized subjects, protection for black laborers, and local self-government. At this stage of pan-Africanism, Du Bois anticipates the “complete assimilation of Africa with two or three great world states, with political, civil, and social power and privileges absolutely equal for its black and white citizens.”119 It was not until the late 1930s, and especially after World War Two, that panAfricanists would look to African states, and not Western ones, for their liberation. In the 1920s, Du Bois still sees a singular history, that of European modernity, which Africans and African-diasporic subjects “lag a few hundred years behind.”120 He naturalizes the colonial time-lag and puts the blame on “backward” races for their “failure to advance,” but he none the less criticizes colonial states.121 For example, England has systematically fostered ignorance among the natives, has enslaved them and is still enslaving some of them, has usually declined even to try to train black and brown men in real self-government, to recognize civilized black folks as civilized, or to grant to colored colonies those rights of self-government which it freely gives to white men.122

117 119 120

Moses, ibid., 76–7. 118 Moses, ibid., 70. W. E. B. Du Bois, Pamphlets and Leaflets by W. E. B. Du Bois ed. Herbert Aptheker (White Plains, NY: Kraus-Thomson Organization, 1986), 198. Du Bois, ibid., 195. 121 Du Bois, ibid., 197. 122 Du Bois, ibid.

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Du Bois’s manifesto also predicts the line over which colonial subjects cannot be further pushed: “The independence of Abyssinia, Liberia, Haiti and San Domingo is absolutely necessary to any sustained belief of the black folk in the sincerity and honesty of the white.”123 With the American invasion of Haiti and European acquiescence over Ethiopia’s conquest by Mussolini, this line would indeed be crossed in a manner that would spark the militarism of pan-African and anticolonial nationalisms of the 1930s. Du Bois’s manifesto has a patient, rational, and tolerant tone, but this language would soon change to urgent, outraged calls for action. For instance, the pamphlet from the Belgian Congo reprinted in Nancy Cunard’s Negro speaks solely to the Congolese, urging them to obtain their freedom: “By making this manifesto known. By getting together in the villages, in the work centres, in the army camps and discussing it. By backing up the strikes and the risings that are breaking out everywhere in the Congo. By forming groups for their own defense.”124 (I examine this manifesto in more detail in Chapter 5.) Lest these international movements be seen as an exclusively masculinist undertaking, we also can consider that the League of Coloured Peoples (LCP), of which Jamaican feminist Una Marson was secretary, at its second Annual Conference in England in March 1934, passed unanimously a resolution concerning women in Africa that was sent to the Colonial Secretary. This resolution called for an end to regarding women as property, violence to women, and contracts of marriage made in infancy or even before birth, and demanded the right of women to own property. While these resolutions may themselves be deemed a European civilizational imperative, the League of Coloured Peoples wrote that it “recognizes the unwisdom of making hurried reforms in all matters affecting tribal custom and would therefore urge that measures be taken along co-operative lines to educate the African communities so that they may of their own initiative put an end to all abuses now affecting the womanhood of Africa.”125 The League worked through the Colonial Office to effect dialogue leading to change in Africa. After 1935, with the relatively uncontested invasion of Ethiopia by Italy, most anticolonial organizations, including the LCP, would look to the colonial world alone to secure their liberties. Given these organizations’ forward-looking diasporic and transnational perspectives, Caribbean writer and novelist Eric Walrond, in an article 123 124 125

Du Bois, ibid., 198. Nancy Cunard, ed., Negro: An Anthology (London: Wishart, 1934), 795. Anon., The Keys (April–June 1934), 82.

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titled “The Negro in London” published in Marcus Garvey’s Londonbased The Black Man in 1936, could chastise London for being behind the times and even provincial: It is indeed a paradox that London, the capital of the largest Negro Empire in the world . . . should be so extremely inexpert in the matter of interracial relations. But in this respect London may be easily compared to New York twenty years ago before the big migration which resulted in the establishment of Harlem.126

Inverting progressivist narratives, Walrond decenters London from the vortex of modernity in matters of race relations. It is London’s very inability to acknowledge black and brown peoples in its midst (except as anxious subtext) that indicates its behind-the-times mentality. In contrast, Jean Epstein, the French film-maker, in 1922 considered African diasporic subjects to be at the center of the modern (and the popularity of black culture in Paris at this time suggests he was not alone in this sentiment). He writes: “But the young black who . . . used to kneel in worship before the headlights on explorers’ cars is now driving a taxi in Paris and New York. We had best not lag behind this black.”127 In this inversion, whites fall behind black modernity, while diasporic black people, shuttling between colony and metropole, displace a singular meaning and location of modernity. Around the world, the manifesto continues to wage this fight to define one’s modern time and place. To summarize, there was a counter-history, a black revolutionary tradition, that existed in relation to European modernity and its history of slavery. It existed within imperial centers such as London, Paris, and New York, where African diasporic activists lobbied for change, and it crossed borders to express solidarity throughout Africa, Asia, and the African- and Asian-diasporic world. Through manifestos and other texts, anticolonial writers articulated alternative modernisms in the sense that they experienced and expressed most forcefully modernity’s uneven development, situated as they were where forces of modernization confronted “belated” black forms of social organization, traditions, and, often in the colonies, less industrialized forms of production. These texts circulated throughout the black international press and cross-fertilized other black national organizations and publications. Mass communication allowed colored people around the world to learn quickly about how different groups were resisting white domination and imperialism. 126 127

Eric Walrond, “The Negro in London,” The Black Man, 1, 12 (late March 1936), 9–10, here 10. Jean Epstein, “L’Objectif lui-meˆme,” Ećrits sur le cine´ma, 1921–1953 (Paris: E´ditions Seghers, 1974), vol. I, 125–8 here 127.

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But how might a pan-African movement to end colonialism, slavery, and racism potentially alter Anglo-American literary history? Can attention to transnational narratives decenter and decolonize metropolitan modernist studies? Modernism, Race, and Manifestos attempts to rethink Anglo-European modernism through the lens of racial difference. Too often, critical understandings of modernism follow the writers themselves in excluding other races as a condition for defining what modernism is. My contribution to modernist studies is to demonstrate how modernist manifestos and other activist texts articulate the multiple temporalities of racial difference that form a particular structure of feeling in the early twentieth century. “Structures of feeling” refers to the lived quality of meaning and values that is structured through contingent events, how persons at various significant moments are faced with the choice to either repeat the past or alter it. Manifestos articulate a structure of feeling that imaginatively refashions power relations, communities, and history. They do this largely by signaling a palpable, material force of writing as enunciation and offering cultural scripts that depend upon the imaginative evocation of the affective, lived experience of collectivities. In the next chapter, I consider the militant wing of the British women’s suffrage movement in terms of their constructions of racial identity, national dominance, and reliance on narratives of progress. Their manifestos affirm these beliefs, yet the militant women’s suffrage movement, often despite itself, troubled the gendered and racial boundaries that shore up these very ideas.

PART I

Cosmopolitan London, 1906–1914

CHAPTER

2

Women’s suffrage melodrama and burlesque

The militancy of women is doing a work of purification. Nowhere was purification more needed than in the relationship between men and women . . . A great upheaval, a great revolution, a great blasting away of ugly things – that is militancy . . . The bad and the old have to be destroyed to make way for the good and the new. When militancy has done its work then will come sweetness and cleanness, respect and trust, perfect equality and justice into the partnership Christabel Pankhurst1 between men and women.

Christabel Pankhurst’s definition of militancy in terms of purity and the destruction of “the bad and the old” argues for the modernity of the militant British women’s suffrage movement. The future she envisions breaks from the past – defined as “bad,” “old,” and “ugly” – and allows women to join the ranks of the modern vanguard described as “the good and the new.” Through this definition, Pankhurst whitens women as citizens by writing them into national narratives of progress.2 These narratives repeat the past by reproducing imperial and national structures of power. They do this by excluding cultural and racial differences (the “bad” and the “old”) and sexual desire (the impure) as less than modern. This exclusion shores up the racial and gendered boundaries that define modern subjects, and then these subjects, in turn, define their actions as historical progress (“the good and the new”). This cycle condemns those defined as outside modernity to remain there, as those inside continually decide who makes history and thereby counts as modern. This reiteration of the past relegates the present moment to one of passive acquiescence

1 2

Christabel Pankhurst, “What Militancy Means,” The Suffragette (2 May, 1913), 492. I use the term “whitens” to denote an understanding of racial categories as fluid and constructed. Pankhurst’s rhetoric assimilates women across classes into political modernity and describes their fitness for citizenship in racial terms, as I later show. My argument is that the discourses of citizenship, modernity and whiteness intersect.

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that Benjamin calls “homogeneous, empty time.”3 In this chapter, British women’s suffrage manifestos provide the parameters for rereading the suffrage archive in terms of how British women’s suffrage rhetoric depends upon the performative repetition of national narratives to advance the racial myths of modernity. Since, however, women suffragists challenged the role of women in national political life, they necessarily altered those national narratives. Here, too, manifestos provide a powerful frame for understanding this performative disruption. In these modernizing narratives, women traditionally serve as race and class markers outside of the flux of history. As women’s suffrage rhetoric insists on women’s place in history, as public citizens, it sparks a widespread fear of national and racial disorder. Women’s suffrage rhetoric, then, both seeks to convince the public that enfranchised women will uphold national narratives of progress and order and disorders those national narratives. In effect, women’s suffrage rhetoric negotiates the contradiction of women’s place within the nation as both markers and makers of history. In the women’s suffrage struggle, “woman” is both a symbolic marker of order and stability and a real subject of disorder and change. To investigate how women can be overdetermined as both symbolic and real and how this overdetermination is negotiated, I turn to instances of performative selffashioning in the women’s suffrage movement. For example, in Elizabeth Robins’s novel The Convert (1907), based upon the play Votes for Women!, I track the close relations between suffrage rhetoric and theater: both forms experimented with available scripts for women. These scripts include melodrama and burlesque that I historicize in order to uncover how these popular theatrical entertainments came to represent women as either upholding or transgressing their role as symbolic class and racial markers of the nation. These theatrical genres fall roughly into two categories: (1) those that uphold national narratives (melodrama); and (2) those that interrupt the seamless continuity of national narratives (burlesque). I turn first to militant women’s suffrage texts that rely on a heightened war-time national narrative that unfolds in homogeneous, empty time. Only after demonstrating how suffrage rhetoric upholds this narrative will it be possible to consider how suffrage texts interrupt that narrative and reveal racialized subjects held to be outside of history and the 3

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Harcourt, 1968), 261.


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modern. It is my argument that these overlooked locations lie within the suffrage archive itself. Not only did militant women’s suffrage groups create modern mass political subjects in a manner that dovetailed with the interests of the state in strengthening the universality of nation and empire and subordinating those deemed less than modern, but the cross-class creation of modern political subjects also allowed for counter-hegemonic possibilities. In this respect, the British women’s suffrage archive presents a range of possibilities for articulating collective representations of “race” and nation. This chapter and, indeed, the first part of this book are primarily about how manifestos and other texts contribute to the formation of colonizing European subjects. There are no colonized subjects in this section; rather, “race” here is constructed through narratives that are often ostensibly about other topics. In the early twentieth century, the category of race was as much about culture and class as it was about pigmentation. As historian of anthropology George Stocking notes, at the turn of the century: “Race was as much product as cause. If it was a determinant of national cultural experience, it was at the same time an outgrowth of previous national and cultural tradition. Indeed, in 1890, the idea of race was in many ways and for many people not very different from what we would call today national character.”4 “Race” as well as nation are products of narrative that change over time.5 WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE MANIFESTOS

Between 1905 and the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), frustrated by the lack of progress to win the vote for women through reformist channels of parliamentary petitioning, public meetings, and lobbying, began to wage a militant campaign. The campaign started with heckling politicians, 4 5

George Stocking, “The Turn-of-the-Century Concept of Race,” Modernism / Modernity, 1 (1994), 4–16, here 6. Important scholarship has begun to investigate the role of the middle-class white woman in relation to narratives of race, nation, and empire. See Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Laura Doyle, Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Jane Garrity, Step-daughters of England: British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary (New York: Manchester University Press, 2003); Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (New York: Routledge, 1995).

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attempting to enter the House of Commons, refusing to pay fines, and accepting prison sentences instead. The goal was to “create an impression upon the public throughout the country, to set everyone talking about votes for women, to keep the subject in the press, to leave the government no peace from it.”6 To sustain its visibility, the WSPU published the journal Votes for Women (monthly between 1907 and 1908 and then weekly until 1918), gave countless speeches, staged massive demonstrations, pageants, and plays. In the winter of 1911–12, in response to the government’s continued refusal to grant their franchise demands and to brutal mistreatment at the hands of police and male bystanders, the WSPU escalated its scale of violence. By 1913, militant suffragettes (as the press called women suffragists, who adopted the moniker for themselves) committed arson, cut telegraph wires, and exploded ink bombs in letterboxes. Public opinion was divided over such violent methods, although the militant actions, subsequent prison sentences, and hunger strikes ensured that the public continually debated the women’s suffrage question. The militancy of the WSPU marks a break from nineteenth-century reformist suffragist organizations, whose patient appeals for the vote rested on the restrained rhetoric of duty and service to the nation. By contrast, the WSPU drew upon the lessons learned during the political agitations of the nineteenth century when, in 1832 and again in 1866–7, violence had been instrumental in extending the franchise to wider segments of the British male population. But the WSPU’s chief lesson in political change and state power was the Boer War (1899–1902). In protesting this war, the future WSPU leaders Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Sylvia and Christabel, Dora Montefiore, Emmeline and Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, and Charlotte Despard came to political consciousness. What they protested during the war was the use of force to enfranchise subjects abroad. The British government justified its military intervention in what would become South Africa as a defense of Uitlander disenfranchisement. Uitlanders were English-speaking migrants from England, Scotland, Ireland, continental Europe, Australia, and North America who were denied the vote within the Transvaal Republic governed by Boers (Dutch settlers). The British government rationalized the war in the language of liberal political rights: freedom, franchise rights of white men, and the inevitability of progress. As Laura Nym Mayhall 6

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement (London: Lovat Dickenson, 1931), 223.


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shows, the future WSPU leaders contested what they viewed as a “cynical ploy” on the government’s part to “exert military might on behalf of economic and imperial interests [but to claim it was for liberal political rights].”7 Mayhall argues that this cynical use of force “suggested that subjects’ use of resistance could be, in fact, a legitimate means of establishing citizenship.”8 This militant form of protest borrowed from a masculine model of citizenship based on autonomy and consent rather than on feminine duty and service. The militant energies of British women’s suffrage brought imperial aggression home from overseas. Their activities arose in conjunction with the uneven effects of British imperial expansion (in this case, by extending the vote to overseas male “outlanders” and disenfranchising Africans). WSPU manifestos should be read, then, within the context of nationbuilding and imperial expansion. In doing so, I am not seeking to prove that women suffragists were racist because they drew racial and cultural boundaries but, rather, to note how race and gender are marked amid shifting definitions of citizenship. In writing women into narratives of citizenship, the WSPU both broke from past narratives that situated women in the private sphere and argued that women’s enfranchisement would contribute to existing narratives of national progress. The performative rhetoric of militant WSPU manifestos, therefore, can be characterized as both rupture and recuperation. While their manifestos seek to break from the past – now! – they convey this break as the fulfillment of historical progress and the redemption of injustice. For example, the WSPU’s founding manifesto, “The Battle Cry,” appeared in the first issue of its journal Votes for Women in October 1907 and begins, “O women far and wide the trumpet call goes forth. Come fight with us in our battle for freedom.”9 It imagines a collective formation of women united in a common struggle to realize their social and political vision. This collective identity is created through the heightened rhetoric of state warfare. The manifesto presents the current conflict as women’s history-making battle to redeem past 7

8 9

Laura E. Nym Mayhall, “The South African War and the Origins of Suffrage Militancy in Britian, 1899–1902,” in Women’s Suffrage in the British Empire: Citizenship, Nation, and Race, ed. Ian Christopher Fletcher, Laura E. Nym Mayhall, and Phillippa Levine (New York: Routledge, 2000), 3–17, here 13. Mayhall, ibid., 13. Anon., “The Battle Cry,” Votes for Women, 1 (October 1907), 3–6, here 6. The Suffragette Fellowship Microform Collection at the Museum of London (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Microform, 1985).

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suffering. Just a few pages prior to the manifesto, the first issue of Votes for Women evokes the long history of struggle, as it is dedicated: “To the brave women who to-day are fighting for freedom: to the noble women who all down the ages kept the flag flying and looked forward to this day without seeing it.”10 The dedication positions this moment of struggle as a fulfillment of the past: how “all down the ages” women “looked forward to this day without seeing it.” By contrast, “freedom” is equated with winning the vote and connotes a departure from a history of servitude. This break generates the newness and nowness of the collective organization of militant women. This modern moment – its attention to the present – focuses on “this day [on which the vote is granted].”11 It implies the absolute need of winning the vote and its epoch-making significance in the present moment of struggle and transformation. This recuperation of women’s militancy into narratives of national progress suggests the “meanwhile” – or simultaneity – of homogeneous empty time, the sense that even in emergency or war-time setting, the nation continues to unfold steadily through representations of what Benedict Anderson calls the “firm and stable reality” of the nation.12 Suffrage militancy, though aimed at institutions of power, sought women’s entry into the very institutions it fought, and therefore it needed to appeal to a transcendent and continuous notion of national unity. At issue was the concern that if members of the social body, especially women, exerted their radical independence, how then could national unity be achieved? Wouldn’t social order descend into anarchy and riot? How to reconcile these urges with social law and order? To compensate for this problem of women and anarchy, the WSPU invoked war-time nationalism, a discourse of national and racial supremacy. The symbols of suffrage militancy (the flag, the trumpet) mimic national symbols and empire. They aim to subsume suffragette violence under duty to the nation and to preserve racial and national dominance. As seen above, “The Battle Cry” manifesto simulates the urgency of wartime emergency, when the state assumes absolute authority over its subjects. It demands its followers’ absolute unquestioning devotion and self-sacrifice to the cause. Further, the language of war evokes the affective peaks of collective belonging that Benedict Anderson attributes to the national imagination. During war, the nation is imagined as a community embodying ultimate values.13 The self-sacrificing militancy of women also 10 13

Ibid., 3. 11 Ibid. 12 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1983), 25. Anderson, ibid., 141–4.


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ensures that the particularities of women’s interests are gathered under the unifying and racialized ideals of patriotism, kinship, and home. In order to give “strenuous service, they must be prepared not to flinch in the hour of difficulty.”14 They must renounce individual choice (including sexual desire) in order to reproduce the kinship lines of national unity. To serve with such devotion, in arduous conditions, “The Battle Cry” demands that women disavow their past affiliations and individual motivations: If you have any class feeling you must leave that behind when you come into this movement. For the women who are in our ranks know no barriers of class distinction. If you are tied to any men’s political party you must break that tie before you come into this movement . . . The founder and leaders of the movement must lead, the non-commissioned officers must carry out their instructions, the rank and file must loyally share the burden of the fight.15

The military language – “ranks,” “non-commissioned officers” – appropriates the very tools by which the nation-state symbolizes itself and evokes the affective peaks of war-time national belonging. The movement’s demands mirror national patriotism, entailing self-sacrifice and quasireligious devotion. This language of collective formation abstracts from everyday life and is mapped onto symbolic rhetoric of nationalist fervor. In an effort to uphold a unified temporality of the nation, the WSPU sought to hide the embodied, desirous particularity of women’s belated inscription (coming after British male suffrage) into the homogenous, empty time of the nation figured as universal and abstract. Its history-making moment joins, rather than disrupts, the steady flow of historical progress. This universal and abstract notion of time is an Enlightenment conception in which “time is always and everywhere the same, succession without content.”16 History flows onward untouched by individual perceptions or actions because it obeys objective laws. This understanding of time supports a mass sensibility, a collectivism where differences cease to matter, provided that subjects unite under a national identity. In contrast, WSPU leaders characterized unorganized working-class women as being outside of this time and, hence, outside of the modern nation. For instance, in “The Potato-pickers,” published in Votes for Women in 1909, Sylvia Pankhurst writes of the rural agrarian workers she meets in northern England and Scotland: “The woman who sat knitting there by the fire was sad, because the children she loved and worked for had gone 14 16

Anon., “The Battle Cry,” 6. 15 Ibid. Ronald Schleifer, Modernism and Time: The Logic of Abundance in Literature, Science and Culture, 1880–1930 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 2.

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out into the world, and left her . . . Yet if she could but realize it, the great Woman’s Movement calls her as it calls all other women, and out in the world there is work that waits for her.”17 Pankhurst draws attention to the disparity between the static quality of the potato-pickers’ life and the homogenous, empty time of the women’s suffrage movement. Spatially, the public, modern realm – “out in the world” – is where the women’s history-making movement unfolds, whereas the potato-pickers are represented as hidden, private, lost, and racially other. Michael Hanchard calls this projection of persons outside of modernity “racial time” that negates productive life.18 Pankhurst certainly negates the lived experience of the potato-pickers as she describes the women “huddled together, these poor degraded creatures lower than the beasts of the field.”19 For these women to gain political consciousness, they must also gain national consciousness and move with the modern pace of the world “out there.” They must leave behind the “racial time” of their prior lives in order to enter the movement. By 1913, Sylvia Pankhurst would abandon this vanguardist stance and ally herself with working-class East End London women radicals, as I show later in this chapter. For now, I draw the reader’s attention to one final and exceptionally clear example of how the racial and gendered boundaries of citizenship are affirmed through the WSPU’s political texts. Christabel Pankhurst’s polemic The Great Scourge and How to End It (1913) deploys “womanly woman” rhetoric to advance racial myths of modernity that exclude persons who mix sexually and racially across class categories. The tradition of womanly woman rhetoric – an essentialized idea of womanhood as maternal and modest – upholds the nation’s abstract, empty time. In this tradition, women as an ideal symbol of womanliness could circulate in homogeneous public time because local and private particularities are bracketed out of the signifier. This rhetoric enacts what Homi Bhabha calls the pedagogical function of narrating the nation, a “continuist, accumulative temporality.”20 Womanly woman rhetoric also maintained a continuity with Victorian feminist identities that were successfully deployed during the sexual purity campaigns of the 1880s. 17 18

19 20

Sylvia Pankhurst, A Sylvia Pankhurst Reader, ed. Kathryn Dodd (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 36. Michael Hanchard, “Afro-Modernity: Temporality, Politics, and the African Diaspora,” in Alternative Modernities, ed. Dilip Parameshwar Goankar (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 291. S. Pankhurst, A Sylvia Pankhust Reader, 35. Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990), 297.


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Christabel Pankhurst’s infamous attack on male vice and sexually transmitted diseases, The Great Scourge, combines social purity rhetoric from the nineteenth-century reformist movement with twentieth-century militancy to produce a modernist rhetoric of imperial and national supremacy. She mobilizes categories of sexual purity and racial hierarchy (maintained through chastity) to further the material and symbolic power of women’s militancy. Pankhurst’s rhetoric derives its emotive force through the self-sacrificing, sublimated fervor of women who enact the ultimate values of nationalism. She excoriates inappropriate, i.e. extramarital, relations for creating the disease-ridden conditions for “race suicide.”21 In place of casual sexual relations, Pankhurst calls for militant chastity which is predicated on control of the body whether in the throes of a street demonstration turned violent or while on hunger strike in prison. The renunciatory discipline inscribed on suffrage bodies contains the disorderly violence provoked by suffrage militancy. The effect of such rigid discipline was to uphold middle-class forms of national identity. The dominant figure of the morally upright, racially pure militant in the women’s suffrage campaign was hostile to workingclass culture. In The Great Scourge, the idea of women prostituting themselves – the target of male vice – is so unthinkable that Pankhurst claims they could only have been kidnapped into such slavery. In her view, the women’s suffrage campaign will cleanse the nation of any immoral activity; all citizens of the nation will be brought into the bright light of modernity and educated into its proper behaviors. Pankhurst’s aim to assimilate all women as citizens of the state disavows class differences that were also racialized, and represents women as a single, unified social body, sharing the same position on the cutting edge of modernity, moving ever forward while repeating existent class and racial formations. Pankhurst’s militant work of purifying the relations between men and women enforces a restraint on women’s sexuality – and, under their influence, men’s sexuality, too – so that cross-class mixing will not occur and thereby cause cultural hierarchies, and, from there, civilization, to collapse.22 As class categories within Britain were also racialized, sexual 21 22

Christabel Pankhurst, “The Great Scourge and How to End It,” in Suffrage and the Pankhursts, ed. Jane Marcus (New York: Routledge, 1987), 187–240, here 188. George Stocking reminds us that “in 1896, the processes and the problems of heredity were little understood, and ‘blood’ was for many a solvent in which all problems were dissolved and all processes commingled. ‘Blood’ – and by extension ‘race’ – included numerous elements that we would today call cultural; there was not a clear line between cultural and physical elements or between social and biological heredity.” Stocking, “Turn-of-the-Century,” 6.

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mixing across classes also implied the threat of racial and national anarchy. To ward off these fears of “interracial” mingling, Pankhurst argues in “What Militancy Means” that militancy purifies the degenerate national habits into which relations between men and women have fallen, namely, “all kinds of evils,” such as tyranny, impurity, inequality, and prejudice. In The Great Scourge, Pankhurst makes clear the racial implications behind the militant work of purification: “It is in the interests of the nation that these . . . hypocritical opponents profess to resist votes for women. How hollow that argument is seen to be when it is realized that men are constantly infecting and re-infecting the race with vile [venereal] disease, and so bringing about the downfall of the nation!”23 In place of women’s passivity as they are innocently contaminated by their husbands’ improper alliances with raced and classed prostitutes, Pankhurst offers forceful change, an inversion of power as white, middle-class women claim their place as the nation’s moral and spiritual leaders. In “What Militancy Means,” the great “upheaval,” “revolution,” and “blasting away of ugly things” emphatically proclaims a rupture from the old, contaminated mode of promiscuous sexuality. White men and women remain the aesthetic ideal and, under the guidance of enfranchised, morally upright women, the state will clean up poverty and social ills. In effect, Pankhurst rhetorically unifies an expanding horizon of cross-class women who struggle collectively to win the vote, believing that once the vote was won, women’s private virtue would vastly improve and modernize the public sphere. In Pankhurst’s vision of a suffrage war, militant women patrol against the improper mixing of raced and classed subjects, a cultural segregation predicated on the chaste discipline of refined modern citizens. This concern to control the radical individualism of militant women through appeals to hierarchies of race and nation was fueled by eugenic understandings of the racial destinies of nations. In this discourse, typologies of race and class were virtually indistinguishable. Those occupying the bottom rung of the social order were believed to be there from natural causes; they were both morally and biologically inferior to those of the superior classes. While it was the superior class that affirmed Britain’s special destiny as a world imperial power, its universalizing qualities stemming from a form of strict organic hierarchy, the entire nation – its growing masses – needed to become fit to rule the empire. In the aftermath of the Boer War (as it revealed the unfitness of the working 23

C. Pankhurst, “The Great Scourge,” 189.


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classes for active military duty) and the victory of Japan over Russia in 1905, fears of the successful challenge of non-white races to European superiority mounted. For instance, in 1914, just after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, when all of Europe was scrambling to avoid a war, British Fabian Beatrice Webb saw the “impending catastrophe” in terms of a racial invasion of “outcasts from Southern Europe, migrants from Algeria, and from coolies from China. ‘This,’ she wrote, ‘seems to me a bigger tragedy than any hypocritical defeat by an army of Germans’.”24 To avoid such decline, eugenicists such as Francis Galton and Karl Pearson and scientific popularizers such as Alfred Marshall identified differential birth rates from both the British lower classes and other races outside of Britain as symptoms of Britain’s racial decline. Marshall affirms British racial superiority and warns that: There can be no doubt that this extension of the English race has been a benefit to the world. A check to the growth of the population would do great harm if it affected only the more intelligent races and particularly the more intelligent classes of these races. There does indeed appear some danger of this evil. For instance, if the lower classes of Englishmen multiply more rapidly than those which are morally and physically superior, not only will the population of England deteriorate, but also that part of the population of American and Australia that descends from Englishmen multiply less rapidly than it otherwise would be. Again if Englishmen multiply less rapidly than the Chinese, this spiritless race will overrun portions of the earth that otherwise would have been peopled by English vigor.25

The degenerate lower classes presented as much a threat to racial and national superiority from within England as the Chinese did from without. Therefore, it was especially incumbent upon women of “the more intelligent races . . . [and] classes” to preserve this superiority by reproducing their more intelligent stock. Their racial stock was their destiny. Given this racial anxiety, the British women’s suffrage movement was often perceived – despite WSPU rhetoric to the contrary – to exacerbate the felt sense that England had lost its organic hierarchies and social cohesion. As women sought to enjoy full participation in modernity – not only by voting but by winning greater legal rights and educational and employment opportunities – they unsettled the role that femininity 24 25

Quoted in Frank Fu¨redi, The Silent War: Imperialism and the Changing Perception of Race (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 31. Quoted in Fu¨redi, ibid., 64.

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played in the discourses of nation, race, and class. If, as Rita Felski and others have argued, women’s role is to remain outside history as the archaic marker of tradition against which the modernity of the nation state defines itself, then women’s entrance into the public life of national citizenship challenged that national identity. Women’s movement into the public sphere injected temporal difference (figured through categories of gender and race) into the homogeneous, empty time of the nation, though suffrage rhetoric was often at pains to minimize and even disavow this difference. More broadly, greater autonomy for women translated as a failure “to hold the racial line,” a collective consensus on the part of the white “race” to maintain a unanimity of power and prestige in the face of the black threat.26 Antisuffrage writers blatantly revealed their anxieties in regard to the threat such unruly women posed to English men’s sexual and racial dominance. The unmanliness of men in dealing with militant women’s hysteria, writes an anonymous contributor to the Referee, “is closely connected with the happiness or misery of innumerable lives for the next ten generations . . . [since] the progeny of unmanly men to unwomanly women is unlikely to last out and to make good for many decades in the coming struggle for life between Asiatics, Africans, and white men.”27 These sexual and racial anxieties were also intimately connected to class fears, as writers such as Elizabeth Lynn Linton charged that the unladylike behavior of militant women associated them with “the uncultured – and savages,” such as the “pit brow women for whom sex has no aesthetic distinction.”28 Working-class women were considered a racially different element of Britain. In large part, middle-class fears about the women’s suffrage movement stemmed from the fact that working-class women were already politicized around local issues through a growing organized labor movement that resisted middle-class national culture. For instance, Christabel Pankhurst was first exposed to women’s suffrage activism through her political involvement in radical working-women’s organizations in Manchester. To build a message that promoted national stability and order, however, the WSPU moved its headquarters in 1906 from Manchester to London, where it formulated political rhetoric aimed at bridging class differences 26 27 28

Fu¨redi, ibid., 26–8. Quoted in Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 204. Quoted in Ann Ardis, New Women, New Novels (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 24–5.


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and working directly at the national political level. As one of its earliest manifestos announces, the WSPU sought to move working-class women away from local concerns and to a national movement where cross-class alliances would mitigate class differences. “Votes for Women, New Movement MANIFESTO” proclaims such a cross-class identity, bristling with activity: The London W.S. & P. Unions adopt the policy, initiated in Manchester and intend to carry on in London a determined and persistent campaign. Since the adoption of this new policy great progress has already been made. THE WORKING WOMEN OF LONDON ARE AROUSED. The end of the long struggle for political existence is in view . . . Women Trades Unionists and Social Reformers now realize that the possession of the Vote is the most effective way of securing better social and industrial conditions, better wages, shorter hours, healthier homes, and an honourable position in the State which will enable women as well as men to render that Citizen Service so necessary to the development of a truly great nation.29

Echoing the Communist Manifesto in its stirring call to action – “workers of the world, unite!” – this WSPU manifesto, however, preserves its national boundaries and universalizes its “Citizen Service” rather than offer a new class perspective. As women sought to join men in rendering “Citizen Service,” they expanded this category. Barbara Green argues that the phrase “working women” in this manifesto “became increasingly vague during the movement,” sometimes indicating professional women, sometimes activism, and sometimes the experience of factory work.30 The movement both made visible and assimilated working-class perspectives into the empty marker of “citizen.” It subsumed the nation’s multiple temporalities into the homogeneous, empty time of national unity. In moving from the gritty realism of cross-class heterogeneity to the unified symbolism of “citizen,” suffrage rhetoric anticipates the spectacles that the suffrage movement would later stage. The time of spectacle, as Thomas Richards argues, revises the past – invents it – by making it wholly present, as homogeneous, empty time.31 Spectacles replace the contradictions of historical conflict with the seamless narratives of commemoration that ultimately replace history. 29

30 31

Women’s Social and Political Union, “Votes for Women, New Movement MANIFESTO” (Suffragette Fellowship Collection, 50.82/549, reel 12, Museum of London). Thanks to Barbara Green for bringing this manifesto to my attention. Barbara Green, Spectacular Confessions: Autobiography, Performative Activism, and the Sites of Suffrage, 1905–1938 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 35. Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 70–1.

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Melodrama, as I discuss next, was particularly effective in mediating these conflicting class perspectives and staging itself as spectacle. MELODRAMA AND MASS CULTURE

The performative function of suffrage rhetoric carved out new roles for women in the nation and, in so doing, drew (often explicitly in the cases of Elizabeth Robins and Rebecca West) from popular theater’s long history of revising and creating available scripts for women. The aesthetic realm of theater was a relatively safe space for experimentation, divorced as it was from direct confrontation with the state. My aim in turning to the popular cultural forms of melodrama and burlesque is to allow my literary reading of suffrage manifestos to provide the parameters for rereading other cultural scripts of women in modernity in terms of how they form racialized communities and generate an awareness (or a disavowal) of the discontinuous, multiple times of modernity. The British women’s suffrage movement was arguably one of the first political movements to deploy mass cultural forms, such as journals, advertising, novels, pageants, and paraphernalia such as buttons and sashes, to popularize their claims. By the first two decades of the twentieth century, women’s counter-public spheres expanded exponentially with the rise of mass culture: middle- and working-class women could gather at halls for suffrage meetings, browse among department store displays, eat and relax at low-cost restaurants such as the ABC Tea Shops, and attend leisure entertainments such as music halls newly open to middle-class women during this period. Though social reformers loudly bemoaned such developments, outspoken critics defended the freedoms newly available to women in urban settings. In 1912, Rebecca West was among those protesting the continued restraint of single women in the name of sexual purity and moral chastity. In the socialist journal The Clarion she argued that: Decidedly what we need is a militant movement for more riotous living . . . The modern psychological theory of insanity states that impulses can never be killed, but only scotched; if one denies an impulse its natural outlet, it will find an unnatural outlet. It may be that the repression of the animal in women, with its desires for food and freedom and comfort, accounts for her greater liability to nervous irritability and hysteria. If so, then what has always been a racial danger [the failure to reproduce] is becoming more and more dangerous every day.32 32

Rebecca West, The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West 1911–17, ed. Jane Marcus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 134.


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West’s call for the de-repression of women’s appetites and desires is clearly connected to her support for women’s participation in the pleasures and dangers of modernity. West imagines this call for riotous living to stem from the collective gatherings of women, whether at women’s suffrage meetings or entertainment venues. By making these women who seek healthy outlets for their “animal” impulses visible and named in print, “those of us with passions for going to suffrage meetings and music halls,” West creates a mobile, modern women’s identity through pleasurably interpellating her readers into modern forms of leisure and political activities.33 This naming constitutes a new political identity through its enunciation of an imaginary group of “riotous” women. Furthermore, West’s text points not to the “real” world, that is, what a realist text might mimetically reproduce as a visually stable, empirically knowable world, but to the mise en sce`ne of theater. In this respect, she emphasizes the theatricality of women’s self-created and clearly artificial roles on stage that reveal the constructed and imaginary nature of women’s identities. Music-hall theatrics were a key site for West’s projections of how women’s newly liberated sexual instinct might function free from middle-class hypocrisy. For instance, in “Christmas Shopping: The Psychology of Regent Street” (The Clarion, 27 December, 1912), West targets Gaby Deslys’s performance in a sketch at the Palace Theatre in “not quite the customary among of clothing.” Though shocking, West mentions “one excellent point about her performance . . . [that] she took full responsibility of this exhibition. She associated herself with the petticoats and faced the attitude of mind which this display provoked.”34 Unlike Gaby Deslys’s deployment of her sexuality, West deplores how middle-class women rely on mannequins to model their underclothes in a furtive, anonymous, and impersonal manner. This displacement of sexuality also maintains the divide between good women and bad women, who, once fallen into prostitution, must stay there always. Furthermore, women’s self-fashioning manifests the popular energies that West names in her call to liberate the “animal” in women. She alludes to the transformative power of emergent mass formations of women’s leisure, consumer activities, and spectatorship. Women performers’ desirous, embodied particularity suggests burlesque modes of theatrical display (which I explore later in this chapter) that interrupt homogeneous empty time by refusing the role of women as symbolic marker of history. (I return to West’s racialized and gendered intervention in discourses of citizenship 33

West, ibid., 134.

34

West, ibid., 136.

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in Chapter 4.) The “animal” in women opens a space for reconceiving the gendered and racial boundaries of citizenship. West’s claim that the sexual vitality of cross-class mixing at entertainments and political gatherings will strengthen the “race” rhetorically turns the tables on social purity reformers who sought to police such boundaries. West’s linkage of suffrage meetings and music halls was not fortuitous. Both gatherings involve female performers enacting liberatory, powerful roles for women. Suffrage orators and music-hall singers, dancers, and actresses made visible a new category of woman, neither prostitute nor chaste and retiring. Suffrage speakers and actresses shared in the creation of self-consciously performative modern women. Consider the following scene recounted by Sylvia Pankhurst of a militant action that occurred at the peak of women’s suffrage activities in 1913: The King and Queen, attending a matinee at His Majesty’s Theatre, witnessed extraordinary scenes. A woman chained to her seat in the stalls shouted: “You Russian Tsar!” Another climbed over the footlights on to the stage and began a speech; leaflets were thrown, shouts and violent ejections punctuated the performance: “Stop forcible feeding!” “Release Mrs. Pankhurst!” “Give women the vote!” “The Royal name and office” being, according to Christabel, “dishonoured,” the King was henceforth to receive the same treatment as a Cabinet Minister. Women spoke outside the Palace and chained themselves to the railings. At a Court function afterwards, Mary Blomfield dropped on her knees before the King and cried: “For God’s sake, Your Majesty, put a stop to forcible feeding!”35

The suffragettes’ main tactic of interrupting ordinary gatherings, whether leisured or political, ensured that they made visible the unnatural social order whereby men could conduct business and pleasure as usual, while women were barred from political participation and their bodies wrested from their control through separate spheres ideology (in which men occupied the public sphere and women the private sphere, figured as outside history). They also transgressed the organization of representational space in the theater. Their self-dramatizing protest reveals the arbitrary and contingent meanings of social and political institutions by breaking down barriers to representation and hence showing their ability to be altered. The symbolic framework of these actions (no real violence occurred, save for interrupting one performance with another) works to limit the potential social pandemonium of riotous women. The appeal to victimized womanhood controls and contains suffragettes’ bodies: Mary 35

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement, 554.


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Blomfield drops to her knees; other suffragettes chain themselves to palace railings; and, in prison, the forcibly fed body faints. These demonstrations threatened to level certain class hierarchies, but, as I next discuss, they are partially contained through reference to melodramatic narratives. The melodrama had long been a favored form of populist revolt. Its origins are found in the popular theatrical forms arising after the French Revolution that often articulated democratic dissent. As Elaine Hadley has shown, its polarizing, spectacular form moves both horizontally, as its heroes and heroines undergo extreme and wide-ranging social situations, and vertically, as heroes and villains embody moral absolutes. The melodrama, by the end of the nineteenth century, articulated the conflicts and dislocations of traditional paternalist, agrarian communities brought about by expanding capitalist markets and ensuing modernization.36 Melodrama had been employed by feminists throughout the nineteenth century to mobilize large portions of the populace around women’s political concerns. For instance, Josephine Butler employed melodramatic rhetoric in her polemical writings against the Contagious Diseases Act in the 1880s as she addressed the “daughters” and “sisters” of England in terms that appealed to their familial, regional, and national affiliations. Melodramatic rhetoric was highly contradictory; it solicited what Hadley calls a “hybrid form of hierarchical yet populist rhetoric.”37 It was conservative, appealing to agrarian, familial forms of social organization, and elided class differences in order to promote the well-being and protection of women across classes. This appeal exploited the traditional forms of respect due to women and traditional forms of authority due to powerful men. Butler used the rhetoric of women’s victimization and coercion based on the corrupt morality of men who occupy the harsh world of free market trade.38 In addition to dramatizing this sense of victimized virtue, the melodrama’s heroine paradoxically explored the many roles open to her in the expanded, horizontal market economy: new educational and employment opportunities, mass consumption of goods and leisure activities, and participation in political movements. The popularity of melodramatic romances and theatricals was symptomatic of both the large number of women who produced and consumed 36 37 38

Elaine Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800–1885 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 6–7. Hadley, ibid., 195. I draw from Hadley’s analysis of Josephine Butler’s use of melodramatic rhetoric during her campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Act. Hadley, ibid., 180–222.

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these leisure products and entertainments and of the newly visible women politicized and educated by the franchise movements. Melodrama’s characters in general derive their motivations from the action around them, not from representations of psychological depth. Such clear external causality attempts to achieve an obviousness of meaning. However, as Mary Ann Doane argues, “the melodrama’s will-to-transparency is self-negating through its very obviousness.”39 It thereby connotes the artifice of theatricality that burlesque heightens still further (as I later show). Both of these forms conveyed the artificiality of roles for women and the self-conscious reconstruction of collective identities undertaken by the women’s suffrage movement in defining social roles for themselves. The history of the music hall reveals a common feature of modernity: namely, a tension between fostering social fragmentation and offering compensatory appeals to national unity. At its inception in the early nineteenth century, the music hall was a working-class institution that sought to increase the sale of drink by offering entertainment as well. These entertainments had to be licensed, which enabled the state to patrol popular haunts suspected of encouraging prostitution and other forms of vice, as well as to censor plays. In these local working-class environs, the racy burlesque flourished. However, when the investment in a place of entertainment was large, theater owners sought to clean up their acts and attract clientele from across classes. Penny Summerfield has noted that many music halls were dubbed working-class but “in fact the pricing policies of these halls indicate that they also aimed to be socially heterogeneous . . . The creation of the theatre-of-variety chains . . . after 1890, reinforced the trend towards ‘mass’ audiences.”40 In these larger cross-class establishments, the melodrama offered cleaner, more wholesome entertainment fare that could pass the censor’s scrutiny. In the owner’s efforts to bypass censorship, for instance, in 1892 at Collins’s Music Hall, the owner demanded that entertainers obey the following strictures: No offensive allusions to be made to any member of the Royal Family; Members of Parliament, German Princes, police authorities, or any member thereof, the London County Council, or any member of that body; no allusion whatever to 39 40

Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 71. Penny Summerfield, “Patriotism and Empire: Music-Hall Entertainment, 1870–1914,” in Imperialism and Popular Culture, ed. John MacKenzie (Dover, NH: Manchester University Press, 1986), 23.


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religion, or any religious sect; no allusion to the administration of the law of the country.41

What remained of political discourse was generalized statements of national loyalty, especially the notorious jingo songs and military spectacles that J. A. Hobson excoriated in 1901. Hobson identified the music hall as “feasts of sensationalism” that glorify “brute force and an ignorant contempt for foreigners,” and “make the music-hall a very serviceable engine for generating military passions.”42 He viewed the music hall as a product of the forces of modernization. In this process, “a gradual debasement of popular art attending the new industrial era of congested, ugly, manufacturing towns has raised up the music-hall to be the most powerful instrument of such musical and literary culture as the people are open to receive.”43 Melodrama was one of the most popular of music-hall modalities to carry such “feasts of sensationalism.” With its polarization of good and evil, it created a dichotomy in which “British” and “foreign” could easily apply.44 Thus did melodramas at the turn of the century come to articulate sentiments of racial pride and strident nationalism. Moreover, the melodrama’s emphasis on sensational action, exotic locations, and feats of heroism made the genre popular across classes. John MacKenzie notes that by the late nineteenth century, “the backdrop of stirring events was for a period almost exclusively imperial . . . The fact was that imperial exploits made good theatre. They not only fitted into, they heightened military, patriotic, spectacular and melodramatic traditions.”45 The militant woman’s suffrage movement would play to these popular traditions. Their iconography emphasized women in battle garb and other symbolic apparel to provide a subjectivity along the lines of phallic womanhood to convince its audience in the orderliness and stability of women’s demands. Its official rhetoric promoted a continuist, stable narrative of historical progress to which the women’s suffrage 41 42 43 44

45

Quoted in Summerfield, ibid., 30. J. A. Hobson, “The Psychology of Jingoism,” in J. A. Hobson: A Reader, ed. Michael Freeden (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1988), 192. Hobson, ibid., 191. Keith Wilson argues that by the time of the Boer War “London as imperial center rather than proletarian domestic space had already begun to dominate in the imagery of music-hall lyrics . . . even Albert Chevalier’s coster found himself celebrating ‘Mafeking Night’ and cheering BadenPowell, Bobs, and the Dublin Fusiliers.” Keith Wilson, “Music-Hall London: The Topography of Class Sentiment,” Victorian Literature and Culture, 23 (1995), 62–3. John MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Dover, NH: Manchester University Press, 1984), 62–3.

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movement contributed. Their vision of modernity was rational, unified, and self-identical. Modernity, in these suffrage representations, unfolded in homogeneous, empty time; it repeated the past in a continuist, accumulative temporality. While popular melodramas generally kept gender hierarchies intact (the heroine is saved by the hero-suitor who vanquishes the evil villain), the WSPU altered this plot. Its rhetoric employed virginal heroines who were seemingly uninterested in the opposite sex and who sought instead to take men’s place in the public sphere. It was both a rupture with the melodramatic rhetoric of the nineteenth century and its recuperation. Militant women’s suffrage rhetoric offered the paradoxical position of a woman vanguard: its presence both provoked and unleashed violence, yet it did so in order to uphold national unity and strength and therefore insisted on integrity and control. Its image of purity and phallic wholeness countered antisuffrage fears of women’s hysteria and riotous irrationality. The moral absolutes of these chaste woman heroines – often figured allegorically as Britannia, Joan of Arc, Justice, Truth, or Liberty – exist in tension with the fragmented, potentially riotous presence of laboring women. Lisa Tickner characterizes this conflict as that between sign and referent: the more [women] emphasised the associations of femininity and virtue, the more they lost the sense of women as living beings of heterogeneous occupational and social groups that they were otherwise so keen to stress. Sometimes the solution was to put the allegorical figure and the “real” woman together (as in “Justice Demands the Vote”); but there is a tendency in suffrage (as in labour) iconography, for the competing demands of realism and symbolism to pull apart.46

This rhetorical class conflict – between realist heterogeneity and symbolist unity – appears also in the struggle between burlesque and melodrama that I explore through a reading of The Convert. But, first, I turn briefly to the riotous unleashing of heterogeneity within the women’s suffrage movement itself. I do so in order to suggest that white, middle-class femininity and the national identity supported by that femininity do not exist a priori givens. Their representational domination must be repeatedly enforced and thus is always open to challenge and transformation, a repetition of previous scripts with a difference. In addition, the borders of their identity markers are always contested by racialized, “backward,” working-class subjects whom these identities exclude. 46

Tickner, The Spectacle of Women, 209.


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The first instance of riotous heterogeneity comes from the most marginal area of London, the East End. Sylvia Pankhurst organized the East London Suffrage Federation (ELSF) after George Lansbury, the MP for Bow and Bromley, decided to stake his political future on women’s suffrage, resigned his seat in Parliament, and ran again on the single issue of votes for women. He was defeated in part because the WSPU’s active endorsement of him did not last long. By 1913, the tempo of militancy increased in East London and was met with increasing repression. Selfdefense became imperative and Sylvia called on the East End women to start drilling. The army drilled every Tuesday night after the Bow federation meetings and was observed and cheered on by several hundred people. Barbara Winslow reports that “drilling usually consisted of 80 to 100 people marching in formation, carrying clubs. At its peak in the winter of 1914, an estimated 700 women were a part of the People’s Army.”47 The People’s Army was formed partly to give women a chance to defend themselves against the police. The police were seen as hated outsiders in most of the East End; inhabitants refused to cooperate with uniformed police, who enforced their authority with brutality. They tried to conquer the area, rather than police it. During this time, the area often resembled a besieged territory rather than part of the state. With massive migrations of Jews from Eastern Europe and of Irish fleeing the political upheavals of their country, the East End was racialized both as poor and unemployed (dock workers were extremely vulnerable to economic fluctuations) and by foreigners seeking refuge there. According to Sylvia, her sister Christabel Pankhurst, in self-imposed exile in Paris, mandated the split of the ELSF from the WSPU. She told Sylvia, “‘You have a democratic constitution for your Federation; we do not agree with that.’ Moreover, she urged, a working-class woman’s movement was of no value: working women were the weakest portion of the sex: how could it be otherwise? Their lives were too hard, their education too meagre to equip them for struggle . . . We want picked women, the very strongest and most intelligent!”48 As opposed to Christabel’s vanguardism, Sylvia counters with documentary details. She recalls the fury of working-class women’s protest at the Poplar Borough Council that had resolved that public halls should not be let for Votes for Women meetings: 47 48

Barbara Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 58. E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement, 533.

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Then the storm burst. Cries of “Shame!” The shooting of pop-guns, the throwing of bags of flour, blue powder and more solid missiles began the fray. The barrier between the public and the Councillors was broken down by a rush of women. The Councillors engaged in a hand-to-hand combat to force them back. Whilst missiles still fell from the gallery, wild women dashed round the room, overturning ink-pots and tearing agenda papers, seizing the Councillors’ chairs as weapons of defence. When attacked, some brandished “Saturday nights” of knotted ropes . . . The police were sent for, but refused to enter the building.49

The women were still engaged in symbolic protest, but far from upholding the abstractions of national unity, they fought back in a tumultuous display that, as Sylvia narrates it here, presents a multiple and disparate range of activities by “wild women”: impromptu gestures that reject careful, decorous behavior. In opposition to her sister, Sylvia congratulates them later on their strength. She notes, too, that the East End speakers gave the movement its vigor: There was wise, logical Charlotte Drake of Custom House, who, left an orphan with young brothers and sisters, had worked both as a barmaid and sewing machinist, and who recorded in her clear memory incidents, curious, humorous and tragic, which stirred her East End audiences by their truth. Told with her brief, inimitable keenness, they would have made the fortune of a realistic novelist. “You ought to breed,” was her first spoken greeting to me, when she came to my side as I was being carried to speak on a stretcher.50

Besides Charlotte Drake’s talents at realist detail and warm, nonpuritanical humor, Melvina Walker tells “many a racy story” about the “High Life” that made her “one of the most popular speakers in any movement in London.51 This community generates activism through a performance style close to burlesque. They interrupt narratives of progress by drawing attention to the lived difference of working-class England, a difference that refuses to be absorbed into melodramatic narratives. Instead, they offer “racy stories” that target, rather than join, the middle and upper classes. The East London women also waged several rent strikes forged from their experience with the collective solidarity gained through other labor strikes. These strikes would beleaguer middle-class landlords. The second instance of riotous heterogeneity comes from the center of militant suffrage activities. A WSPU leaflet, The Outragettes, published in 1913 at the peak of militant violence, testifies to the presence of a chaotic and radical individualism – “a new kind of woman” – but assures its audience that as soon as the vote is won that that phenomenon will 49

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, ibid.

50

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, ibid., 523.

51

E. Sylvia Pankhurst, ibid., 524.


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disappear: “A new kind of woman has been created by the present Government, and the sooner she disappears the better for law and order and national dignity.”52 Placing the blame on “the pettifogging evasions” of the government, the militant suffragette is transmogrified into an outragette, “a window-smasher, a rioter, wrecker and incendiary.”53 The government has “called into existence this wild tumult of Outragettes, women only in name and form, so completely have they been transformed into furies.”54 Antisuffrage writers’ fears of riotous women are now acknowledged, only this WSPU pamphlet places the blame on the recalcitrant government. The pamphlet reveals and claims the destructive and chaotic side of the women’s suffrage movement. This anarchic discourse unleashes the sexualized “fury” of women as well as racializing them as “a wild tribe.”55 Emmeline Pankhurst, who authored this pamphlet, then rhetorically distances herself from the furies she acknowledges: “The smallest gleam of political insight would show our muddleminded politicians that the cause for Votes for Women is irresistible despite the excesses of a section of its supporters.”56 The reasonableness of their demands must be separated from the riotous excesses they undertake in protest of the government’s actions. The reformist vanguardism articulated here must maneuver between the Scylla of racialized, anarchic violence and the Charybdis of state repression as it seeks to strengthen the nation by agitating against the state. The Outragettes leaflet backs Emmeline Pankhurst into a rhetorical corner where she must negate the very violence she condones. By contrast, Elizabeth Robins’s movement novel The Convert exposes the lurking specter of class differences that haunts the suffrage movement. While Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst whiten women as citizens by writing them into national narratives of progress as virtuous and chaste, fully in line with self-sacrificing melodramatic heroines, the “ugly” bodies in The Convert reveal their classed and raced differences in a way that refused to be subsumed easily into the homogeneous, empty time of the nation. The ugliness of class difference, a dramatic temporal disjunction figured as racial difference, threatens to break apart the nation represented in terms of a dominant middle-class aesthetics and style. Against this chaste and moral language, grotesque raced and classed bodies and their “vulgar” burlesque performances were threatening and censored by official cultural 52 53 55

Emmeline Pankhurst, “The Outragettes,” in Marcus, Suffrage and the Pankhursts, 185–6, here 186. Emmeline Pankhurst, ibid., 185. 54 Emmeline Pankhurst, ibid. Emmeline Pankhurst, ibid., 186. 56 Emmeline Pankhurst, ibid.

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forms.57 In addition, the manifestos that I have earlier discussed are crucial for rereading The Convert because they draw attention to the nation’s conflicting temporal registers. Reading The Convert alongside suffrage movement manifestos makes visible the goals and difficulties of altering history – now – and of staging alternative communities. In The Convert that community is comprised ambivalently of modern suffrage heroines and threatening working-class women. THE CONVERT

The Convert foregrounds the problem of representing cross-class affiliations by interrupting a melodramatic narrative with short scenes of suffrage oratory that resemble working-class burlesque. The polyvocal multiplicity of rowdy crowd scenes inserts into melodrama’s traditional, paternalistic narrative a liberatory new range of class positions from which to represent a conflictual account of national identity. The political speeches performed in The Convert before an audience of hecklers highlight the unstable, heterogeneous aspect of modernity and offer a plurality of perspectives that contest the homogeneous, empty time of national belonging. Further, as working- and middle-class women publicly deliver their political messages, with varying degrees of earnest pedagogy, brash bawdiness, and chaste terror, they underscore the impossibility of a singular modernity of a nation or a people. In The Convert, the heroine’s confrontation with “the people” moves her from a claustrophobic melodramatic domestic interior into the open spaces of public debate and controversy and transforms her identity. Her “conversion” is never fully recuperated under the traditional figures of the chivalrous man and victimized woman, ostensibly implied by the melodramatic plot. As shown earlier in this chapter, social purity reformers in the 1880s and, later, the British women’s suffrage movement used the heightened, sensational form of melodrama as a powerful propaganda tool for their political cause. In The Convert, the heroine, Vida Levering, is transformed from an ordinary, sheltered Edwardian upper middle-class woman into an impassioned, self-sacrificing suffrage heroine. In the novel’s final scene, Vida pleads her cause to an important Member of Parliament, Geoffrey 57

George Mosse affirms this point: “The visual self-representation of the nation was just as important as the much cited literature of nationalism. The nation protected the ideal of beauty from the lower passions of man and helped transform it into a symbol of self-control and purity.” George Masse, Nationalism and Sexuality (New York: Fertig, 1985), 16.


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Stonor, who had wronged her ten years ago, urged her to have an abortion, and refused to marry her. She threatens to reveal this shameful secret to his fianceé and succeeds in morally blackmailing him into supporting the women’s suffrage cause. This melodramatic plot is interrupted by open-air political gatherings in which women speakers contest middle-class ideas of femininity and motherhood, the values upon which Vida’s melodrama depends. While melodrama presents an objective moral sense in line with realism’s aim to represent a social totality, burlesque insists on multiple, subjective stances that are modernist in their partial perspectives. By exploring this novel and suffrage rhetoric through the lens of theatrical presentation, I am following Susan A. Glenn’s recent argument that turn-of-the-century female performers, most notably Sarah Bernhardt, “symbolized the radical new possibilities that theater presented for elaborating new forms of female identity.”58 These possibilities multiply perspectives and complicate identities, making them more provisional and fluid. Glenn finds Bernhardt a pivotal figure for negotiating between traditional bourgeois sensibilities and modern attitudes within the era’s pre-eminent entertainment industry, the theater. Moving from theater to narrative fiction, I demonstrate how The Convert alternates between dual scripts of melodrama and working-class burlesque, and, in doing so, serves as a site of contestation between two kinds of communities. These communities battle for dominance in representing the nation and prove instead that modernity consists in precisely the temporal contradictions of various classes (some explicitly racialized, some not) in conflict. As already discussed, the connection between popular entertainment forms such as melodrama and the British women’s suffrage movement is a pertinent one. In order to convince the public that women needed to be emancipated, suffragettes performed publicly as orators, propagandists, activists, and workers. Part of their aim was to represent women as active participants in civic and economic life. They accomplished this by enacting these newly visible roles so as to grant them legitimate status in the public eye. Because The Convert is an adaptation of Robins’s play Votes for Women!, it provides a heady glimpse into the staged roles available for women as a means of forging middle-class and working-class identities. The novel and its precursor play were written in the early years

58

Susan A. Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 10.

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of the movement (1906–9) when the WSPU leadership (of which Robins was a member) sought to include all aspects of women’s lives, across classes, as part of the women’s movement. The novel was commercially successful and allowed Robins to purchase Backsettown Farm, which served as a retreat for professional women seeking the support of a women’s community. What makes this novel so fascinating is the way in which Robins borrows from two popular entertainment forms, the melodrama and burlesque, in her effort to transform the available scripts for women in modernity. Because The Convert was originally written as a play, these theatrical roles would have been particularly appropriate. Robins first became famous in England for producing and starring in several of Ibsen’s dramas. In 1908, Robins, along with Cicely Hamilton, formed the Actresses’ Franchise League (AFL), whose aim was to work for the enfranchisement of women through propaganda plays. Most of the plays were staged as benefit matinees in West End theaters or at suffrage society meetings, and tended to be comedies or farces. Conversely, in a serious didactic bent, Cicely Hamilton’s Pageant of Great Women (1909) depicted women’s history through the achievements of fifty-two great women, and was performed by suffrage groups throughout England. Votes for Women! was written in collaboration with Henry James and William Archer. It was produced at London’s Court Theatre by Harley Granville-Barker in 1907 and was one of the most commercially successful of all the suffrage plays. The play was subtitled “A Tract” to warn playgoers that they would be subjected to dramatic recreations of suffragette demonstrations. These speech scenes were derived from transcripts of actual suffrage demonstrations. The political scenes are embedded within an audience-pleasing melodramatic narrative that helped ensure the play’s commercial success. Despite warnings to unwitting pleasure-seeking theatergoers as to the political nature of the play, reviews such as that in the Manchester Guardian solemnly pointed out how dangerous it was to seduce the audience with such propaganda.59 The “seduction” the writer alludes to suggests the sexualized performances of suffrage oratory. Other reviews singled out the speech scenes for special praise; they comprised some of twentieth-century drama’s first crowd scenes. The Trafalgar Square scene was, according to the Daily Mail, astounding: “For sheer stage management this scene beats anything that we can remember on the 59

Jane Marcus, “Introduction,” in Elizabeth Robins, The Convert, ed. Jane Marcus (Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press, 1980), ix.


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London stage.”60 Max Beerbohm reviewed Robins’s play and applauded the documentary realism of the crowd scenes, rejecting the melodrama of the rest of the play: “Miss Robins has studied the mind of the crowd not less intently than the mind of the popular orator; and Mr. Granville Barker has so drilled the crowd that its reality is overwhelming enough to be almost inartistic.”61 The crowd scene overwhelms Beerbohm’s aesthetic sensibilities with its brash and bawdy exchanges between the orators and their audience. These spirited scenes derive their animation, in part, from the tradition of burlesque theater with which Robins would have been familiar. At its inception in the mid-nineteenth century, the English burlesque was an eclectic, working-class entertainment based on the parody of some well-known historic episode, legend, play, or book.62 The most popular object of parody was the melodrama: its conventions, moralities, character stereotypes, staging, and rhetorical style attracted the attention of burlesque authors.63 Written in verse and set to popular tunes, burlesque was a costume drama, featuring transvestite roles for women, actresses in tights, and a numerous female corps de ballet. Its comic role reversal ensured that melodramatic moral highs and lows were travestied and that powerful men were ridiculed. For instance, an 1870 burlesque poster announced: “Miss Polly Buxom as King Charles. Prince Rupert . . . Miss Bessie Green. A HOUSE OF COMMONS DEBATE. The Speaker . . . Miss Nelly Grace.”64 Further provoking the political status quo, William Brough’s Field of the Cloth of Gold (1869) starred Lydia Thompson at London’s Strand Theatre and in New York, and ended with explicit references to women’s suffrage: “The time will come when we / Will have our right and vote.”65 These roles featured powerful women who loudly proclaimed the right to be included in official forms of civic participation. In addition, burlesque often ridiculed upper-class men by showing powerful, sexualized working-class women taking advantage of them. The 1868 burlesque Ixion, performed by Lydia Thompson and the British Blondes, centered around the King of Thessaly (played by Thompson), 60 61 62 63 64 65

Quoted in Marcus, ibid. Max Beerbohm, Around Theatres (New York: Knopf, 1930), vol. 2, 591–2. I rely here on a definition offered by Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 176. Michael Booth, ed., English Plays of the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), vol. 5, 30. Quoted in Booth, ibid., 479. Quoted in Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 17.

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whose wife revolts against him. The burlesque performer was represented as stripped of the moral restraints of bourgeois culture and embodied the aesthetics of transgression, inversion, and the grotesque. William Dean Howells, reviewing the Boston theatrical season in the May 1869 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, called English burlesque performers “a horror to look upon.”66 In their guise of masculinity, they did not suppress their femininity and produced instead a monstrous mixing of genders. To Howells, they seemed “creatures of a kind of alien sex, parodying both.”67 The combination of expressive sexuality and freedom from bourgeois restraint created a threatening female figure. Women burlesque performers’ powerful sexuality was often refracted through the lens of racial difference and the comic display of grotesque bodies, as with Sophie Tucker and Fanny Brice. Burlesque performers, too, were frequently accompanied on stage by Negro minstrelsy, and the women played masculine instruments such as the bugle and banjo. From the perspective of artists and writers in England at the turn of the century, popular burlesque entertainments included in the music hall and variety theater were believed to articulate a structure of feeling lacking in traditional aesthetic forms. More specifically, artists were drawn to what they believed were collective, participatory performances rife with parody, spontaneity, and racial and sexual vitality. In History of the London Stage (1904), H. Barton Baker recalls burlesque at the Strand Theatre, where it flourished between 1858 and 1870, and how difficult it was to withstand its appeal: There certainly was a “go”, an excitement about burlesque at the Strand in those days that was never approached by any other house. The enjoyment of the performers was really, or apparently, so intense that the wild ecstatic breakdown into which they broke at the end of almost every scene seemed perfectly spontaneous; it was a frantic outburst of irrepressible animal spirits, and they seemed to have no more control over their legs than the audience over their applause. You might call it rubbish, buffoonery, vulgarity, anything you liked, but your temperament must have been abnormally phlegmatic if you could resist the influence of that riotous mirth and not be carried away by it.68

Far from consolidating a sense of national unity and moral reason, as women’s suffrage rhetoric emphasized, these popular performances threatened to destabilize England by mocking its middle-class pretensions and revealing the crowd’s “animal spirits.” In his study of French leisure 66 68

Quoted in Allen, ibid., 133. 67 Quoted in Allen, ibid., 134. Quoted in Booth, English Plays, 38.


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culture and modern art, T. J. Clark argues that because class identities were staged, they could more easily reveal their constructed and uncertain status than they might in ordinary, workday activities.69 Performers could play the role of a middle-class flaˆneur in one scene and a calicot, or counter-jumper – a class of disgruntled, rebellious Parisian city shopkeepers – in the next. As working-class roughs prevailed over genteel middle-class buffoons in the music hall, the audience attained a temporary sense of superiority over the hegemonic middle class. These theatrical performances served, in part, as a compensatory outlet for a populace struggling within increasingly regimented forms of modern life. They provided a spirited alternative to that other popular nineteenthcentury dramatic form, the melodrama. With their shifting, heterogeneous perspectives, they interrupted national narratives of progress that depended upon their unfolding in homogeneous, empty time, a repetition of the same. They made visible conflicting locations within modernity. In his essay, “Narrate or Describe?” Georg Lukaćs criticizes naturalist writers such as E´mile Zola for failing to transcend the common characters of the everyday world and for allowing the details of the prosaic world to dominate the necessity for human action: The author’s point of view jumps from here to there, and the novel reels from one perspective to another. The author loses the comprehensive vision and omniscience of the old epic narrators. He sinks consciously to the level of his characters and sometimes knows only as much about situations as they do. The false contemporaneity of description transforms the novel into a kaleidoscopic chaos.70

The “kaleidoscopic chaos” situates the author’s or, perhaps more accurately, the narrator’s point of view among his characters on a horizontal plane. The simultaneous and partial points of view are mobile and glimpse from various positions images of modern life. This leveling of perspective and mixing of temporalities (what Lukaćs calls “the false contemporaneity of description”) was what other writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such as Gustave Le Bon called the crowd mind. While Lukaćs grapples with the limited epistemology and immediacy of the crowd as it fails to produce a totalizing form of revolutionary consciousness and action, I suggest that we understand the “kaleidoscopic chaos” of the crowd differently. The chaos of the crowd 69 70

T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 238. Georg Lukaćs, “Narrate or Describe?” in Writer and Critic and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Arthur Kahn (London: Merlin, 1970), 133.

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slows the narrative’s forward momentum and eliminates its hierarchizing function. On a formal level, then, it interrupts narrative progress. One way in which the “crowd mind” interrupts the hierarchizing function of narrative is by offering simultaneous perspectives that multiply possible meanings. The music-hall crowd, for instance, is critically cognisant of doubled meanings – the blurring of subjective and objective perspectives into a dreamscape – necessary to enjoy titillating double entendres. In an oft-repeated anecdote, Marie Lloyd, the famous music-hall performer elegized by T. S. Eliot, was made to perform a song whose lyrics caused complaint to London’s Vigilance Committee. She sang the number without elaboration and won the committee’s approval. She next proceeded to sing the inoffensive parlor ballad “Come into the Garden, Maud” with words by Alfred Lord Tennyson, adding lascivious nuance and gesture to her act that provided an objectionable level of meaning. This incident illustrates the nonverbal means by which female burlesque performers conveyed the fantastic realm of sexual allure. Indeed, they manipulated the signs of femininity and romance in order to triumph economically and sexually over upper-class men. These female performers combine objective economic gain with the subjective fantasy of sexual allure. Their triumph occurs when their bourgeois male prey fails to read the parodic and theatrical excess in their role playing. The working-class audience – often volatile enough to count as a crowd – triumphs over the truth-seeking middle and upper classes by knowing how to read the doubled meanings of the theatricality, both self and role, sexual artifice, and the economic necessity of marriage and gifts. For the chaste and moral suffrage heroine of The Convert, this gender mimicry is horrific because it exposes middle-class female decorum as being rooted in the economic necessity of marriage. It also exposes the construction of femininity (aestheticized as white and pure) as a ruse to maintain social and economic privilege. In response, she, like the leaders of the suffrage movement, seeks to contain such threatening, parodic energies. SUFFRAGE BURLESQUE

Vida questions her upper-class friends’ uncritical acceptance of press accounts that figure the agitating women as “Red Indians” or “sexless monstrosities.”71 She wants an eyewitness account: “But you’ve seen them –?” she asks.72 To satisfy her curiosity, she and her sister-in-law 71

Robins, The Convert, 58–60.

72

Robins, ibid., 60.


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attend an outdoor suffrage meeting. While they dress in cast-off clothes that parody the tastes of the masses, they are anxious to preserve social hierarchies. They discover, however, that in the crowd such distinctions are not observed, even the speakers are indistinguishable from the masses. The sisters are addressed by policemen and onlookers curtly, without the forms of social politesse to which they are accustomed. Signs of class position may still be read, however; Vida and her sister masquerade as “a Woman of the People” by wearing cast-off clothes and so play with the signs of class, seeking to render themselves downwardly mobile.73 However, they fail to understand words the lower classes use: “‘What is quod?’ . . . Even when they heard the words these strange fellowcitizens used, meaning often failed to accompany sound.”74 The crowd’s language renders meaning partial and uncertain. As language is rendered incomprehensible, sounds take on a musical, sensory effect, parleyed between audience and speaker: “Haw! Haw!” “’Ear, ’ear!” said the deaf old newsvendor, with his free hand up to his ear. “And to express our sympathy with the brave women –” The staccato cries throughout the audience dissolved into one general hoot; but above it sounded the old newsvendor’s “’ear, ’ear!” “’E can’t ’ear without ’e shouts about it.” “Try and keep yerself quiet,” said he, with dignity. “We ain’t ’ere to ’ear you.” “– sympathy with the brave women,” the steady voice went on, “who are still in prison.” “Serve ’em jolly well right!” “Give the speaker a chaunce, caun’t ye?” said the newsvendor with a withering look.75

The rhythmical punning of “here,” “hear,” and “ear” evokes the nonsense of popular burlesque songs and refrains, such as the popular 1890s song, “Tararaboomdeay.” The words point to the location, “here,” noise, “hear,” and bodies, “ear,” of many voices joining in banter and debate. Their doubled meanings convey not only referentiality but spirited forcefulness, rhythm, and play. The speaker’s reasoned appeal for sympathy with imprisoned suffragettes is drowned by nonsense hoots and staccato cries. As the working class speaks out, class hierarchies and meanings are momentarily obscured and the narrative trajectory lost. The homogeneous, empty time of nation-building is interrupted by the working class’s distanced perspective on modernity, its nonsynchronous 73

Robins, ibid., 73.

74

Robins, ibid., 80.

75

Robins, ibid., 81.

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stance vis-a`-vis bourgeois forms of nationalism. In these speech scenes, the forward movement of the plot stills as a multitude of voices play with language and meaning, enfolding the speakers and heroine into its improvised rounds of jocularity. Though The Convert’s melodramatic narrative eventually subsumes class differences in favor of the maternal woman who will nurture the nation, its narrative trajectory is punctured throughout with these “realtime” performances. Robins borrowed from transcripts of actual suffrage meetings to insert documentary “footage” into the fictional narrative. As defined by Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, a “real-time” sensation is produced through the collapse of subject and object, inside and outside the text, which occurs as reading is coextensive with the event of interpretation within the text. Though this novel is by no means postmodern, the insertion of suffrage speech events into the narrative produces the “realtime” sensation by means of the collapse between subject and object and inside and outside the text. It expresses the multiple temporalities of modernity. The historical time of nineteenth-century realism that demands a mimetic “like” life detachment disappears in favor of what Ermarth describes as postmodern temporality: “In postmodern narrative we experience temporality as an imaginary ambience containing tensions, fields, tectonics, values . . . Time, in other words, is not neutral and absolute, but a function of position, in narrative literally of reader position . . . Postmodern time is coextensive with the event, not a medium of recollecting it in tranquility.”76 The raucous political speech scenes break up the melodramatic narrative and insert a condensed level of time and space that produce the immediacy of a reading “event.” These events do not unfold in homogeneous, empty time. Rather, they insist on the transformative agency of the present moment to win the vote, now! The interruptive event of suffrage oratory – read through the paradigm of manifestos – breaks with the past and brings the wide range of temporal positions of those who are excluded from national narratives of progress to bear on how the scripts of modernity will unfold. These scenes insist on the multiplicity of voices and perspectives, all of whom negotiate the modern. The working classes do so through doubled meanings that register their position both outside and within dominant narratives of modernity. By including these ambivalent codings of the modern, Robins

76

Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, “The Crisis of Realism in Post-modern Time,” in Realism and Representation, ed. George Levine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 215.


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makes visible the racial unconscious of modernity, its disavowed “backward” peoples, and their histories. The visibility of the racial unconscious stalls the melodramatic narrative. The reading event forces readers to position themselves among the highflying, boisterous political debates and to take an interpretive stance in the urgency of the speech-making moment. The multiplication of gazes, responses, and stories – as working-class and middle-class men and women speak and unemployed, working- and middle-class men and women gaze and respond – contest the realist hierarchies of the novel. The speech scenes’ undecided, centrifugal discourse disrupts a unified national community and its homogeneous, empty time. Indeed, the political rhetoric performed by suffrage speakers and hecklers reflects a political constituency with whom the middle-class heroine cannot identify. In fact, the political speeches in the novel produce the heroine’s conversion and demand new forms of interpretation that take into account racialized class differences. In the face of these fearful differences, Vida expresses her ambivalence: “It would be queer, it would be horrible, it was fortunately incredible, but what if, ‘after all,’ she were ignorantly assisting at the scene that was to play its part in the greatest revolution the world had seen?”77 The idea of herself as a participant at this history-making moment strikes a deep chord within Vida, alerting her to “a strange new sense of possible significance” of the massed gathering before her.78 Vida soon afterwards joins the suffrage movement and articulates her political position through her experience of suffering as a wronged and abandoned woman. Her life story foregrounds the conservative strain of melodrama that seeks to uphold paternal, familial bonds. However, the heterogeneous performances at Trafalgar Square and elsewhere demonstrate a variety of political positions that cannot be fully incorporated into the conservative strain of melodrama. In one suffrage demonstration, along the Thames Embankment in the neighborhood of Pimlico Pier, one speaker asks, “‘Don’t you men know – why it’s notorious! – that the women of the working class are worse sweated even than the men?’ . . . ‘If you don’t believe me, ask them. Here they come.’ It was well contrived – that point! It struck full in the face of the homeward-streaming women who had just been let out [of the Army and Navy factory].”79 In an impromptu spectacle, working-class women, just leaving their shift, are incorporated into the franchise rhetoric. Though they do not speak for themselves, their overworked bodies manifest the need for women’s 77

Robins, The Convert, 85.

78

Robins, ibid.

79

Robins, ibid., 190.

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franchise. The gesture toward their inclusion implicitly expands the women’s movement’s claim to represent all classes of women. Political performances become entwined with work shifts and the transitional space between public thoroughfares and private labor sites. In this manner, documentary detail intrudes upon the sensational melodramatic narrative. A similar gesture to mix usually segregated spaces occurs again when a working-class speaker invites a Hyde Park audience to take a stroll in her neighborhoods: “P’raps your ’omes are all right! P’raps your children never goes ’ungry. P’raps you aren’t livin’, old and young, married and single, in one room.” . . . “I come from a plyce where many fam’lies, if they’re to go on livin’ at all, ’ave to live like that. If you don’t believe me, come and let me show you!” She spread out her lean arms. “Come with me to Canning Town – come with me to Bromley – come with me to Poplar and Bow. No, you won’t even think about the over-worked women and underfed children, and the ’ovels they live in.”80

The discourse of maternity looks very different from traditional melodrama when inflected by working-class conditions and vernacular. Seeking to mobilize the audience that congregates in Hyde Park, the speaker invites them into the areas of working-class London to witness the everyday conditions of working-class life. The chaotic threat of such geographical, cross-class mixing is partially held in check by the desexualized air of the speaker, her lack of seductiveness. The speaker’s lean, brown arms, shrill voice, and general air of weariness resist being sexualized. As such, her performance and invitation potentially reproduce liberal reformist endeavors that maintain boundaries between classes. One can look and still keep one’s class identity by keeping a certain distance. Far more terrifying are the performances in which working-class women are sexualized. The burlesque performance of a working-class woman occurs during the first suffrage meeting that Vida attends. She and her married sister flee the performance, an instance of terror that moves the plot through affective excess rather than rational causality. At this point in the novel, Vida is not yet converted; therefore, she can reject such a performance. However, the abandon shown in this first demonstration is never repeated in subsequent speech scenes, so Vida never again has to face such a sexualized threat. Later in the novel, as seen above, working-class women have the subdued air of being consumed by the demands of work 80

Robins, ibid., 247–8.


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and poverty. In this initial speech scene, Vida and her sister are already uncomfortable and conspicuous in their parodic costumes of “the people.” They want to see Ernestine Blunt, the famous suffragette who is the fictionalized version of Mary Gawthorpe, a top WSPU speaker who became less politically active following the WSPU’s split with Labour.81 Instead of Ernestine Blunt, described as delicate, pink, and white, they see “the one with the wild black hair and the awful ‘picture hat’! [And they stare] fascinated by this lady be-feathered, be-crimped, and be-ringed, wearing her huge hat cocked over one ear with a defiant coquetry above a would-be conquering smile.” She performs as though at a music hall: The unerring wits in the crowd had already picked her out for special attention, but her active “public form” was even more torturing to the fastidious feminine sense than her “stylish” appearance. For her language, flowery and grandiloquent, was excruciatingly genteel, one moment conveyed by minced words through a pursed mouth, and the next carried away on a turgid tide of rhetoric – a swimmer in this sea of sentiment flinging out a braceleted arm, and bawling appeals to the “Wim – men – nof – Vinglund!” The crowd howled in derisive joy.82

This “terrible female” mimics the speech of the genteel classes and punctures her parody of the middle class with physically dramatic gestures of – to a middle-class perspective – her offensive body. Her rhetoric is not about reason, proportion, or a centered sense of individual rights, but calculated to appeal emotionally to the crowd, to give pleasure, and to carry them with her in a phantasmatic appeal to unity. Even her words, as they are bawled and overlapping through the force of their utterance, nearly break down signification: “Wim – men – nof – Vinglund.” Such an appeal blurs the distinct meanings of “women” and “nation” into one swamping collectivity that obliterates any unified sense of England. Both her rhetoric and her body are embellished with artifice and carry sexual connotations: “turgid tide of rhetoric,” “defiant coquetry,” “wild, black hair.” This description suggests that she seduces her audience rather than appeals to their logical reasoning. Her parody of middle-class suffrage rhetoric doubles the meaning of her performance. In addition to the earnest nature of suffrage rhetoric, the prefix “be” in “be-feathered,” “be-ringed,” and “be-crimped” refers to that which is excessive and ostentatious, a theatrical artificiality that overpowers the senses. The power of her performance – at once racialized and sexualized – leads not 81 82

Joanne E. Gates, Elizabeth Robins, 1862–1952: Actress, Novelist, Feminist (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994), 166. Robins, The Convert, 86–7.

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to national health and order, but to chaos, vice, and degeneration in the eyes of the decorous middle class. By contrast, the crowd positively revels in the “gyrating female” and breaks out into a primitive “howl.”83 Though the speaker’s words carry no particularly upsetting content, her sexualized body and its effect on the crowd threaten Vida and her sister, and they flee. The “terrible female” usurps the style of suffrage rhetoric. She inverts the WSPU’s “O Women, Far and Wide” into a deliberately artificial rhetoric that scorns the careful, purified insistence on order and discipline that the Pankhurst leaders demand. The performer parodies the vote and the orators’ middle-class sensibilities. Such rhetoric is threatening to the values of the melodramatic heroine, yet Vida cannot take lightly the effects of the woman’s performance on the crowd. The Convert represents both Christabel Pankhurst’s virtuous melodramatic rhetoric and the “be-crimped” female’s burlesque rhetoric in order to attempt to include positions from across classes within the suffrage movement. In the end, however, The Convert’s virtuous rhetoric prevails. The novel concludes with an appeal to the maternal myth of “woman.” Rather than focusing on women’s right to work and their permanent presence in the public sphere, the narrative subsumes women’s work under women’s presumed real desire for domesticity. It reassures men that women mean to stabilize the nation rather than tear it apart. Because men have failed to provide for, comfort, and protect women, women must act to gain the vote. Their failure causes women to labor in factories rather than to nurture the future generations as their creative, life-giving roles demand. The historical association of working-class women with sexuality and rebellious, anarchic violence is muted as “womanly woman” rhetoric is deployed in the novel to persuade its audience that, if given the vote, women will restore order and health to the social body. The Convert documents the tensions between different classed styles of imagining the nation. The “real-time” political scenes are sexualized, racialized, and sensational, and they interrupt the melodrama’s mimetic representations to suggest a self-conscious manipulation of signs through burlesque-style theatrics. The parodic performances of working-class burlesque repeats middle-class suffrage rhetoric with a difference. Speaking from a location considered to be “primitive” and outside of the modern, it offers a belated standpoint, a time-lag in the unfolding of national narratives. It injects a fold in time, an elsewhere that figures 83

Robins, ibid., 87.


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the temporal disjunctions of class inequality read in racialized terms. The Convert, in its attempt to represent a cross-class alliance of women, both unleashes and defensively recontains heterogeneous representations of unruly, sexualized classed and raced bodies. It does so by foregrounding the ways in which the signs and temporality of identity may be manipulated, self-consciously performed, and not quite assimilated by melodramatic spectacle. The WSPU by and large rejected the interruptive temporality of working-class women’s oratory and actions. Rather than embrace such events as the avant-garde will do (explored in the chapters that follow), the WSPU worked vigilantly to uphold the authoritarian, imperial state and its homogeneous, empty time that sustains the racial myths of modernity. In the next chapter, I examine a more forthright imperial temporality, one that does not bring the temporal difference of race through the back door of melodrama only to reject it. Rather, the first historical avant-garde group, the futurists, embrace a colonizing modernity. In order to create revolutionary subjects who can compete and win in this aggressively nationalist and imperialist era, they celebrate, rather than scorn the riotous energies of suffragettes. These riotous energies are then reappropriated by futurism’s masculinist logics. But not fully so: futurist manifestos both celebrate modernity’s instrumental logics and its anarchic undoing of logic and hierarchies.

CHAPTER

3

Futurism’ s music hall and India Docks

Already the richness of this new art is apparent to those who know how to see. Its power is tremendous since it reverses all natural laws: it ignores space and time; it upsets gravity, ballistics, biology, etc. . . . Its eye is more patient, more penetrating, more precise. Thus the future belongs to the creator, the poet, who makes use of this hitherto neglected power and richness; for a new servant is available to his Philippe Soupault1 imagination.

Soupault’s prophecy that “the future belongs to the creator, the poet” who can harness the potential of cinema echoes the groundless optimism of avant-garde manifestos, particularly those of the futurists. The buoyant prewar futurist manifestos envisioned modernity (and especially new technologies such as the cinema) as a conquering force that could overturn “all natural laws,” including time and space. The creator who harnesses this power, Soupault predicts, can shape the future. That is, he makes history. In what follows, I connect modernity as a conquering force with the manifesto’s break from the past (figured in futurist manifestos as black and female or passe´ and degenerate) to demonstrate how futurist manifestos and other texts supported Italy’s bid to become a modern, imperial power. But that’s not all that these texts do. Recall that in Chapter 1, I argued that the manifesto’s temporality is composed of both straightforward instrumentality – to start the revolution, now! – and theatrical hesitation and reflection that is ironic and parodic. In part, the theatricality of manifestos compensates for the writer’s position outside of political institutions.2 In the case of futurist manifestos, they envision modernist 1

2

Philippe Soupault, “Note 1 sur le cine´ma,” SIC, 25 (January 1918), reprinted in Richard Abel, French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), vol. I , 142–3, here 143. I am indebted for this line of argument to Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

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possibilities of alternative community formation that combat modernity’s disciplinary and bureaucratic institutions. Rather than writing political manifestos that challenge the state for the right to participate in its institutions – an aim that necessarily circumscribes the rhetoric and representational strategies of the suffragette movement texts, as I suggested in the preceding chapter – they enjoin their audience to adopt a nonserious stance toward modernity. For instance, futurist leader F. T. Marinetti (who made several trips to England between 1910 and 1914) supported the British suffragettes not because they strengthened the state but because he saw them as part of an anarchic process of revolutionizing society. Marinetti envisioned this social revolution through his manifestos, which, unlike the WSPU manifestos, celebrate theatricality. Futurist manifestos are frequently filled with self-parody and irony. The manifesto’s tongue-in-cheek pose opens the present moment to critique and potential transformation – rather than a repetition – of history. It stalls rather than furthers a singular narrative of modernity. In interrupting the narrative of modernity in which those who claim to be modern exclude others by considering them to be outside of history, futurist manifestos offer the potential means by which that narrative can be contested by colonized subjects, and they stage alternative communities. In sum, Marinetti’s manifestos hold in dialectical tension, on the one hand, the statist instrumentality of speech acts that unilaterally impose their will (declaring war or executing prisoners) and, on the other hand, the theatricality of avant-garde high jinks performed outside of institutions of power. As documents mimicking state power, futurist manifestos impose hierarchies of race and nation on the revolutionary subjects that they envision; as avant-garde theatrics, they liberate language and experience from that instrumentality. In other words, Marinetti’s manifestos reground the liberatory cosmopolitan subjects they produce through the metaphysics of race and nation. In this, his manifestos and words-in-freedom poetic exclude racialized and gendered subjects from his vision of art as a vehicle of total revolution. This critique will be illustrated at the end of the chapter through the “Feminist Manifesto” and poetry of the English expatriate poet, painter, designer, and novelist Mina Loy. Loy lived in Florence, Italy, before World War One and had a love affair with Marinetti. Her poetics of femininity and maternity reimagine intersubjective relations in a manner that avoids both instrumental logics and total disintegration, problems to which Marinetti’s manifestos and words-in-freedom poetic threaten to succumb. And while neither Loy’s

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nor Marinetti’s texts allow for colonized subjects to participate as subjects in the fictions of futurist mastery or in their undoing, writers such as Aime´ Ce´saire and C. L. R. James in the 1930s self-consciously draw upon the avant-garde’s contingent strategies to contest Eurocentric myths of modernity, as we shall see in Chapters 5 and 6. THE CONQUEST OF MODERNITY

This section historicizes the futurist avant-garde and examines Marinetti’s “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” in terms of how it privileges whiteness and masculinity as modern. The first futurist manifesto breaks from the past by means of expunging blackness and femininity from the present history-making moment, the founding of futurism. As with the previous chapter, my aim is to establish the first of my claims – that Marinetti’s manifestos reveal the exclusionary nature of European modernity – before I demonstrate the flip-side of this claim: that they also “unwork” such hierarchical and linear thinking. This contradiction of time in manifestos – between forward-moving action and an ironic belatedness – reconfigures the modern as arising from many surprising locations and histories. In particular, Futurism’s fascination with racial others reveals the cross-cultural and colonial genesis of avant-garde militancy. The temporal contradictions that occur in Marinetti’s manifestos stem not only from Italy’s peripheral status in Europe but also from the history of the avant-garde itself. The term “avant-garde” was first coined to denote military “shock troops,” those who cleared the way for the regular army corps to proceed. When art groups appropriated the term in the nineteenth century, they combined the political meaning of the “avantgarde” (as a military tool for the state) with an aesthetic ideal, that of an elite group of artists who envisioned a revolutionary future and forged a path for others to follow. The aesthetic avant-garde substituted an aesthetic program for its previous military service to the state. But it also maintained the earlier connotation of an elite, disciplined coterie. Martin Puchner argues that the aesthetic avant-garde did not fully come into its own until it also appropriated the manifesto from its earlier use by revolutionary socialist political groups. Between the 1880s and 1900s, avant-garde groups such as the symbolists, naturalists, the unanimists, and many others had tentatively taken up the manifesto form, but their manifestos expounded carefully, in full paragraphs, their aesthetic programs, almost as if they were writing an essay. Only with Marinetti’s


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“The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” initially called “Le Futurisme,” did, as Puchner says, “the avant-garde have available the proper instrument to articulate its state of being advanced, its break with the past and affinity to the future, and only then did it speak succinctly and aggressively with a single collective voice.”3 Marinetti adapted the manifesto form so that it would, in itself, perform the conscious state of being advanced, enact its aggressive myth of the future, and regenerate the nation. To understand why Marinetti’s version of the avant-garde sought to strengthen the state rather than undermine it, it is necessary to consider Italy’s position among European nations at the turn of the century. Italy, having only recently achieved national unification – the Risorgimento – in 1870, was undergoing rapid modernization that had more in common with modernization on the so-called colonial periphery than with the “centers” of European industry and political modernity, notably England and France. Emilio Gentile reports that the decade in which Marinetti developed futurism was replete with groups vying to determine how Italy should modernize itself. Modernization, Gentile writes, “appeared an arduous undertaking for a nation state constituted so recently, still so uncertain in its identity and unstable in its moral cohesion, while all the while the transformations of modernity were increasingly met with accelerating rhythm.”4 The younger generation of Italians rebelled against the liberal nationalism of the Risorgimento (in which each nation looked to themselves to progress). They were frustrated by Italy’s continued underdevelopment and its lack of cultural and economic primacy within Europe and the world. These groups vied for ways to reform the character of Italians and to complete the national revolution begun with the Risorgimento. They sought to “forge the spiritual unity of the nation, and once more conduct the Italian nation into the vanguard of modernity” by means of imperial conquest, individualism, cosmopolitanism, and libertarian ideals.5 It was the idea that culture could hold a militant function that inspired Marinetti’s manifestos. The manifesto – its writing and subsequent declamation and distribution – became an activity through which to form the modern conscience of the new “man,” giving him a spiritual and aesthetic vision meant to replace traditional ideas and 3 4 5

Puchner, ibid., 78. Emilio Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 43. Gentile, ibid., 51. See also his definitions of liberal and modernist nationalisms, 4–6.

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religious beliefs. That vision was inspired in large part by Georges Sorel’s myth of violence as a means of social regeneration. State-sponsored violence, in Sorel’s and Marinetti’s proto-fascist vision, would regenerate and modernize society. To show how myth animates Marinetti’s futurist manifestos in their constitution of political communities and modern subjectivities based on racial exclusion, I shall begin with Sorel’s revolutionary syndicalism as a chief source of futurism’s radical aesthetic practices. Sorelian syndicalism, as articulated in the widely read Reflections on Violence (1908), advocated separatist vanguardist, working-class groups bound together in ardent solidarity and absolute confidence that modern society would soon face apocalyptic levels of conflict that would result in a regeneration, defined as a purge of bourgeois decadence, egoism, democratic parliamentarianism, and hedonistic materialism. In his introductory letter to Daniel Hale´vy, Sorel defines the myth of the general strike as the motivating force behind the class-based revolution that he believed would clean up the decadent ills of bourgeois society. Sorel states, “A myth cannot be refuted, since it is, at bottom, identical with the convictions of a group, being the expression of these convictions in the language of movement; and it is, in consequence, unanalysable into parts which could be placed on the plane of historical description.”6 Like the manifesto’s speech act that does something with words rather than debate and analyze, the myth does something as it is uttered: it constitutes a group and its beliefs in ways that seemingly transcend history. And those beliefs are dynamic in nature, “the language of movement,” in which its actors “always picture their coming action in a battle in which their cause is certain to triumph.”7 The belief in an apocalyptic transformation accelerates activities as all deeds are thought to contribute to the impending overthrow of old forms of social organization. Moreover, this “kind of feeling” is “closely related to those which are necessary to promote production in any very progressive state of industry.”8 A new collective myth will modernize and increase the economic productivity of the state. But this form of modernization demands a nonmodern other. Sorel imagines myth spontaneously infusing a group with the discipline, energy, and self-sacrifice that he likens to “tribalism.” Sorel casts this tribalism in racial hues as he defines the “tribe” as a kinship unit based on blood relations. His myth of modernity racializes its participants as it modernizes them. The modern “tribe” 6 8

Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (New York: Collier, 1950), 50. Sorel, ibid., 51.

7

Sorel, ibid., 39–40.


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employs violence as a virtue, one that ensures group solidarity and sacrifice in the promise of apocalyptic social conflict and cleansing. This modern irrational or instinctual “feeling” is aligned with industrialism and, a bit later, national supremacy. (Sorel became a nationalist in 1909.) The revolutionary power of the Sorelian myth of violence was then enfolded in support of the state. Sorel eschewed the power of words in favor of primordial forces – violence – to transform modern society completely. In his defense of violence, he argued that it carries forward into modern times the fervent morality of religious faith and the authoritarianism of tradition. (Futurism, however, would distance itself from this tenet, refusing tradition and academicism of any form. It would instead substitute for religious faith and traditionalism an aestheticized vision of a new society.) In illustrating how violence produces stark and vigorous moral character in its social members, Sorel relates how in 1860, a Colorado mining town cleared itself of bandits by means of “lynch law.” Lynch law, he explains, “was frequently put into operation; a man accused of murder or of theft might be arrested, condemned and hanged in less than a quarter of an hour, if an energetic Vigilance Committee could get hold of him.”9 This social mechanism, he claims, produces an excellent habit in the American citizen: He does not allow himself to be crushed on the pretext that he is virtuous. A lawabiding man is not necessarily a craven, as is often the case with us . . . Moreover, he possesses the necessary energy to resist, and the kind of life which he leads makes him capable of resisting effectively, even of taking the initiative and the responsibility of a serious step when circumstances demand it.10

Not only did violence render citizens virtuous, but those very acts produced rigid demarcations of ethnic and national solidarity. Lynch law, of course, not only cleared towns of bandits, but it also, by eliminating due process, imposed racial terror predominantly upon African Americans in order to prevent racial intermixing and to affect social, political, and economic segregation. It was, chiefly, an American phenomena; in Europe, such acts of racial violence occurred mainly in the colonies. Certainly for Marinetti, the colonies served as a threshold experience for what Gentile calls the “conquest of modernity.” Marinetti’s ties to the colonies were extensive and crucial to his work and imagination. As is well known, he derived his publishing connections from the colonial fortune 9

Sorel, ibid., 181.

10

Sorel, ibid.

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amassed by his father, a wealthy lawyer in Alexandria, Egypt. In addition, he managed his publishing coup, the printing of “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” on the front page of Le Figaro, through the aid of his father’s business friend, Mohammed El Rachi, an Egyptian Pasha who happened to be a shareholder of the newspaper and a friend of the director, Gaston Calmatte.11 Moreover, Marinetti served at the Libyan front in 1911 and his “great fire-brand” novel, Marfarka le futuriste: Roman africain (1909), imagines the heroics of imperial warfare, and the conquest and pillage of African tribes and territories. Gentile explains that “the aspiration to have the capacity and the power to master the processes of modernization” entailed a consolidation of the nation to enable its participation in world politics and a global economy.12 This logic is circular: the nation depends on its colonies not only for economic resources but for its own consolidation as a nation defined against that which is foreign. In other words, its superior identity legitimates its economic dominance which then confirms its superiority. The unification of Italy as a nation-state was accompanied by the development of Italian colonial aspirations in the early twentieth century, particularly in North Africa. This feat of colonization would prove to the world Italy’s preeminence as a civilizing force and economic power. Enacting this superiority meant disciplining national subjects as modern subjects. This interpellation occurs through a confrontation of the modern subject with the shocks, fragmentation, and acceleration of modern life in order to appropriate and dispel their negative effects. A rhetoric of violence mediates this confrontation and aims at encouraging its audience to celebrate the conquest of modernity. This conquest would unify the nation in its imperial and racial pre-eminence achieved through the degradation and appropriation of colonized subjects. Though Marinetti’s first manifesto, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” is international in its call for cosmopolitan artists, its French language publication in Le Figaro celebrates national mobilization in war-time emergency in order to anchor its cosmopolitan exuberance in nationalism. The manifesto narrates the mythic transformation of the modern subject from a state of individual decadent passivity to one of collectivist modernist action. The manifesto’s narrative preface makes visible this infrastructure of group formation that subsequent avant-garde 11 12

Gu¨nter Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 1909–1944 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 45. Emilio Gentile, “The Conquest of Modernity: From Modernist Nationalism to Fascism,” Modernism/Modernity, 1, 3 (1994), 55–87, here 58.


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manifestos rely upon without needing to repeat explicitly. The manifesto begins in an Oriental interior setting, one that evokes the setting of decadent poetry. “Hanging mosque lamps” are artificial and confined, like the futurist’s own spirits that shine “with the prisoned radiance of electric hearts.”13 Marinetti and his fellow writers trample “atavistic ennui into rich oriental rugs, arguing up to the last confines of logic and blacking many reams of paper with [their] frenzied scribbling.”14 Their actions violently reject premodern “atavistic ennui,” outside of history, in order to constitute their modernity. In racial terms, as I show below, they whiten themselves as they distinguish between modern and premodern subjects. Then, they begin walking in the silence of the old city where they hear the “feeble prayers” of the old canal and “the creaking bones of sickly palaces.”15 Finally, the tenor of the narrative shifts as they “suddenly hea[r] the famished roar of automobiles.”16 As they race through the streets, the hard metallic bodies and powerful engines of their automobiles supplement the mobility and impermeability of their bodies. They become modern mythic Centaurs. While the men become machines, the mechanical forms including trains, ships, and automobiles are anthropomorphized. This blurring of organic and nonorganic boundaries results in a fantasy of control over the forces of life and death: “Death, domesticated, passed me at every turn to hold out her paw gracefully, and once in a while laid down with a noise of strident jaws, making velvety caressing eyes at me from every puddle.”17 Death, the ultimate symbol of material chaos and unintelligibility, is feminized, its flirtatious behavior invites futurist mastery.18 And while Marinetti alone appears to have crashed his car – “I stopped short and to my disgust rolled over into a ditch with my wheels in the air,” as he re-emerges from the ditch and revives his car, “alive again” – the narrative only then becomes collective.19 Group unity is achieved: “And so, faces smeared with good factory muck – plastered with metallic waste, with senseless sweat, with celestial soot – we bruised, our arms in slings, but unafraid, declared our high intentions to all the living of the earth.”20 At this point, the collectively uttered exhortations of the manifesto, its eleven points, begin. The violence of modernity – the automobile crash, in this

13 14 18 19

F. T. Marinetti, Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio (Boston: MFA Publications, 2001), 19. Marinetti, ibid., 19. 15 Marinetti, ibid., 19. 16 Marinetti, ibid., 20. 17 Marinetti, ibid. I am drawing on Cinzia Sartini Blum’s discussion of this scene, The Other Modernism: F. T. Marinetti’ s Futurist Fiction of Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 48–9. Marinetti Futurist Manifestos, 20–1. 20 Marinetti, ibid., 21.

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case – generates group cohesion, heroism, and the enhancement, rather than annihilation, of bodies by modern technologies. This prosthetic performance of man and automobile – crashing and resurrecting – recasts the trauma of modernity as “ecstasy, accident as adventure, death drive as joy ride.”21 Whereas Jeffrey Schnapp argues that the accident itself recasts Marinetti’s stance toward modernity, I read the crash as effecting its transformation essentially through the figurative consumption and expulsion of the Sudanese nurse. An encounter with racial difference becomes the threshold experience for Marinetti’s transmogrification into a metallized man, the revolutionary subject of modernity. The chaos of death hovers near as Marinetti’s car is overturned. Marinetti, lying prone, mingles intimately with a fusion of organic and industrial material, figured as a life-giving mother: “O maternal ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your nourishing sludge; and I remembered the blessed black breast of my Sudanese nurse.”22 The proximity to the maternal and colonized subject is at once assimilated and rejected. Barbara Spackman has argued that the central question in Marfarka the Futurist, published just months after “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” is that of proximity, not only of man to woman but “also the proximity of Futurist Europe to its once and future colonies.”23 Africa is figured in the novel not as a premodern past but as the future of a reinvigorated Italy.24 This proximity is negotiated and warded off in the novel by troping the black bodies either as consumable commodities to be exported to the imperial metropolis – grapes, bananas, coffee, sugar, vanilla – or as pulverized bodies abjectly cast as putrefying cesspools.25 Spurred on either by his virile, avid sexual consumption of commodified body parts or vile disgust at his African soldiers whom he calls packs of “mangy, stinking curs!” Marfarka performs his heroic feats of conquest.26 His followers, too, become extensions of Marfarka’s will, aligned with technological feats of military prowess and the conquest of Africa, both militarily and sexually. Marfarka announces: “I teach you to despise death, to feed on danger, and to gamble your life, as you are doing now,

21 22 23 24 26

Jeffrey Schnapp, “Crash (Speed as Engine of Individuation),” Modernism/Modernity, 6, 1 (1999), 7. Marinetti, Futurist Manifestos, 21. Barbara Spackman, “Marfarka and Son: Marinetti’s Homophobic Economics,” Modernism/ Modernity, 1, 3 (1994), 89–107, here 91. Spackman, ibid., 90. 25 Spackman, ibid., 100. F. T. Marinetti, Marfarka the Futurist [1909] (London: Middlesex University Press, 1998), 170.


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for an idea, a glance, a performance!”27 The future is an open question for collective military, economic, and racial conquest. Like Marfarka the Futurist, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” constructs its community in relation to the myth of the racial other. Marinetti mingles with the factory cesspool and emerges abjectly – torn, filthy, stinking – from the haunches of his car. His rebirth as manmachine is diametrically opposed to the consumable body of the Sudanese nurse metonymically related to the cesspool. The recollected nurse’s body allows for the fantasy of absolute racial difference, which, as Paul Gilroy notes, works “through appeals to the value of national or ethnic purity. Their biopolitical potency immediately raises questions of prophylaxis and hygiene, ‘as if the (social) body had to assure itself of its own identity by expelling waste matter’.”28 This fantasy of absolute difference – presented as self-evident – allows for the formation of the futurist collective and their ecstatic manifesto declaration: “We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.”29 The violence of the accident, rather than being figured as traumatic shock, is cast as ecstasy that Schnapp reads as “sunder[ing] bonds to the past and in their place, forg[ing] new links between men, machines, and their environment.”30 These “metallicized” subjects – Marinetti and his cohorts – are immune to threats posed by “degeneration, fatigue, mortality and an overburdened historical consciousness.”31 They enact their superiority over passive, inert others, leading Italy through a “revolution of the mind” that will impose its will on other territories and compete effectively with other imperial nations.32 MANIFESTOS AND THEATRICALITY

Next, I consider Marinetti’s aims for avant-garde theater. I do so because what he envisions there serves as a microcosm for his imagined social and political revolution. Marinetti prefigures in the futurist theater manifestos the racial and gendered rhetorical violence that he believed would stimulate the revolutionary regeneration of Italy. In particular, Marinetti looked to England as a model for the vigorous potential of modernity, 27 28

29 32

Marinetti, ibid., 145. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 83. He quotes Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (New York: Polity Press, 1986), 298. Marinetti, Futurist Manifestos, 21. 30 Schnapp, “Crash,” 7–8. 31 Schnapp, ibid., 8. Gentile, “The Conquest of Modernity,” 72.

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because its industrial revolution had occurred in the previous century. More specifically, Marinetti borrowed from the English music hall – long celebrated by modernists such as Baudelaire – to produce a theatrical sensibility of force and violence that could counter the instrumentalization of modern life. For instance, as Giovanni Lista describes, the eccentric clown provided an image of a spiritual attitude, an objectification of a modern manner of being before the world and its objects.33 Marinetti – as did many contemporary avant-garde writers and artists such as Picasso, Apollinaire, Myerhold, Colette, Djuna Barnes, Walter Sickert, Rebecca West, Ford Madox Ford, and Wyndham Lewis – saw in collective, participatory popular entertainments such as music hall and circus what Berghaus calls “the essence of human existence in the modern metropolis.”34 Boxing and slapstick made visible the violently physical assaults on human sensibility in modern life. The circus and variety theater in England and abroad in Europe staged varied, random series of quick acts and attracted an unruly audience drawn from across classes. The circus’s circular enclosure produced an intensely focused spectacle of performers’ extreme degree of physical training and control, fabulous costuming, and faultless timing. The racial and exotic elements of circus were outrageous and provoking. The circus clown frequently drew upon the blackface minstrel tradition and on commedia dell’ arte. It occasionally featured black performers such as Chocolat or Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando, who were self-mocking or engaged in daredevil feats. The circus performances often featured risque´, scantily clad women on horseback controlled by a mustachioed ringmaster, brandishing his whip. The revue by contrast, focused on the present. It created what the critic Curnonsky called in 1912 “a kind of spectacle of incessant actuality,” and it satirized the day’s events reported in the newspaper.35 It glibly and ironically commented on “revolutions, wars, new inventions, fashions, artistic and literary matters, crimes, public calamities, etc.”36 The vivid immediacy of the revue depends on the spectator’s immersion in contemporary happenings. These events are presented in terse accounts without logical coherence. They mimic the arbitrary and simultaneous presentation of newspaper items. This montage approach to presenting public figures and cultural phenomena shifts aesthetic production from 33 34 35 36

Giovanni Lista, Futurism (Paris: E´ditions Pierre Terrail, 2001), 53. Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 164. Quoted in Jeffrey Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 13. Quoted in Weiss, ibid., 14.


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mimetic representation to a theatrical enactment in which both self and world are artificially created through satirical force and energy. For Marinetti, the avant-garde manifesto would appropriate this popular energy in order to create the “new” man of modernity. For the futurists, the proximity to so-called premodern racial subjects was a danger to be warded off not only in the African territories but also in Europe. In effect, the futurists enthusiastically imported colonial violence into the decadent, passive European center and, in so doing, mingled “premodern” and modern subjects in what looked more like a contested settler colony than the Manichean division of the civilized European “center” and savage “peripheral” colonies. The futurists aestheticized the violence of this volatile geography through a parodic theatricality. This theatrical event stalls narrative and invites a seizing of the present moment to transform, rather than repeat, the past. While Marinetti rewrites modernizing scripts of conquest and domination, he also instructs his audience on how to maintain their racial superiority. This mingling of European and racial subjects took place in the virtual space of futurist manifestos that at once imitated and enhanced the “culture of attractions”: circus, music hall, variety theater, and cinema shorts. The culture of attractions, as it was imaginatively deployed by the futurist avant-garde, was a specific engagement with racial and sexual difference that sought to educate its audience into the heterogeneous unleashing and consolidation of global modernity. This chapter’s epigraph by Philippe Soupault suggests that the avant-garde should anticipate the possible effects of modern technologies of cinema on perception and show its audience how to grasp these possibilities by educating them, “if one knows how to see it.” The manifesto was particularly important in educating people to negotiate the proximity to – and detachment from – the prolific and unsettling sights and sounds of the modern metropolis. “The Variety Theater” manifesto, published first in excerpted form in London’s Daily Mail (1913) and later published in full in the Italian journal Lacerba, dramatized an immersion in the random and simultaneous onslaught of modernity’s fragmented, anonymous cityscape. The imagined theater served as an experimental space in which art merged with life. Within the confines of this virtual theater, Marinetti’s manifesto instructs the audience on how to see the world through a combative, avant-garde lens and act accordingly. It presents a “dramaturgy of audience reaction” as a central part of the script.37 The audience-performer 37

Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 167.

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interaction served as the imaginative means of both reinjecting outworn modes of aesthetic form with the excitement and vibrancy of “life,” and, conversely, of steering the public toward a dynamic engagement with art. Indeed, in the final portion of “The Variety Theater” manifesto, Marinetti’s words-in-freedom poetic imagines the theater spilling out into the thoroughfares and transforming all aspects of public life: “transformation of the streets into splendid corridors to guide push logic necessity the crowd toward trepidation þ laughter þ music-hall uproar.”38 The manifesto, with its long history of service in the throes of political battle, superbly conveyed the violence required to jolt its audience from conventional modes of perceiving and to remake the relations between themselves and others. Marinetti later remarked in his memoirs that his ten years of literary activity prior to founding futurism convinced him to “change gear . . . and introduce the fist into the artistic battle.”39 “Art as Action” was the new formula for this concept, and it could only be realized through “the ruins of the past,” demolished through circulating the iconoclastic manifestos to as wide an audience as possible. Futurist manifestos, by means of their rupture from the past and vision of a revolutionary future, call into being their audience and its reception of avant-garde art. The manifestos transform the future by rejecting past forms of interpretation. In this regard, they open the present moment to historical transformation and “a certain untimeliness.”40 Futurist events are imaginatively envisioned; they do not exist as such outside the text. (Though Marinetti’s public performances, especially those held in Italy, led to rioting and a few nights in jail, they fell short of the transformative communal encounters imagined in “The Variety Theater” manifesto or even “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism”). None the less, “the fist” introduced in the futurist manifestos’ fantasies of collective violence generates the semantic and rhetorical power to construct reality in a different way, to break from the class norms and received meanings of the social world.41 Because violence is by definition excessive, it cannot be contained within the semantic structure of language, it draws attention to the materiality of language as well as the phenomenological realm of 38 39 40 41

F. T. Marinetti, Marinetti: Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), 122. Quoted in Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 46. Krzysztof Ziarek, The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 9. Laura Winkiel, “‘The Sweet Assassin’ and the Performative Politics of SCUM Manifesto,” in The Queer Sixities, ed. Patricia Juliana Smith (New York: Routledge, 1999), 62–85, here 65.


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intersubjective experience, radically reconfigured as “unworkable” and noninstrumental. This “unworkable” relation, as I show below, looks like pandemonium within the carefully circumscribed arena of variety theater. Avant-garde manifestos push their audience’s imagination toward a new kind of lived experience by gesturing toward what lies beyond the realm of conventional representation. In producing an event that gestures toward the unrepresentable, the manifesto – more than the explanatory essay – scripts the futurists’ and audience’s roles as if their encounter were a dramatic text. This scene-making fiction exposes the infrastructure of the production and reception of avant-garde art. Marjorie Perloff argues that futurist manifestos do more than mediate the reception of a work of art or a literary text. Rather, their novelty was to “refuse to remain in the expository or critical corner” and, instead, she argues that avant-garde manifestos, “sufficiently aestheticized, can, in the eyes of a mass audience, all but take the place of the promised art work.”42 The avant-garde manifesto is not art or literature per se, but it offers in their place the hybrid form of theatrical script, expository prose, experimental poetry, collage, and graphic design. And it gestures toward “the unsaid, the halfwords, and the marginalized” through – in the words of one futurist manifesto – the event-nature of its aphoristic, hasty, “delirium.”43 As Perloff suggests, the manifesto prepares the audience for the art and literature that are produced after or simultaneously with the manifesto, but it can also serve as an art or literary event in its own right. Many futurist manifestos work to decenter the work of art within an interactive space of reception imaginatively envisioned by the manifestos. In the manifesto Futurist Painting and Sculpture (1914), Umberto Boccioni declares that “[A painting] is an emotive architectural environment which creates sensation and completely involves the observer” and, in Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto 1910, he says that “We shall henceforth put the spectator in the centre of the picture.”44 Further configuring this dynamic space, Perloff argues that the spectator’s sensation is produced through the rhetorical strategy of the artist as improvvisatore in which one begins with no second thought and no turning back: “Improvisation is . . . an art that depends not on revision in the interests in making the parts cohere in a unified formal structure, but on a prior readiness, 42 43 44

Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 86. Carlo Carra`, “The Painting of Sounds, Noises, and Smells,” in Manifesto: A Century of Isms, ed. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 205. Marinetti, Futurist Manifestos, 177, 28.

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a performative stance that leaves room for accident and surprise.”45 The artist as improviser gives the appearance of hastily jotting down a manifesto “now” in a “real-time” that is coextensive with the event of its reception. Time, as I argued in the previous chapter, becomes a function of the reader’s position, the event of experiencing and interpreting the text. Marinetti’s manifestos script the activity of reception that disrupts readerly expectations through astonishment, repulsion, anger, excitement, or fear. Manifestos open the present moment to its “irreducible heterogeneity,” its overlooked possibilities for change.46 For instance, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” performs the pedagogical service of preparing the public to be open to and ready for the onslaught of modern art.47 This gap in understanding is achieved through the manifesto’s hostile tone of address and rhetoric of violence. With the futurists’ call to “Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly!” the urgency and intensity of exhortation creates in artists and their audiences a sensibility of themselves as potential instruments of change in the present moment.48 The manifesto challenges the spectator’s received ideas about art and forges a space for an unanticipated avant-garde praxis of art to enter their consciousness. In envisioning new forms of spectatorship, futurist manifestos instruct their audience to meet the demands of modernity even as they work to liberate consciousness. By insulting their audience, manifesto writers attempt to change the lived experience of the audience by provoking it to participate in the chaotic conditions of modern life. They invoke the physical sensation of violence and produce hardened but participatory, active subjects through the technique of shock. Taking their cue from Sorel’s revolutionary syndicalism, Marinetti’s manifestos imagine that violence might regenerate society. “The Variety Theater” manifesto imagines violence as spurring an audience to engage in modern forms of intersubjectivity. These injurious acts unsettle audience complacencies, locate chinks in the ego’s armor, and polarize responses that are either passive and passe´ or aggressive and modern. Marinetti announces in “The Variety Theater” manifesto that: “In its swift 45 46 47

48

Perloff, The Futurist Moment, 101–2. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994), 33. Alice Kaplan has argued that the manifesto “opens a discursive space for understanding . . . where there never was one.” Alice Kaplan, “Recent Theoretical Work with Pamphlets and Manifestos,” L’ E´sprit Creáteur, 23, 4 (1983), 74–82, here 77. Marinetti, Futurist Manifestos, 23.


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overpowering dance rhythms the Variety Theater forcibly drags the slowest souls out of their torpor and forces them to run and jump.”49 The provocative, shocking, and threatening language of the manifesto fosters a somatic tension in its readers, an imaginative readiness to take action in the face of violent confrontation. For Marinetti, words contain the possibility in themselves to injure, and, to bring home this point, Marinetti instructs his futurist followers to: “Spew out a romanza of insults and profanity, etc.”50 These words hurl themselves at the audience and impact them immediately as wounds to their sensibility. They must either become aggressors themselves or remain victims. Such violent acts transform the variety theater into pandemonium. Linking performers with spectators, Marinetti demolishes the fourth wall of dramatic performance. He imagines an audience provoked by sneezing powder or glue on their seats, becoming active and forcibly stirred into concrete action. He also suggests staging performances in which planted actors in the audience instigate general mayhem. He advocates “selling the same ticket to ten people: traffic jam, bickering, and wrangling.”51 Or worse still: “Offer free tickets to gentlemen or ladies who are notoriously unbalanced, irritable, or eccentric and likely to provoke uproars with obscene gestures, pinching women, or other freakishness.”52 The disturbing force of these activities – subordinating women and others who are passe´, yet raising pandemonium – can be understood through what Benjamin calls (in the very different context of surrealism) the joke, the invective, the misunderstanding: “cases where an action puts forth its own image.”53 There, in and through technology, inner and outer “man” “so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the collective becomes revolutionary discharge.”54 In Marinetti’s imagined variety theater a riotous exchange of blows, practical jokes, and confusion reconfigures the relations between self, community, and language. “The Variety Theater” manifesto advocates violence to awaken its somnolent audience. Such injury subjects the reader to an identity formation within the hostile conditions of modern life: either brutal and dominating like the futurists, or effete and passe´ and thereby excluded from the futurists’ fiction of mastery. Their jeers aim to provoke the will to revolt and the use of violence against abject others, those who cannot or will not transcend their racial and gender particularities. As with Marinetti’s crash in 49 53

Marinetti, ibid., 127. 50 Marinetti, ibid., 130. 51 Marinetti, ibid. 52 Marinetti, ibid. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Harcourt, 1968), 191. 54 Benjamin, ibid., 192.

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“The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” the audience is instructed to identify with a process of sensuously, porously mingling with the racially and sexually other, siphoning from it a primal, physical energy, and then triumphantly detaching from that permeable, chaotic body. From this violent, proximate space of the music hall, Marinetti’s manifesto seemingly transcends its strident exhortations and moves into a dreamlike words-in-freedom that imagines his audience spilling onto the streets, filling the cities with revolutionary discharge, and altering modern life by rejecting all conventional modes of everyday life. I turn next to Marinetti’s words-in-freedom poetic that concludes “The Variety Theater” manifesto. Here the manifesto’s hierarchical exclusion of passe´ subjects disintegrates into a radical reworking of signification. My argument now takes a crucial turn toward opening rather than closing the present moment to transformation. WORDS-IN-FREEDOM

The argument that words-in-freedom open the present moment to the possibilities of radical historical transformation (including the elimination of subject/object hierarchies) may seem counterintuitive at first, given its imbrication with ideologies of imperial conquest. Quite literally, Marinetti derived his poetic detachment from the laws of syntax and meaning and from the materiality of bodies during Italy’s earliest instance of imperial warfare from the air. Schnapp has shown in detail how the 1911 battle of Tripoli, in which Marinetti fought, was an experimental ground for futurist poetics: “It permitted words in freedom to be hatched as a literary analog both of the newly mechanized, transparent battlefield and of a montage-based aesthetic of reportage emerging from within the primitive documentary cinema.”55 These new technologies were available through the first use of airplanes in theaters of war. The rhetoric of transcendence, Schnapp argues, is “grafted onto the technology of flight,” just as “the related discourses of exploration and colonization has been fully projected onto what was referred to as the ‘aerial continent’.”56 Marinetti’s poetics support an international race for conquest of the air: modernity’s expansion and domination of others. “Words-in-freedom” expresses an aerial detachment from – but steadfast participation in – the effects of modern violence. 55 56

Jeffrey Schnapp, “Propeller Talk,” Modernism/Modernity, 1, 3 (1994), 153–78, here 169. Schnapp, ibid., 169.


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“Words-in-freedom” obliterate syntax and logic and allow expressive force to expand “without strings” through a frenzied sequence of sensorial effects and imaginary associations. As Cinzia Blum notes, “the resulting explosion of imaginative energy stretches the boundaries of the subject to encompass a whole universe,” as when Marinetti announces in the “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature”: “art, this extension of the forest of our veins, that pours out, beyond the body, over the infinity of space and time.”57 Marinetti declares in the manifesto “Geometric and Mechanical Splendor and the Numerical Sensibility” that “in this continuous effort to express with the greatest force and profundity, [signs] naturally transport themselves into self-illustrations, by means of free, expressive orthography and typography, the synoptic tables of lyric values and designed analogies.”58 In addition, these free expressive words are analogically indicative of the bodies who utter those words: “[They] also serve to express the facial mimicry and the gesticulation of the narrator.”59 Like the manifesto’s possible etymology “hostile hand” and its often experimental typography, words-in-freedom seek to contain the physical presence and affective expressionality within their material forms. For

OKE

instance, TO SM alludes to the gesture of the smoker, blowing smoke away from oneself, the movement of the hand away from the mouth, and the physical drift of the smoke into the air.60 While Marinetti excludes racialized subjects from participation in modern subjectivity, they are crucially objectified through representation in his words-in-freedom poetic. Marinetti invokes popular entertainments that objectify live bodies as nonrepresentational, thereby reducing them to pure form. They provide a literal physicalization of performance: flying trapeze artists were literally flying, contortion artists used their bodies as their sculptural material, and freakish bodies were grotesque and often artificial. These bodies on display present an alogical performance that was believed to be iconic. Their violent behavior – whether performing magic tricks, incredible feats of physical prowess, erotic striptease, or transporting the spectator to far-away cinematic scenes of exotic or bizarre locations (actualite´s), predicated on a “you are there” sensation of temporal and spatial proximity – collapsed time and space and fixed meaning onto bodies in a hieroglyph of signification. Bodies are composed as what Antonin Artaud would later call “symbols that are 57 58

Blum, The Other Modernism, 164. Marinetti, Marinetti: Selected Writings, 89. Marinetti, ibid., 100. 59 Marinetti, ibid. 60 Marinetti, ibid.

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precise and immediately legible”.61 Sign and referent became iconic as their performances are unmediated by story narrative, imitation of other conventional (realist) forms, or through editing or fourth-wall artifice. The space for interpretation is unnecessary; meaning is immediately denoted. For boxers, jugglers, trapeze artists, gymnasts, and slapstick actors, meaning resided in gestures believed to be essential expressions of the body, unmarked by history and conventional representation. Marinetti enthuses in his manifesto: “The Variety Theater offers us all the records so far attained: the greatest speed and finest gymnastics and acrobatics of the Japanese, the greatest muscular frenzy of the Negroes, the greatest development of animal intelligence.”62 More than anyone else, Europeans looked to Africans for the immediacy of physical sensation and movement, unmediated by language and history. This strategy ensured that decadent fuzziness and the incoherence of matter are eliminated through the violence of signs inscribed onto bodies that have fixed meanings lifted out of the time and space of history. Yet it is here that my argument turns. Marinetti reflects the time-lag of Italy’s belated entrance into modernity as an imperial power (hence coming late to significant geopolitical power) in his theatrical unworking of instrumental language. While futurism has been read by critics through the lens of either the aestheticized politics of fascism or romantic modernism, I follow Berghaus’s claim (Gentile, too, belongs within this critical view) that Marinetti, for all his messianic, hyperbolic effusions of modernity, “never subscribed to the subordination of the individual under the prerogatives of the Fascist State.”63 Marinetti resisted instrumental and bureaucratic forms of modernity. He advocated instead a permanent revolution “against ‘fixed, restful conformity’ and promoted instead ‘stormy and dynamic variety’ and ‘anarchic individualism’” including the right of workers to strike and artists’ right to nonconformity.64 This critical stance against totalitarianism also involved attention to the alterity of matter. Fixed through signification though it may be, matter also held a life of its own. Though Marinetti envisioned humans turned into machines and machines come alive, he also warned, 61 62 63

64

Antonin Artaud, “The Theater of Cruelty,” in Caws, Manifesto, 455. Marinetti, Futurist Manifestos, 129. Critics who focus on futurism as an aestheticized politics of fascism include Benjamin, Illuminations; Blum, The Other Modernism; Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics and the Avant-Garde (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). Edward Comentale, Modernism, Cultural Production and the British Avant-Garde (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004) reads futurism as a romantic modernism. Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theater, 407. Berghaus, ibid., 407.


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“Be careful not to force human feelings onto matter. Instead, divine its different governing impulses. . . . Through intuition we will conquer the seemingly unconquerable hostility that separates out human flesh from the metal of motors.”65 This intuition sought to eliminate the metaphysical dichotomy of form and matter, but it brings romanticism (understood as a form of hierarchical thinking, as in the notion of liberation being a complete break from the past) in through the back door of intuition. But, I would argue, not by intention – Marinetti vociferously rejected romanticism as an aesthetic and expressive category. As much, then, as Marinetti reinscribes hierarchies of gender, race, and nation through his futurist conquest of modernity that upholds the metaphysics of the subject, his poetic vision seeks to undo these very terms. A brief discussion of what I mean by “power” and “undoing” will elaborate what is at stake in my readings of these manifestos and how they reimagine community and history. Ziarek has argued that the historical avant-garde’s radical anti-institutional impulse should not be reduced to “resistance or revolutionary overthrow of particular forms of power and their replacement with new ones – whether democratic, or, worse, totalitarian, either socialist or fascist.”66 Instead, Ziarek asserts that the avant-garde should be thought of as “constitut[ing] a forceful challenge to the very idea of power and power oriented modalities of being.”67 This postFoucauldian notion of power, as Ziarek defines it, “denotes the whole array of modern productive technologies of power based on articulation and normalization. Power is, therefore, not a what but, rather, a how: a modality or disposition which determines what is in a productive manner and gives it its momentum.”68 This momentum occurs as the commodification of art or as the harnessing of creative energies through corporate and popular culture. Italian futurism, in particular, aligns itself with this modern mobilization of technology as power, especially in its effusion of “war – the world’s only hygiene!”69 Though even here, as Ziarek notes in a different context, futurist texts “almost immediately counter themselves,” as in the futurist undoing of nature/culture, form/ matter dichotomies. Technology supersedes both the categories of the human and the natural. In “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” for example, Marinetti mythologizes his car as “my beautiful shark” which 65 66 67

Marinetti, Marinetti: Selected Writings, 87–9. Krzysztof Ziarek, “The Turn of Art: The Avant-Garde and Power,” New Literary History, 33, 1 (2002), 89–107, here 95. Ziarek, ibid. 68 Ziarek, ibid. 69 Marinetti, Futurist Manifestos, 22.

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is revived by “a caress from me,” a move which denaturalizes and transcends both the animal world and the mechanical one.70 Moreover, Marinetti advocates in the 1912 “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature” the destruction of “I” as the subject of art, “to substitute for human psychology, now exhausted, the lyric obsession with matter.”71 The intensity and acceleration of experience brought about by technology reveals both subjects and objects to be fields of energy, forms in process and in flux that mutually constitute one another. At moments in Marinetti’s manifestos and words-in-freedom, technicity (a term borrowed by Ziarek from Heidegger meaning that which manifests its force in the triumph of technological progress) releases the masterful human subject through “an opening onto a new ‘numerical sensibility’ that would reflect the ‘universal vibrations’ of forces on the level of micro relations, ‘expressing the infinitely small and the vibrations of molecules’.”72 This mutually constituting and fundamentally imbricated understanding of the world has the potential to remake human relations as nonhierarchical, while it also reconceives the space of representation to include the context of aesthetic exchange (art’s production, mise en sce`ne, and reception). Futurism’s reworking of technology allows for a performative, energized formation of community. This different matter of relating can produce provisional, nonhierarchical communities that express the coevalness of Italy’s belated entrance into modernity. Marinetti seeks both to participate in modernity’s instrumentality as he advocates Italy’s bid to become an imperial power and to undo modernity’s instrumental force because, by that logic, those nations who came first to modernity objectify Italy as passe´ (as I show below). Futurism’s contestation of modernity’s instrumentality aligns it, albeit momentarily, with that other current of the avant-garde, the anarchic undoing of subject/object relations found in Dada and in Gertrude Stein’s writings. Dada and Stein, Ziarek suggests, “[take] us toward another sense of intensity: incalculability, disarticulation, and release from power-oriented, technological production toward freedom.”73 Ziarek defines freedom as “forms of relationality,” such as dadaist Tristan Tzara’s manifestos, with their non sequiturs and contradictions, that are “unworkable” and incalculable “and, hence, which disarticulate the very paradigm of production as the formative force 70 71 72 73

Marinetti, ibid., 21. Quoted in Krzysztof Ziarek, The Force of Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 70. Marinetti, Marinetti: Selected Writings, 87. Quoted in Ziarek, The Force of Art, 71. Marinetti, Marinetti: Selected Writings, 106. Ziarek, “The Turn of Art,” 95–6.


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of modernity.”74 And yet, futurism’s fascination with modern forms of power both interrupts its disciplinary force and redeploys it through national and racial discourse to generate new forms of modern political communities and subjectivities, rooted in a metaphysics of race and nation that ground their cosmopolitan sympathies. I turn back now to “The Variety Theater” manifesto to show what I mean. The final portion of “The Variety Theater” manifesto transcends the material and chaotic violence of the theater, moving into a words-infreedom sequence in which “the world’s Futurist brain” floats above the city.75 It detaches from its embodied experience to capture all it sees in the city-theater of signifying networks. But this is not a romantic, transcendent “I.” In place of romantic contemplative lyricism, Marinetti announces that: “The simple, doleful reign of endlessly soliloquizing vegetation is over. With us begins the reign of man whose roots are cut, of the multiplied man who mixes himself with iron, who is fed by electricity and no longer understands anything except lust for danger and daily heroism.”76 He imagines himself in his manifestos as becoming a “multiplied man” whose collective, hybrid self – mixed with iron, fed by electricity – lyrically expresses “the ephemeral, unstable, and symphonic universe that is forging itself in us and with us.”77 Such openness disintegrates the literary “I” by invoking language that encompasses the “all.” Its communal space creates an event that would enact a mutually constitutive relation with the universe of inert matter, “in us and with us,” as a network. The observing “I” becomes radically decentered. The scattering of the “I” appears in the aerial viewpoint of a city below in which women and racialized persons blur together in an “unworkable” exchange of commodities, people, and technology. Yet the poetic “I” refuses to participate in such mayhem, offering instead his disinterested, disembodied gaze. Marinetti’s romantic heroism returns (indirectly) to act upon others by presenting a division between himself as poet and his material. None the less, these “objects” reveal their immanent vitality, inherent, as Marinetti sees it, in all phenomena: Immense black face (30 metres high þ 150 metres height of the building ¼ 180 metres) open close open close a golden eye 3 metres high SMOKE SMOKE MANOLI SMOKE MANOLI CIGARETTES woman in a blouse (50 metres high þ 120 metres of building ¼ 170 metres) stretch relax a violet rosy lilac blue bust froth of electric light in a champagne glass (30 metres) sizzle evaporate in a 74 76

Ziarek, ibid., 96. 75 Marinetti, Futurist Manifestos, 131. Marinetti, Marinetti: Selected Writings, 67. 77 Marinetti, ibid., 68.

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mouthful of darkness electric signs dim die under a dark stiff hand come to life again continue stretch out in the night the human day’s activity courage þ folly never to die or cease or sleep electric signs ¼ formation and disaggregation of mineral and vegetable centre of the earth . . . transformation of the streets into splendid corridors to guide, push logic necessity the crowd towards trepidation þ laughter þ music-hall uproar . . . zuu zuoeu here we are dazzle of the promenade solemnity of the panther-cocottes in their comic-opera tropics fat warm smell of music-hall gaiety ¼ tireless ventilation of the world’s Futurist brain.78

The “immense” black face is reduced to commodified sign, mechanically batting an eye. As blackness and flirtatious femininity are blurred together in a string of signs, the cityscape is formed and unformed through language that refuses the logic of commodification. Marinetti’s analogical structure and onomatopoeia playfully unwork signification. “zuu zuoeu” corresponds to no literal city sound; rather it mingles city sound with Marinetti’s expressive, affective urge. Further, this passage’s emphasis on sensual, tactile experience (colors, sounds, images forming and unforming) works to enliven the city, asserting an extra-literary, phenomenological immediacy between text and reader. It also incorporates the vibrating, pulsing metropolitan matter within the subjects who wander the terrain. And yet, who is viewing this mayhem? A disembodied gaze sees and conquers the world. Marinetti expresses an ironic detachment that affirms his mastery of the chaos unleashed. I return to this problematic of futurist mastery after we examine one more aspect of Marinetti’s poetic sojourn in England in which he joins a suffragette window-smashing campaign. EVENT AS INTERRUPTION:

“S U F F R A G E T T E S

A N D I N D I A D O C K S”

While “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” and the other manifestos I have examined advocate an uncomplicated break from the past, many of Marinetti’s other texts, including words-in-freedom, offer a more complex reconfiguration of time. This event of opening the present moment to a transformation rather than a repetition of the past occurs through Italy’s uneven, peripheral relation to European modernity. Though Marinetti advocated a revolutionary overthrow of Italy’s past, he was conscious of Italy’s belated status within Europe: it was coming late to modernity in comparison with England and France. This fold in 78

Marinetti, Futurist Manifestos, 131.


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time – between the revolutionary time of Italy’s conquest of modernity and its belatedness – finds its symptomatic contradictions in Marinetti’s manifestos and other interruptive texts. On the one hand, Marinetti’s manifestos aligned themselves with the state and state-sponsored violence. Following Sorel, he promoted the literal violence of war in order to rupture completely from the past and to undertake a revolutionary overhaul of society. On the other hand, because Marinetti advocated an aesthetic program, he merely posed as a warmonger. In this regard, his manifestos – especially those such as “The Variety Theater” – foreground a playful, ironic theatricality that mocked the pretensions of statesponsored instrumentality in language, especially its ability to enforce exactly what is said. This irony, too, indicates Marinetti’s awareness of coming late to modernity, a lateness that merely repeated the modernist breaks of other manifestos. Futurist manifestos come after the English, French, and Haitian Revolutions, with their stirring manifestos, and after Marx and Engels’s London-based manifesto that in 1848 could already praise modernity’s cataclysmic and transformative powers. Marinetti’s self-deprecatory stance – his awareness of Italy’s belatedness – surfaces during his first trip to England in 1910. During his “Futurist Speech to the English” given at the Lyceum Club of London, he expresses a hostility toward the English for their view of Italy as an exotic land filled with treasures from the past, a happy hunting ground for tourist pleasures: The compliments you are about to pay could only sadden me, because what you love in our dear peninsula is exactly the object of all our hatreds. Indeed, you crisscross Italy only to meticulously sniff out the traces of our oppressive past, and you are happy, insanely happy, if you have the good fortune to carry home some miserable stone on which our ancestors have trodden.79

George Yu´dice remarks that, in this passage, Marinetti rejects what might today be called England’s “orientalism,” a concept that clearly places Italy as an object, not an agent, of modernity within the dominant view of the English.80 And though Marinetti criticizes the English, his warm reception by them was occasioned by both his outlandishness and his admiring (and critical) attention to them. In the same speech, he makes it plain that he borrows from English accomplishments in his aspirations 79 80

Marinetti, Marinetti: Selected Writings, 64. George Yu´dice, “Rethinking the Theory of the Avant-Garde from the Periphery,” in Modernism and Its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural Modernity from Spain and Latin America, ed. Anthony L. Geist and Jose´ B. Monleoń (New York: Garland Press, 1999), 52–80, here 57.

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for Italy. He tells the English: “you nourish an unbridled passion for every kind of struggle, from boxing – simple, brutal, and rapid – to the monstrous roaring necks of the cannon on the decks of your dreadnoughts.”81 In his subsequent visits to England and later manifestos, Marinetti focuses less on dreadnoughts than on boxing and other popular entertainments as he emphasizes the theatricality and ironic play of his belated and objectified status in England. For instance, while Marinetti’s “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” notoriously praised war, militarism, and patriotism and promoted scorn for women, when he lectured in England, he admitted his admiration for suffragette militancy. In “Futurist London,” an interview he gave to the Evening News on March 4, 1912, when asked “what he thought of the Suffragettes . . . from the point of view of action, he responded ‘I think the Suffragettes are doing the only possible thing to get what they want’.” Marinetti believed that the entry of women into the political system would deliver its final coup de graˆce: “Where could we find dynamite more effective? . . . let us hasten to give women the vote.”82 The tactics of suffragette militancy, as I argued in the previous chapter, were to disrupt everyday life, whether of routine parliamentary meetings – with shouts from the gallery, “Will the Liberal Government give votes to women?” and the unfurling of banners – or the burning of golf courses and gazebos, the ink bombing of mailboxes, and the breaking of windows. The theatrical events of politics in everyday life, as a strategic tactic of disruption, provoked the symbolic – and real – transformation of public life. As illegitimate actors effect a takeover of legitimate activity – staged as a theatrical event – the boundaries between theater and the world or between art (as aesthetic, imaginative representation) and life (as the pragmatics of action) break down and interpenetrate one another. It is this disruptive event that allows for a radical reconfiguration of self and society (one that is both modern and yet unworkable, offering a heterogeneous but controlled fold in time) that Marinetti adopts for his words-in-freedom poetic. In “Suffragettes and India Docks,” Marinetti conveys his participation in a 1912 suffragette window-smashing campaign as a words-in-freedom prose poem. He begins with a mock-apostrophe to London: “O my poetic words-in-freedom sing your touch smell noise of that so palpable city 81 82

Marinetti, Marinetti: Selected Writings, 59. Quoted in Caroline Tisdall and Angela Bozzolla, Futurism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 162–3.


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London.”83 In naming the synaesthesia of London, Marinetti creates through his words-in-freedom an intensity of experience in which all senses are bombarded. These sensory perceptions gesture toward an outsidethe-text, the phenomenological intensity of metropolitan perception. These “seen words and spoken sounds” make them palpable and hence exchangeable with others. They provide “a means of shared externality,” by which Marinetti will become linked to the suffragettes.84 Just as in the denouement of “The Variety Theater” manifesto, Marinetti and Boccioni, as artists, are curiously detached from the tumult in which they participate, a stance that allows them to recollect it poetically and visually. Their distance is figured as they fly over the spectacle, freed from gravity and the material weight of their embodiment. Marinetti, “the aeropoet” and Boccioni, “the aeropainter,” are “two sun people imprisoned in the thick fog” of London’s climate.85 This pose of mastery also allows Marinetti to criticize the English in his 1910 speech at the Lyceum Club for Women. There, he condemns England for its passeíst “medieval trappings,” its “whiff of archives and a rattling of chains.” He derides his audience, scorning how “you”: lack both a sharp, adventurous love of ideas and an impulse toward the unknowns of the imagination; you lack a passion for the future and a thirst for revolution. You are so custom-bound, in fact, as to believe firmly in this old wives’ tale: that the Puritans saved England, and that chastity is a nation’s most important virtue. But remember the dismal, ridiculous condemnation of Oscar Wilde. Intellectual Europe will never forgive you for it.86

Given the large number of women in the audience, it is possible that it is to them that Marinetti addresses his condemnation of the moral hypocrisy of English prudery, a racial quality that I explored in the previous chapter. He challenges England’s veneer of chastity that results in homosexual young men taking refuge in marriage. He argues that such masks and screens also support “your snobbery,” which “consists of a mad, exclusive cult of racial purity,” as well as an enslavement to the aristocracy and to fashion.87 Sexual chastity supports racial purity, and both curtail a “love of ideas and an impulse toward the unknowns of imagination.”88 Elsewhere, Marinetti would argue for an Italian 83 84 85 88

Marinetti, Marinetti: Selected Writings, 341. Laura Doyle, Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 79. Marinetti, Marinetti: Selected Writings, 341. 86 Marinetti, ibid., 60. 87 Marinetti, ibid., 61. Marinetti, ibid., 60.

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revolution in the arts because a hindrance of imagination results in social entropy (akin to Rebecca West’s call to release the “animal impulses” in women which I discussed in the previous chapter) and the failure to compete effectively against the other imperial powers.89 To combat such custom-bound “fog,” the suffragettes’ windowbreaking campaign not only demolishes the transparent barrier between themselves and their idealized images as mannequins in storefront window displays, but they, in Marinetti’s vision, reconfigure the relations between individuals, objects, and the state. They undermine instrumental logics that depend on hierarchical relations. Marinetti yokes together the suffragette West End window-breaking campaign with the India Docks of East End London, a location (as I stated in the previous chapter) that resembled at this time a besieged territory that protested through armed confrontation the state’s violent repression of their demands. In addition, this site opened England’s national territory to the economic and demographic presence of empire. The ships, the warehouses, goods from all over the world depend upon the vagabonds of empire: the foreign-born sailors and dockers who work among the disparate goods from around the world. None the less, for Marinetti, as for many other modernists, their alterity embodied the rich strangeness of global modernity, with its abundant analogical structures in which “the distant, seemingly diverse and hostile things” pointed to the absent totality of empire that attenuated the boundaries of local communities.90 Marinetti presents this vivid otherness of modernity as a dreamlike vision that already begins to break down inherited custom-bound traditions and instrumental language: “Endless phantasmagorical three-hinged crane with its hungry jaws snapping away as if it wanted to take the roof off the squat dockside tavern but instead sinking its teeth into sacks and sacks and jacks and spewing them out on the wharfs and barges of the Thames.”91 Here, Marinetti animates matter – the crane has a life of its own – in a manner that connects his lyrical “I” with the vibrations of the universe, the power and force of machines. This interconnection undercuts instrumental logic. Rather than showing a human subject acting through the crane to master nature, the crane becomes equally animated, moving, seemingly, with a logic of its own. Marinetti undermines the instrumental logics of subject/object hierarchies in the March 18, 1914 manifesto “Geometric and Mechanical Splendor and the Numerical Sensibility.” There, he declares “1. We systematically destroy the literary I in order to scatter it into the universal 89

Marinetti, ibid., 55–8; 123–4.

90

Marinetti, ibid., 85.

91


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vibration and reach the point of expressing the infinitely small and the vibrations of molecules . . . Thus the poetry of cosmic forces supplants the poetry of the human.”92 This sensibility, Marinetti relates, comes from the radical decentering of self through networks of sensation made possible by machines. In this manifesto, the speaker is on the bridge of a Dreadnought where he senses its speed, the vitality of the admiral’s orders, and trajectories of fire that “suddenly become autonomous, human no longer, in the whims, impatiences, and illnesses of steel and copper.”93 The autonomy of matter, in a proto-surrealist move, allows alterity to remain other, vibrating with a liveliness of its own. In this regard, given the racial and class demographics of the East End, Marinetti’s “Suffragettes and India Docks” self-consciously highlights alterity, allowing it to defamiliarize everyday life. On the East End docks, the machinery and me´lange of goods take on a dreamlike quality. As the division of human and matter merge in a common phantasmagoric vibration, so too, does language become analogical, offering dreamlike substitutions as well as conveying the rhythm of movement: “sacks and sacks and jacks.”94 A jack, or sailor, becomes contiguous with the international sacks of goods being transported. Humans, goods, and language convey lateral, metonymic relations. This hallucinatory setting shifts even more as Marinetti next describes “hollyhock-purple washes of distant tree banks” presented “with the subtlety of Monet.” These decorative images seemingly enter a “three-meter wide opening” of representational space onto the East End landscape. Next, the scene shifts and it is presented as through it were a postimpressionist collage: “the rank stench of oil slicks coal herring pitch tar pages from The Times describing the march of the suffragettes armed with lead pellets breaking the vast display windows of the shops along the Strand.”95 Like a collage, a fragment of newspaper intrudes upon the rough scene, injecting “real life” into the words-in-freedom aesthetic. This newspaper account of the suffragette march shifts directly to Marinetti’s account of his own participation in the march itself. We see first a newspaper representation of the march and then Marinetti interrupts its realism with his words-in-freedom that convey the lived experience of collective mayhem: Several of us captain the tide of women along the street where the Ministries are located but the increasing flow and tumult of other legions coming in from the 92


93

Marinetti, ibid.

94


95

Marinetti, ibid.

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outlying districts compel the mounted police to give the signal for the charge all hell breaks loose as the horses come galloping down on them clubs flying screams pistols shots people knocked down and the crashing of more windows in the stores invaded by madwomen. I and Boccioni are dragging a pretty suffragette along by the arms when two huge horses with two immense policemen on them charge down on our suffragettes and we all go tumbling head over heels into the entrances and down the front stairs of the buildings.96

Marinetti grapples with the dilemma of representing the futurist male body. On the one hand, he and Boccioni maintain their detached superiority as “aeropoet” and “aeropainter” who take command – they “captain” the women – of the suffragette movement, in a manner emphasizing virility and political omnipotence. On the other hand, he desires a negation of those qualities, what Christine Poggi calls “a longing to overcome subject/object distinctions in a corporeal fusion with matter/ mother.”97 Marinetti presents political violence, “clubs flying screams shots people knocked down,” as literally battering down masculine futurist/suffragette distinctions, enjoining a contingent community as “we all go tumbling head over heels.” The shock of police brutality opens subjectivity to the proximity of otherness (here of “pretty suffragettes”) and connects “all” to the event of violent dispersal. The violence of political repression also eliminates public/private demarcations, as when “the crashing of more windows in the stores invaded by madwomen” allows for the group, reeling from blows, to pitch “into the entrances and down the front stairs of the buildings.” This topsy-turvy formulation in which one falls “down” the front stairs describes how stable notions of space and temporality are altered under the sensory overload of the scene. The event interrupts conventional meanings of self/other as well as temporal and spatial representation and presents a jumbled, fragmented sequence of chaotic impressions. Marinetti’s communal undoing of his autonomous subjectivity is shortlived. Order is restored as he and Boccioni, now safely ensconced in a hotel meeting room, regale his suffragette listeners on the “aesthetic of the machine plastic dynamism” and reimpose their virile mastery that manifests itself as “scorn for women.” Marinetti – as Poggi has argued for Marinetti’s war-time narrative L’ Alcove d’ acciaio – oscillates between his desire for women – “an absurd demon forces me to degrade myself, to 96 97

Marinetti, ibid., 341–2. Christine Poggi, “Dreams of Metallized Flesh: Futurism and the Masculine Body,” Modernism/ Modernity, 4, 3 (1997), 19–43, here 20.


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annihilate myself ” – and his desire for military heroism – the pure exteriority of an instrumentalized body without organs, desensitized and omnipotent.98 This latter desire is only briefly gestured to here as Marinetti presents himself as an “aeropoet,” but the oscillation between Marinetti’s undoing of self during the suffragette demonstration and the later remastering of his female audience points to this crucial instability in futurist poetics. “Suffragettes and India Docks” concludes by returning to the docks, this time superimposed upon a rugby field: With his muscular Negro arms veins and arteries branching out like the ropes of a tug he sweeps the rugby field himself with great smelly strokes and the players clear out in the pink blue yellow sweatshirts.99

Marinetti begins “Suffragettes and India Docks” as a words-in-freedom poem that renders proximate the rough images of the East End docks to the suffragette violence on the West End. This spatial and class conflation suggests that sexual insubordination is of the same order as racial and cross-class mixing. The denouement of the prose poem, however, places the black dockworker both at the water’s edge where his “arms veins and arteries” move outward, connecting viscerally with the surrounding “ropes of a tug,” and also located on a rugby field, demurely sweeping “with great smelly strokes.” The transnational violence of the empire’s world-market is relocated and domesticated as “sport” and black/colonial servitude against which a colorful rainbow of sweatshirts decorates the field. Order is restored with a respectful nod to “your fine love of sport.”100 The final scene features Marinetti and Boccioni departing England by train as many adoring suffragettes “converted to Futurism more by our aggressive Italian physical attractiveness than by Futurism’s ideas” wave goodbye “with a hasty show of friendship.”101 Not romantic amore but rather an unsentimental sexual appeal produces a hierarchized stability in their futurist and suffragette relations. The interruption of the windowsmashing campaign is recontained as it is superseded by the forward momentum of Marinetti’s European tour. Marinetti’s writings, especially his manifestos, as they move resolutely forward, sublate prior histories of political traditions and especially manifesto traditions. Rather than seizing the present moment in order to transform, rather than repeat, the past, futurist manifestos, as their name 98 100

Poggi, ibid., 29. 99 Marinetti, Marinetti: Selected Writings, 342. Marinetti, ibid., 61. 101 Marinetti, ibid., 342.

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suggests, remain, in the end, wedded to a romantic overcoming of history, a repudiation of the past tout court. I conclude this chapter with the feminist manifesto and poetry of Marinetti’s lover during this prewar period, Mina Loy. These writings critique Marinetti’s ahistorical insistence on self-creation ex nihilo. Her manifesto and poetry offer a different way of thinking about history, community, and agency. They dilate and stall the present moment in order to claim its full potential for redeeming a forgotten past and remaking future possibilities. While Marinetti insists on racial and gender subordination as he repudiates nonmodern subjects, Loy offers an alternative modernism that allows for the radically democratic vision of social inclusivity based on the intersubjectivity of maternal bodies. MINA LOY:

“S E C R E T

S E R V I C E B U F F O O N”

In an undated letter to her friend Mabel Luhan Dodge, Loy remarks on her unpublished manifesto, sent to Dodge in 1914: “By the way that fragment of feminist tirade I sent you – flat? I found the destruction of virginity – so daring don’t you think – had been suggested by some other woman years ago – see Havelock Ellis – I feel rather hopeless of devotion to the woman-cause – slaves will believe that chains are protectors – & so they are – the most efficient for the coward.”102 Loy recognizes the belatedness of her manifesto, that her most “daring” proposal had already been imagined by one of Havelock Ellis’s patients. What had seemed so fresh, so revolutionary, now appears “flat” to Loy and perhaps may be why she never pursued the manifesto’s publication. The time for the manifesto had passed; moreover, women’s liberation seems hopeless to Loy, her audience gone or perhaps had never existed. While Loy fears she may have no audience and no platform on which to wage a feminist revolution, I would like to trace a different path through which Loy fashions a means to foster the woman’s cause and its differential relation to history. Rather than disavow the manifesto’s belatedness as Marinetti had done, Loy adapts her manifesto’s program for change into an innovative poetic that rejects the masculine logic that supports the conquest of modernity. Rachel Blau DuPlessis locates this novel force in Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” and poetry within the sexual embrace. For her, the orgasm 102

Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.


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provides access to an open question regarding sexual difference. Yet this embrace remains within the domain of the individual as a creative undoing of sexual binaries. In contrast, I find in Loy’s manifesto and poetic the aftermath and fruition of the sexual embrace – the creative force of maternity – to be her rejoinder to Marinetti’s logic of masculine self-creation that imposes a hierarchy of gender and race by means of its absolute refusal to acknowledge intersubjective relations. While Loy maintains racial hierarchies in her evolutionary thinking, I suggest that she goes beyond essentialized notions of womanhood as a maternal marker of race that troubled the suffrage rhetoric of the WSPU. Her phenomenological account of maternity – the event of birthing – undoes subject-object and mind-body dualities. It can potentially constitute communities across racial divides. While Marinetti’s manifestos integrate art and politics, Loy’s manifesto merges politics into the psychology of gender relations. It addresses “the feminist movement” by remarking that it “at present instituted is Inadequate.”103 But what particular organization does she address? And in what country? Revolution now takes place within the reader’s psyche rather than on the streets as the reader is warned that she is on “the eve of a devastating psychological upheaval.”104 The manifesto is theatrical in its hopeful pose of, and futile desire for, action. Echoing the revolutionary urgency of political manifestos, it advocates “no half-measure” and “NO scratching on the rubbish heap of tradition.” Instead, its “only method is Absolute Demolition” of women’s gendered behavior.105 Loy transfers the public realm of politics and history to the private realm of women’s experience as the catalyst of this demolition is the sexual embrace and, specifically for Loy, Marinetti’s embrace. However, the manifesto’s theatricality resonates too closely with Marinetti’s blustery pose as conqueror of modernity. Rather, Loy’s poetic elaboration of maternal time that explores the racial and gendered liminality of procreative relationships, I shall argue, begins to realize the gendered revolution she calls for above. Loy addresses the ethical and aesthetic implications of Marinetti’s sexual relations with her in the 1917 poetic sequence, Songs to Johannes. In that poem, Marinetti refuses Loy her desire to carry his child. In “Song XXX,” Loy names this refusal a fear of “plagiarism.”106 Marinetti’s will to self-creation produces only literary fertility: for instance, in Marfarka the 103 104

Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger L. Conover (New York: Noonday Press, 1996), 153. Loy, ibid., 153. 105 Loy, ibid. 106 Loy, ibid., 66, line 2.

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Futurist, Marfarka’s manufactured cyborg son guarantees him immortality. In his human relations with Loy, however, he displays “souvenir ethics,” old-fashioned and out-of-date.107 Their relations are “fumbled” as Marinetti prevents a proto-form, a child, from being born.108 Because Marinetti refuses to have a child out of wedlock, Loy judges the limits of his social revolution. His manifestos remain securely focused on the public nature of modernity, without rethinking the ethics of gender relations. In Loy’s poem, Marinetti sees children’s “proto-form” as an illegal copy that denies the self-created originality of the author. In response, Loy places this plagiarism within the mass entertainments that Marinetti extols in his manifestos, the circus and music hall: “fœtal buffoons / Caught tricks.”109 After all, mass entertainments are hardly predicated on originality. None the less, Loy captures Marinetti’s enthusiasm for and subsequent subordination of the popular energies of music hall. Loy writes of this subordination in her poem “Lion’s Jaws.” But she also mocks Marinetti’s belatedness, his lack of originality as he borrows from avant-garde precursors: Raminetti cracked the whip of the circus-master astride a prismatic locomotive ramping the tottering platform of the Arts of which this conjuring commercial traveller imported some novelties from Paris in his pocket . . . Souvenirs for his disciples To flaunt At his dynamic carnival.110

“Souvenirs” indicts Marinetti’s originary claims for futurism. Loy makes evident his borrowings from the remembered gestures of the Parisian avant-garde. Along with his belated “souvenirs,” Loy attacks Marinetti’s bourgeois treatment of women as passe´. She appears in parentheses as a “(secret service buffoon to the Women’s Cause),” her self-mockery repeats that of her unborn child; both are rendered inferior and clownish in Marinetti’s microcosmic circus.111

107 110

Loy, ibid., 67, line 17. 108 Loy, ibid., 66, lines 16, 15. Loy, ibid., 48, lines 62–72. 111 Loy, ibid., 49, line 113.

109

Loy, ibid., 66, lines 3–4.


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Marinetti controls reproduction and hence gender and race relations. He insists on his originality and thereby hierarchizes those who would follow him as belated and derivative. He reaffirms his modernity as he denigrates those who follow. As his manifestos announce the new, they break from and condemn all other temporalities. In Loy’s “Souvenirs,” the unborn child embodies the violent, emotionally fraught struggles between the two lovers: “From archetypal pantomime / Stringing emotions / Looped aloft / – .”112 In Marinetti’s refusal to let the child be born, he subordinates both woman and child who could challenge his originality and modernity. Loy retaliates in “Lion’s Jaws” by showing how Marinetti’s aggressive stance against his rival, the symbolist poet Gabriel D’Annunzio, depends upon his subordination and control of women and their reproductive capacity to carry forward the “race.” This subordination clears the ground for the manifesto, as a masculinist weapon, to become the “bomb” in their literary warfare: the antique envious thunder of Latin litte´rateurs rivaling Gabrunzio’s satiety burst in a manifesto notifying women’s wombs of Man’s immediate agamogenesis Insurance of his spiritual integrity against the carnivorous courtesan.113

Marinetti’s defense against the competitive literary market is willful “self-creation” – his agamogenesis – which asserts his solipsistic egotism. In Songs to Johannes, Loy characterizes Marinetti’s phallic mastery as “a clock-work mechanism,” thoroughly bound, as Maeera Shreiber writes, “by a historical sense of time,” an abstract homogenous public time.114 By contrast, Loy’s woman speaker “seeks to live according to cyclical time, which finds its measure in the rhythms of the body.”115 Yet this cyclicality is not ahistorical; it is in dialogue with historical time, as we shall see below. This cyclicality finds itself fully expressed only in Loy’s poetic innovations. Her manifesto only suggests – rather than enacts – how maternity might rework the temporality of modernity, between its strict 112 114

115

Loy, ibid., 66, lines 6–9. 113 Loy, ibid., 47, lines 41–9. Loy, ibid., 54, line 25. Maeera Shreiber, “‘Love is a Lyric / of Bodies’: The Negative Aesthetics of Mina Loy’s Love Songs to Johannes,” in Mina Loy: Woman and Poet, ed. Maeera Shreiber and Keith Tuma (Orono, ME: The National Poetry Foundation, 1998), 87–109, here 94. Shreiber, ibid.

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division of public, masculine time and private, feminine time. As Loy admits to Mabel Dodge Luhan, her manifesto might not be as daring as she had first hoped. In Loy’s manifesto, the body is denaturalized and comes to stand midway between the sexes and their competing temporalities. Like Marinetti, she imagines an interpenetration of nature and technology that challenges conventional notions of subjectivity. In “Feminist Manifesto,” she writes: The fictitious value of woman as identified with her physical purity – is too easy a stand by – rendering her lethargic in the acquisition of intrinsic merits of character by which she could obtain a concrete value – therefore, the first selfenforced law for the female sex, as a protection against the man made bogey of virtue – which is the principal instrument of her subjection, would be the unconditional surgical destruction of virginity through-out the female population at puberty –.116

Loy severs women’s dependence on male investment in femininity by recomposing the female body through technology. As in futurist violence, this destruction frees women to revolutionize their sex (and, by extension, society) by reconfiguring their relation to their bodies and through the intersubjectivity of maternity. Maternity, according to Loy’s manifesto, should be “the result of a definite period of psychic development of life – & not necessarily of a possibly irksome & outworn continuance of alliance.”117 Moreover, such independence of the sexes regenerates the race: “For the harmony of the race, each individual should be the expression of an easy & ample interpenetration of the male & female temperaments – free of stress.”118 Loy’s evolutionary thinking (race as a continuous rather than a revolutionary concept) works, in part, to rescue sexuality from degenerate and “fallen” woman discourses in order to reinscribe them firmly within health and hygienic standards, much as Rebecca West does, as I argued in the previous chapter. Yet Loy’s vision of interpersonal relations remains bounded by the same racial community that Marinetti violently maintains. Invoking liberal rights discourse, Loy’s manifesto asserts that every woman has “the right to maternity” but, as was common in the British women’s suffrage movement, she qualifies that right, demanding that: “every woman of superior intelligence should realize her race-responsibility, in producing children in adequate proportion to the unfit or degenerate members of her sex.”119 In addition, the manifesto alters the concept of sexuality and procreation: “– for the sake 116

Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker, 154–5.

117

Loy, ibid., 155.

118

Loy, ibid.

119

Loy, ibid.


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of her self respect is the impurity of sex the realisation in defiance of superstition that there is nothing impure in sex – except in the mental attitude to it – will constitute an incalculable & wider social regeneration than it is possible for our generation to imagine.”120 According to the manifesto, rethinking sexuality and reproduction from the perspective of women will regenerate the race and transform society. The metaphysics of race, as it does for Marinetti, limits Loy’s radically open subjectivity, calling for liberal rights but drawing firm boundaries around ethnic and national communities. Yet its incalculable effects suggest that the event of the sexual embrace – its intersubjectivity and procreative afterlife – can potentially expose history to unimaginable social redemption. And while Loy’s manifesto clearly draws racial boundaries, the undoing of subject boundaries in the extraordinary poem “Parturition” (1914) suggests an opening of these kinship communities. It stalls the originary narrative of modernity and opens subjectivity to intersubjective relations that undermine hierarchies of race and gender. In this poem, Loy extends the body into the cosmos, much as Marinetti’s words-in-freedom poems do. Unlike Marinetti, however, her body remains fully concretized, delimiting experience to that which connects inner and outer realms of perception and thought, as well as a deconstruction of subject and object dichotomies: “I am the centre / Of a circle of pain / Exceeding the boundaries in every direction.”121 While Marinetti floats above his poetic creation, Loy’s experience comes from within and is then exteriorized. Shreiber argues that this exteriorization is concretized as the child being born and becoming wholly separate from the mother: “As a consequence of this rupturing, which entails the dissolution of whatever fantasies of narcissistic integration the speaker may have had, identity is reconfigured as a non-static ongoing condition of being.”122 Being, in this case, is experienced in relation to the larger world. The speaker experiences the proximity of mother-child intersubjectivity (separate yet connected) at the moment of birth – felt “against my thigh.”123 This primal birth relation connects her to the entire life world: the “same undulating life-stir” as experienced in the animal, insect, and cosmic world.124 The grammar of this relationship is “both . . . and,” an overlapping but also differentiating relation. Loy explores its potential in decentering the subject and making a fluid, provisional bond with the world. In “my congested cosmos of 120 122 124

Loy, ibid., 156. 121 Loy, ibid., 4, lines 1–3. Shreiber, “‘Love is a Lyric / of Bodies’,” 98. Loy, ibid., 7, line 111.

123

Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker, 6, line 90.

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agency / From which there is no escape,” Loy experiences her body and its relation to space as becoming porous, a breaking down of inner and outer distinctions and a decentering of self: Locate in irritation It is

without within Within

It is without The sensitized area Is identical with the extensity Of intension125

Loy’s phenomenological language designates her inner pain, moving beyond the boundary of her body, yet marking the limit of her body, “extensity / Of intension.” This limit, enacted through the line break, suggests a gap between that which is within and that which is without. Such a gap may be seen more clearly in the following section: Pain is no stronger than the resisting force Pain calls up in me The struggle is equal [...] For another mountain is growing up Which goaded by the unavoidable I must traverse Traversing myself 126

In this passage, pain is an alien force within her body. The subject fights within herself; she is not self-identical but rather diverges from her own experience. In the lines, “I must traverse / Traversing myself,” she is both agent of the verb and object of the modifying gerund. Her subjectivity is oriented both within and without. This gap in experience situates her both within her body and detached from it. Loy relates the materiality of perception in a manner that connects corporeality with organic and even inorganic matter. Unlike Marinetti’s vision of this network of relations that – given his affiliation with modernization and state power – expands to engulf others, Loy speaks from the border between her body and the world: Stir of incipient life Precipitating into me The contents of the universe 125

Loy, ibid., 4, lines 6–7, 11–17.

126

Loy, ibid., 4–5, lines 24–6, 47–50.


119

Mother I am Identical With infinite Maternity Indivisible Acutely I am absorbed Into The was – is – ever – shall – be Of cosmic reproductivity 127

In contrast to this transcendent temporality experienced through the particularity of the reproductive body, in “The Ineffectual Marriage,” Loy mocks Marinetti’s egotistical pretension to the same temporality: “Pooh said Miovanni I am / Outside time and space.”128 Loy’s remarkable lines from “Parturition” above instead allow for an identification with all matter (organic and inorganic) through a shared experience that can potentially constitute community, rather than, as in Marinetti’s case, sever from it through the defensive detachment of egotistical mastery enacted in his manifestos. The experience of birthing, in Loy’s poetic treatment, breaks down the gulf spanned by the subject-object dualities, between feeling and being felt, the crossing over of what is touching to what is touched, the ambiguity of being both the object and subject of an embrace: “I am knowing / All about / Unfolding.”129 The flesh is reversible, it folds in on itself and unfolds, allowing simultaneous inner and outer perspectives. This chiasmus opens Loy’s perspectival sense and leads her to conclude her poem with a populist paean to: “Each woman-of-the-people / Wearing a halo / A ludicrous little halo / Of which she is sublimely unaware.”130 In the end, Loy moves beyond her eugenicist beliefs to identify with “each womanof-the-people,” potentially from across kinship categories, anticipating her post-World War Two collages of social outcasts (“Bowery bums”) from across race and class categories. An anonymous critic in the British theater journal Mask wrote that futurism is not about art, but rather its primary task is to raise critical attention toward modern life: to laugh at the futurists, one must “laugh at the whole farcical fabric of modern life. He who criticises them must first criticise modern civilization: in short if the Futurists are damnable, . . . and they are . . . then modern life is damnable.”131 When viewing their art, one “burst[s] out laughing.” At the second, one almost “run[s] 127 130

Loy, ibid., 6–7, lines 95–106. Loy, ibid., 7, lines 128–131.

128 131

Loy, ibid., 37, lines 44–5. 129 Loy, ibid., 7, lines 121–3. Anon., “The Futurists,” Mask, 4 ( July 1911), 278–9.

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terrified away, and at the third you nearly lose your reason. The Futurists have shown you the external world you live in . . . and you hate them for it . . . Naturally.”132 But, the author asks, “Why didn’t you think of that before? Why didn’t you protest against your world being cut up into noises, jerks and squirms?”133 Blaming big business rather than the futurists for this situation, the author suggests that Marinetti’s manifestos make visible the rhythms of modernity, stretched as they are between the homogeneous, empty time of modernization and the syncopated community-building temporality. This community-building temporality – what Loy explores further – allows for the possibility of anticolonial modernisms and alternative histories that I explore in the second part of this book. The next chapter continues to examine the doubled temporality of modernist manifestos, stretched between the imperial time of colonization and a riotous, avant-garde undoing of that time. In this next chapter, however, this doubleness does not occur because of a sense of national belatedness, as with Marinetti, but, rather, from vorticism’s own marketdriven and racial ambivalence about modernity. 132

Anon., ibid., 280.

133

Anon., ibid.

CHAPTER

4

Vorticism’s cabaret modernism and racial spectacle

“In the state of degeneracy, in which we live, it is through the skin that metaphysics will be made to reenter our minds.”

Antonin Artaud1

“Futurism, as preached by Marinetti, is largely Impressionism up-todate. To this is added his Automobilism and Nietzsche stunt. With a lot of good sense and vitality at his disposal, he hammers away in the blatant mechanism of his Manifestoes, at his ideé fixe of Modernity.” Wyndham Lewis2

The prewar English avant-garde group the Vorticists published their founding manifesto, written by Wyndham Lewis in collaboration with Ezra Pound, in the first issue of the little magazine, Blast. Unlike the manifestos I have discussed so far, Lewis’s manifesto advocates critical consciousness instead of action, a tense stasis rather than the forward momentum of action. This stasis derives from vorticism’s ambivalence concerning modernity. This ambivalence occurs in the second quotation above, as Lewis condemns Marinetti for doing little more than advance an already existent modernity: his manifestos repeat the past without transforming it. In particular, Lewis excoriates Marinetti for his “Automobilism and Nietzsche stunt.” For Lewis, even avant-garde iconoclasm is grist for the entertainment mill of modernity. While more critical of modernity than Marinetti, Lewis deploys racial myths in ways that often dovetail with Marinetti’s racial and imperial vision of modernity. Unlike the British women’s suffrage movement, in which race still held connotations prevalent in liberal forms of nationalism (that race is culturally produced through association with either purity and chastity or depredation and immodesty), “race” under the rubric of the modernist 1 2

Antonin Artaud, “The Theater of Cruelty,” The Theater and Its Double (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 99. Wyndham Lewis, “The Melodrama of Modernity,” Blast, 1 (June 1914) (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1981), 143.

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nationalism of the vorticists transcends historical categories by being transmitted through the blood. By escaping historical time, “race” could define social boundaries and delimit the spread of modernity. This concept of race allowed vorticism to proliferate experimental, heterogeneous, literary, and visual forms, and, conversely, to contain that modernist mayhem through the ahistorical fixity of racial hierarchies. I turn next to the historical avant-garde cabaret to locate a source of vorticism’s heterogeneity and theatricality, and then, by examining the racial elements of this experimental space, I hope to demonstrate why it was that Lewis distanced himself from the racial anarchy of the cabaret. In 1881, Rodolphe Salis opened the longest-running and most famous avant-garde cabaret in Europe, Le Chat Noir. By the end of the Great War, cabarets flourished throughout Europe. From Die Elf Scharfrichter and Fledermaus to Els Quatre Gats and the Cabaret Voltaire, cabarets gathered together groups of avant-garde artists who were dedicated to breaking from traditional art forms and challenging their aesthetic assumptions. These semi-private spaces – usually publicized only through word of mouth – served as sanctuaries where artists could experiment freely with new art forms and antibourgeois attitudes away from the glare of the public eye. Participants presented modern dance routines, manifestos, poetry and stories, comic theatrical skits, and puppet shows; they also offered visual art as startling backdrops. These kaleidoscopic sequences of acts were loosely modeled after circus and variety shows.3 In adopting popular entertainment formats that staged sensational encounters with racialized subjects, the cabaret theater aestheticized those encounters. Cabaret by definition wrests people and things from their historical contexts and presents a varied series of absurd and often racialized spectacles to mark the historical interruptions and social transgressions of avant-garde art. These racialized identities are lifted from their association with colonization, and float in the semiotic context of cabaret masquerade. The deterritorialized space of the avant-garde cabaret uproots and challenges organic forms of nationalism and race. In this cabaret setting, the avant-garde’s performances in Europe sought to make art “amid a mess of confusion, indeterminacy, paradoxes and constant change.”4 3 4

Harold B. Segel, Turn-of-the-Century Cabaret (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), xiv. Richard Sheppard, Modernism – Dada – Postmodernism (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000), 188.


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The cabaret craze arrived in England in 1912, and by 1914 had fostered the creation of the short-lived English avant-garde group, the Vorticists. Their work is symptomatic of a crisis of the place of art in a world of rising mass democracy and anticolonialist movements. The deterritorialized, ahistorical space of vorticism created by the English avant-garde in the first issue of their little magazine Blast enacts what I call cabaret modernism, a heterotopia where essentialized categories of race are called into question and reaffirmed. The avant-garde’s participation in various forms of racial masquerade signals a shift in the categories of race themselves. Yet my contention is that though this cosmopolitan mixing suggests the avant-garde’s need to rewrite representations of modernity and racial difference, these representations, rather than dissolve racial difference, continue to maintain hierarchies of race and thus demonstrate the unwillingness of the avant-garde to seize the possibilities of the heterotopic space imagined in Blast. Lewis’s response to the potential transformation of racial categories was to appeal to Anglo-Saxon nativism. This nativism was considered to be outside of history and therefore was appealed to in order to limit modernity’s metamorphoses of difference. Cabaret modernism could both unleash heterogeneity in a seemingly spontaneous and creative forum and strictly delimit it through a rigorously maintained racial definition of the artist. Lewis feared that unchecked market forces would produce a new brand of herd-like conformity even while vorticism fought to eliminate the art academy’s monopoly on artistic expression. Lewis recounts in Time and Western Man how the avant-garde sought to destroy “the ‘academic’ of the Royal Academy tradition” and to achieve a freedom of expression that “can be indulged in by anybody who has the considerable private means required to be an ‘artist.’”5 The “mass of propaganda” that Blast contained had, in Lewis’s view in the late 1920s, achieved its object. After the war, the stranglehold on art that the academic tradition enjoyed had been overcome. But this transformation of the institution of art – opening art to anti-institutional impulses that allowed for a wider range of expression – created new problems, according to Lewis. Though art could “be indulged in by anybody,” Lewis refused to accept art that participated in what he called the “transitional chaos” of the timemind.6 In Time and Western Man, he expounds on what he means by “time-mind” through references to work by James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, 5 6

Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man [1927] (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1993), 38. Lewis, ibid., xiv.

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and Gertrude Stein. Stein, for instance, writes in “Composition as Explanation” that: There must be time . . . This is the thing that is at present the most troubling and if there is the time that is at present the most troublesome the time-sense that is at present the most troubling is the thing that makes the present the most troubling.7

Lewis links Stein’s focus on time to Bergson and William James, and argues that the philosophers’ dynamical conception of time is fully in line with modernity. “Dynamical,” Lewis contends, is a quality all too well known by the “most hurried of men,” and describes “the bustle and rush of action”: Big Business, Armaments, Atlantic “hops,” Wall Street, and Mussolini. A “dynamic personality” means, in journalism, an iron-jawed oil-king in an eightcylinder car, ripping along a new motor-road, with a hundred-million-dollar deal in a new line of poison-gas bombs blazing in his superbrain, his eye aflame with the lust of battle – of those battles in which others fight and die. So there is no need to explain what “dynamical” means.8

Instead of relying solely on the dynamical flux of lived time, Lewis creates a modernism that can balance dynamism with an aesthetic of fixed space and frozen time that reifies racial categories. The tense balancing of these two forces produces a space from which to critique modernity. Comentale summarizes this small space of critique as, on the one hand, demonstrating art’s contingency (its conditioning by a multitude of relations within the world) and, on the other, exposing the dangers that this contingency presents. Art serves then as “an aesthetic wrench halting the smooth productive machinery of the social order and forcing a reconsideration of its effects.”9 Unlike Comentale, I understand vorticism’s contingent and conflicted aesthetic as poised between the necessity for market-driven publicity and the rejection of those very modernizing forces it depended upon. I see its delimiting ethics as a form of rearguard, antidemocratic politics rather than solely the more productive critical consciousness Comentale propounds. In my view, while I agree that vorticism’s “halting” mechanism sought to preserve a certain measure of autonomy (critical and creative distance) for the artist, it is here, I argue, that the metaphysics of race returns. Lewis proposes “a new race of 7 9

8 Quoted in Lewis, ibid. Lewis, ibid., xvii. Edward Comentale, Modernism, Cultural Production and the British Avant-Garde (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 11.


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philosophers, instead of ‘hurried men,’ speed – cranks simpletons, or robots.”10 This “new race” is founded on an Anglo-Saxon nativism that rejects the “transitional chaos” of democracy and heterotopic mixing and advocates instead the frozen time of despotism. Together, the conflicting forces – historical contingency and the metaphysics of race – work together to animate avant-garde performativity, with its combination of speech-act instrumentality that repeats racial myths of modernity and theatrical parody that repeats those scripts with a difference that allows for the possibility of historical change. THE CAVE OF THE GOLDEN CALF

It is important to understand that Lewis’s collectivist project of vorticism’s cabaret modernism had its roots in his participation in an actual cabaret. This places vorticism’s formalist aesthetic in its historical context, and, thereby, reveals the racial unconscious that critics often leave unremarked. In June 1912, the first English avant-garde cabaret, the Cave of the Golden Calf, opened its doors. Its owner and hostess was Frida Strindberg, former wife of August Strindberg and later the lover of poet, dramatist, and cabaretist Frank Wedekind. The Cave of the Golden Calf and its nightclub counterpart, the Cabaret Theatre Club, served as a gathering place for bohemian artists and writers, and provided, in the words of its promotional brochure, “a gaiety stimulating thought, rather than crushing it.” Promising to mix continental cuisine with “the picturesque dances of the South, its fervid melodies, Parisian wit, [and] English humor,” the brochure expressed the hope that the cabaret “will create a surrounding, which, if it has no other merit, will at least endeavor to limit emigration.”11 The wish was that English art and literature might be rejuvenated by an infusion of continental avant-garde activity. Lewis, freshly arrived from the Continent after eight years of studying art abroad, was a central figure in the formation of the cabaret. He contributed paintings and decorations on large canvases that resembled murals. He also designed a promotional poster for the Cave and decorated an elaborate eight-page brochure. The fault lines of modernism – between dissolving categories of self and other and reinscriptions of them in new hierarchies – appear in strong 10 11

Lewis, Time and Western Man, xvi. William C. Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 50.

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relief in Lewis’s vorticist work. Lewis, a prolific artist, essayist, and novelist, is certainly the least-read, least-loved “men of 1914” within the Anglo-American modernist canon. Called by Paul Edwards “a one-man Frankfurt school of the right,” his bad-tempered rants against modernity and modernists alike, and disastrous support of Hitler in the early 1930s, have earned him an infamous place within histories of modernism.12 But Lewis’s critique of mass society, in which publicity and images can be manipulated at will in order to distract public attention from increasingly consolidated economic and political power, continues to resonate powerfully. Lewis’s early solution to the herdlike conformity and standardization he saw in modern democracies was to present an aesthetic array of shifting, indeterminate, contradictory forms and meanings that he believed might destabilize a consensus of opinion about the world. Yet he also mobilizes advertising and publicity culture in order to promote vorticism. His first effort was at the Cave of the Golden Calf. With great press fanfare, the basement cabaret at 9 Heddon Street commenced, and featured Lewis’s oversized oil painting Kermesse, Jacob Epstein’s white plaster caryatids, and Eric Gill’s golden calf sculpture. In the style of European avant-garde cabaret, various forms of Kleinkunst, or little art, were performed. Cuthbert Hamilton and Lewis prepared shadow plays; others staged extemporaneous theatrical skits; poets delivered their verse; and Lillian Shelley – “a perfect model of an Egyptian goddess” – sang there and later took Madame Strindberg’s monkeys to the Savoy Hotel for a late-night supper. The Italian futurist F. T. Marinetti appeared and “declaimed some peculiarly blood-thirsty concoctions with great dramatic force,” as Lewis reported to a friend.13 Osbert Sitwell, a frequent visitor to the Cave, recounts its character in his autobiographical Great Morning!: The Cabaret Club, where the lesser artists of the theatre, as well as the greater, mixed with painters, writers, and their opposite, officers in the Brigade of Guards. This low-ceilinged night club, appropriately sunk below the pavement of Beak Street, and hideously but relevantly frescoed by the then mature Wyndham Lewis, appeared in the small hours to be a super-heated vorticist garden of gesticulating figures, dancing and talking, while the rhythm of the primitive forms of ragtime throbbed through the wide room . . . Dancing more than conversation was the art which occupied the young men of the time in the Cabaret Club.14 12 13 14

Paul Edwards, “Afterword,” in Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, 441. Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde, 50. Osbert Sitwell, Great Morning! (Boston: Little, Brown, 1947), 229.


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The moneyed revelers and less moneyed artists of various categories freely mixed. Strindberg hired Gypsy and Negro jazz bands to play to the crowd, music-hall girls sang, and everyone danced the Turkey Trot and the Bunny Hug. The first English avant-garde club staged its aesthetic encounter with modernity in terms of primitivism: wild dancing, ragtime, jazz, Egyptian-style hairdos and jewelry, folk art, geometrical sculpture, and paintings. Such styles and activities served as both a transgressive identification with the “primitive” and as an appropriation and erasure of colonized and raced subjects. The cabaret-goers performed aspects of what signified as African American, Gypsy, and other folk art forms, and they viewed modern renditions of ancient Egyptian and Greek arts. Joining these varied forms as part of its heterotopia, the cabaret collapsed distinctions between time, place, and otherness, rendering them fodder for the stage. Exoticized entertainers mingled with avant-garde artists and the audience; primitive art and classically inspired caryatids were juxtaposed; and working-class variety theater merged with middle-class soireé and exhibition space. The cabaret disturbed as well: Osbert Sitwell’s recollection of the cabaret describes it as a subterranean attack on spectators’ visual and auditory realms. It was “sunk” below street level, “hideously” frescoed. He added that “gesticulating figures” whirled around to the primitive music that “throbbed.” In Sitwell’s account, the monstrous racial mixing of crowds was viscerally experienced as visually indistinct, as individual outlines among the crowd were not discernable. Its misshapen form – the amorphous nature of all urban crowds – suggested for writers from Gustave Le Bon and Nietzsche to Lewis a crisis of individual autonomy in the face of growing urbanization, racial mixing, and mass forms of democracy. For instance, Lewis hated the way that European culture and ideology were disseminated throughout its colonized territories. In Time and Western Man, he wrote that instead of missionary bibles distributed around the globe, Europe exports “white magic,” science, and socialism, so that Everyman: Black, White, and Yellow – becomes a leisured gentleman; with the aid of machinery (the good God Science) he only needs to work two hours a day. All the rest of the time he sits in a velvet jacket and paints a field of buttercups, one eye on a copy of the “Idylls of the King,” while his mate feeds his ear with Puccini and Offenbach.15

15

Lewis, Time and Western Man, 294–5.

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This “white magic,” Lewis ominously predicts, turns the white populations, “into not an irresistible race of supermen, but a horde of particularly helpless children.”16 The chief danger, for Lewis, is the disappearance of great art in the face of a racially blended tide of mediocrity. Transforming these modern mass conditions as part of avant-garde art, the cabaret produced a disruptive setting for the production and reception of art. It brought together artists, their works of art, and the audience’s response that broke aesthetic rules concerning the autonomy of art. The theatricality of cabaret performance estranged art from its academic tradition through its irreverent stagings. It recontextualized its production and reception within the rowdy, distracted domain of live entertainment. Art was no longer contemplated with calm detachment; instead, paintings and sculptures served as casual backdrops to theatrical declamations, dancing, conversation, and music. Verbal and musical forms were improvised in ways that suggested spontaneous, instinctual activity rather than reflective rationality. The improvised performances at the cabaret produced a new art, language, and style that might be understood as a form of heterotopia. The term “heterotopia” draws attention to Lewis’s efforts not only to defamiliarize language and representation in his play Enemy of the Stars, but also to bring together in Blast a disparate array of creative endeavors, analogous to the heterotopic space of the cabaret. Heterotopias are both concrete and conceptual. In addition to serving as utopian spaces apart from increasingly commodified and reified mainstream spaces (such as the music hall, which I considered in Chapter 2), they address the abstract dimensions of space and temporality that structure representation. Heterotopias, as Foucault says, “dissolve our myths” and “contest the very possibility of grammar” that have heretofore structured the unchanging same of the “new.”17 At the level of sentence structure, as I demonstrate in a reading of Lewis’s play Enemy of the Stars, Lewis’s heterotopia presents an avant-garde event that opens conventional representation to the contingency of meaning, an aim shared by manifestos. However, because Foucault is largely inattentive to the racial and colonial dimension of the European forms of knowledge that he analyzed, Laura Stoler’s reconsideration of race and colonization in Foucault’s work allows me to bring these occluded dimensions to the center stage of British modernist

16 17

Lewis, ibid., 295. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1970), xviii.


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studies.18 I rely as well on Foucault’s later reassessment of heterotopia, which explicitly addresses the spatial and temporal phenomena of colonization. Foucault’s term heterotopia, introduced in The Order of Things, suggests both a disparate mingling of unrelated people and places and an underlying disturbance in language and meaning that comes from a taxonomic disorder. Foucault illustrates this term by means of Borges’s reference to a Chinese encyclopedia in which a “wild profusion of existing things”– embalmed, tame, drawn with a camelhair brush, etc. – “disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other.”19 He suggests that this list has a monstrous quality because all common ground has been destroyed, even at the level of representation and being (i.e. the state of being dead, alive, or drawn by a brush). Disparate qualities are held together only in the nonplace of language, an “unthinkable space.” This space destroys the syntax that causes words and things to hold together. Heterotopias “shatter . . . common names” and “make it impossible to name this and that . . . [they] desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences.”20 Heterotopias undermine received forms of sense and meaning and disturb rationality. Foucault’s concept has been criticized for its lack of historical specificity and its placement outside power structures which render the concept banal and over-generalized.21 To address these concerns, I situate the English avant-garde and its aesthetic forms within late imperial London and the power of state-sponsored racism. As part of a profusion of new spaces in England, the cabaret was positioned both within the London public and outside it. It took its place alongside the counter-public spheres of the women’s suffrage movement with its meeting halls, shops, and presses; trade union halls; and the consumer-oriented tea shops, department stores, and entertainment halls. The latter mass culture spaces were offset by an increasingly militant and racialized East End of London, which, as I demonstrated in Chapter 2, by 1913 resembled a besieged territory that was hostile to police, armed, and comprised Irish nationalists, Jewish immigrants fleeing pogroms, Asian, West Indian, and African sailors seeking employment, working-class 18 19 21

Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). Foucault, The Order of Things, xv. 20 Foucault, ibid., xvii–xviii. See, for instance, David Harvey, “Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils,” Public Culture, 12, 2 (2000), 529–64.

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women suffragists, and radicals. The influx of immigrants arriving between 1870 and 1914 united an unholy alliance of Tory MPs, socialists, trade union leaders, and members of the proto-fascist British Brothers League. They lobbied for an end to the flood of immigrants, and, in 1905, the Aliens Act was passed, which subjected all non-British subjects to immigration control for the first time. The spatial confrontation enacted in the East End of London and elsewhere testified to the proliferation of politically unruly groups within the metropolis. While the historical specificity of these conflicts may not have received direct citation in the Cabaret Theatre Club, the random, often absurd, juxtapositions of persons and acts suggest this violent underside of modernity, especially when this violence is aestheticized, as it was by Marinetti, Lewis, and another vorticist contributor, Rebecca West.22 In Foucault’s 1986 reassessment of heterotopia, he suggests that it unfolds within two extreme poles of functionality. The first, which corresponds to the cabaret, he calls a space of illusion that “exposes every real space . . . as still more illusory.”23 For instance, the women’s enfranchisement struggle contested gender-segregated spaces to show their artificial nature. The second, the space of compensation, is “as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours [Western metropolitan space] is messy, ill constructed and jumbled.”24 Foucault likens the functioning of fixed, compensatory spaces to certain colonies. Here, Foucault indirectly suggests the relation of racism and the “statization” of biology. Ann Stoler has argued that Foucault directly discusses this relation elsewhere in his work as “the anatomy of state power and the murderous capacities within it,” and, she adds, “the fact that state racism and European imperial expansion” occurred together.25 I investigate in what follows the uneasy combination of both heterotopic functions, that which dissolves racial categories as illusory and that which rewrites them via fixed, statist notions of Anglo-Saxon superiority, as they are precariously presented in the vorticist journal Blast. 22

23 24

For example, Lisa Tickner has examined the symbolic significance of the Parisian underclass called “apaches,” who were “unemployed, violent, criminal hooligans.” Their imagined social practices were choreographed to wildly popular effect on the Paris and London stage. According to Tickner, the apache dance condensed anxieties concerning twentieth-century modernity. Sexually explicit, vengeful, illicit, and wildly disruptive, the apache was the antithesis of the bourgeois subject and directly influenced Lewis’s work at the Cabaret of the Golden Calf. Lisa Tickner, “The Popular Culture of Kermesse: Lewis, Painting, and Performance, 1912–1913,” Modernism/Modernity, 4, 2 (April 1997), 67–120, here 72–3. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics, 16, 1 (1986), 22–7, here 27. Foucault, ibid., 27. 25 Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 61–2.


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As I argued in the last chapter, Marinetti’s futurism aimed to foment an aggressive brand of modernist nationalism through its avant-garde practices. So, too, Blast was dedicated to stimulating its audience to compete against other European nationalisms in the sphere of art. Lewis predicated the need to rejuvenate the English public’s aesthetic sensibility not only upon the belief that English art was provincial, sentimental, and conventional, but also in response to the Italian futurist “invasion” of England and widespread fears of England’s weakening geopolitical power. Lewis’s 1914 manifesto struck back, asserting a collective British supremacy due paradoxically to its individualist spirit. Rather than the mass appeal of futurism, Lewis promised that: Blast will be popular, essentially. It will not appeal to any particular class, but to the fundamental and popular instincts in every class and description of people, TO THE INDIVIDUAL. The moment a man feels or realizes himself as an artist, he ceases to belong to any milieu or time. Blast is created for this timeless, fundamental Art that exists in everybody.26

For the young, Bergson-inspired Lewis, the path to modern artistic sensibility is through the intuitive and passionate body, the creative expression one “feels or realizes” as an individual at any place or time. But art restrains as well, as Lewis announces in his manifesto: “The Vorticist is not the Slave of Commotion, but it’s [sic] master.”27 Lewis attempts to lift artistic production out of history and tradition to create “new” English art that he calls “timeless.” The contestation between a desire to transcend history and the inability to do so will structure much of Lewis’s avantgarde drama Enemy of the Stars, which I discuss below. But first I turn to the raucous, disparate onslaught of cabaret modernism figured in vorticism’s first manifesto. BLAST AS THEATER

The vorticist journal Blast provided a printed forum analogous to what the cabaret enacted nightly.28 The collective presentation of contributors’ work, witty social commentary, and aesthetic doctrine was striking and disparate. It included a variety of art forms: reproductions of paintings 26 27 28

Wyndham Lewis, “Long Live the Vortex,” Blast, 1 (June 1914) (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1981), 7–8, here 7. Wyndham Lewis, “Our Vortex,” Blast, 1, 147–9, here 148. When Madame Strindberg closed the Cabaret Theatre Club in February 1914 because of financial difficulties, she promised that it would reopen as the Blast Club. Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde, 50.

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and sculptures, poetry, short stories by Rebecca West and Ford Madox Ford, a closet drama (a drama that cannot be staged), and a twenty-page manifesto. It celebrated a wild and artificial heterotopia; but, as we shall see, it also worked to contain and recolonize the heterotopia’s energies. Its intended effect was to galvanize England with new, vigorous art and a monstrous mixing of forms. The reviewers interpreted it accordingly. The Little Review’s critic, Eunice Tietjins, ironically announced Blast’s arrival: “the typical gamin, the street urchin with his tongue in his cheek . . . has at last invaded the quarterlies.”29 Meanwhile, The New York Times called vorticism: “the last phase of the ridiculous rebellion which has given the world the ‘Portrait of a Nude Descending the Stairs’ and the writings of Gertrude Stein. It is the reductio ad absurdum of a mad modernity . . . a development of Futurism to its ultimate absurdity.”30 Richard Aldington, who favorably reviewed the journal – he was a co-signer of the manifesto – said: “Quite naturally it was energetic, tremendously energetic.”31 Blast injected energized disorder and absurdity into the English art scene. The vorticist manifesto set the tone for the artwork to follow. Its irreverent, impatient satire of modern culture and hilarious language theatricalizes the manifesto’s solemn intention of declaring a break from the past. Blast, like Marinetti’s manifestos, is not pure theater; as a text, it circulates beyond the confines of a singular, immediate performance. We might recall from Chapter 1 that the manifesto as an event-text opens the present moment to an untimeliness that unworks representation and opens a space for alternative modernisms to emerge. The event-nature of the manifestic utterance presents the indeterminacy of performativity (the possibility of repeating previous scripts with a difference) and thereby inserts the contingency of historical location into its pages. Within the mise en sce`ne of its covers, the twenty-page manifesto emphasizes the immediacy and urgency of creating a new aesthetic sensibility as well as founding and promoting a new art group, the vorticists. In this endeavor, it echoes the Communist Manifesto that founded a worldwide movement against capitalism. Lewis, however, strips his manifesto of Marx and Engels’s political language. Instead, he presents a tongue-in-cheek theatricality that through shocking proclamations and the visual display of innovative graphic layouts and reproduced art, sought only to stimulate 29 30 31

Eunice Tietjins (E. T.), “Blast,” The Little Review, 1 (September 1914), 33–4, here 33. Anon., “Vorticism: The Latest Cult of Rebel Artists,” The New York Times, section 5 (August 9, 1914), 10. Richard Aldington, “Blast,” Egoist, 1 (July 15, 1914), 272–3, here 272.


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the English art scene and publicize vorticism.32 Like other manifestos, the founding vorticist manifesto rejects convention and recent history, and scripts aesthetic action in the present moment in order to transform the future. But it also curtailed the possibility of wider social effects by strictly defining its group identity in race and gender terms, and halting, rather than stimulating, the most far-reaching consequences of its appeal. In this regard, the vorticist manifesto revises the history-making, active claims of Marx and Engels’s Manifesto, and even of futurist and women’s suffrage manifestos, by confining itself to a strictly aesthetic realm. The theatricality of the founding vorticist manifesto – like the cabaret – unleashes heterogeneity by opening the present moment to a creative undoing of logic, grammar, and sense. The manifesto, much as the variety theater’s comme`re and compe`re (mistress and master of ceremonies), addresses its readers directly as though they are present. Unlike variety theater, its self-reflexive language places this “live” scene in the future: “CURSE those who will hang over this Manifesto with SILLY CANINES exposed.”33 As such, it reveals an illusory and heterotopic “non-place of language” that is both abstract and concrete, performative and representational. Its temporality creates an aporia of present and future. The twenty-page manifesto enacts a baffling struggle between opposing as well as complementary dualities. In the manner of Apollinaire’s 1913 “L’antitradition futuriste” manifesto, with its lists headed “merde aux” and “rose aux,” it begins with long lists of things and people to be “blasted” and “blessed.” After cursing England, France, the Britannic Aesthete, professionals, amateurs, humor, sport, codliver oil, the British Academy, the Bishop of London and all his posterity, Beecham (Pills, Opera, and Thomas), the Victorian period, and luminaries of middle-class culture, the manifesto blesses England, France, humor, ports, the hairdresser, castor oil, 33 Church Street, the Salvation Army, the Commercial Process Company, those attached to the vorticist circle, aviators, music-hall performers, boxers, cabaret and opera singers, militant suffragettes and

32

33

Wyndham Lewis would later boast that his “comic earthquake” Blast declared “Kill John Bull with Art!” which its audience received as a great joke: “And John and Mrs Bull leapt for joy in a cynical convulsion. For they felt as safe as houses. So did I.” Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering: An Autobiography (1914–1926) [1937] (London: John Calder, 1982), 50 and 36. I draw upon Martin Puchner’s analysis of vorticism’s “rear-garde” modernism in comparing the vorticist manifesto to the Communist Manifesto. See his Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 107–31. Wyndham Lewis, “Manifesto,” Blast, 1, 11–43, here 17.

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Ulsterites, and James Joyce.34 The manifesto both blesses and curses humor, France and England, and advocates working-class over middleclass entertainments. Its satirical targets include locations, companies, medicinal oils, and “posterity” to disturb epistemological and ontological categories. The parataxis of listmaking, both pro and con, random and trivial, assails the reader from both directions. It offers the taxonomic disorder of heterotopic space, what Comentale calls “an imminent critique,” whose mocking performance of political posturing “denies the possibility of any authority, any claim to establish a self-identical, transcendent position beyond the squabbling of everyday.”35 Yet, the manifesto’s reliance on national characteristics, even to mock them, reimposes a metaphysics of race and nation which I will demonstrate next. Though Lewis’s manifesto questions the stability and transparency of representational systems, it also asserts Foucault’s second heterotopia of compensation, the fixed space of state-imposed colonial order based on a metaphysics of race. Lewis repeatedly voiced fears that the erosion of cultural and racial divisions through modernization would yield an undifferentiated, mechanical society and a degraded, commodified mass culture. To recuperate the full presence of art within the imperial metropolis, the vorticist manifesto asserts an Anglo-Saxon nativism whose racial purity and rigid boundaries provide a universalizing authority for art. Anglo-Saxon art is “permanently primitive” and set apart from history, yet it also reasserts the dichotomized spatial divisions of modern and colonial world history.36 Lewis claims that this detachment is the result and source of imperialism. The English “genius” originated its imperial dominance, and, conversely, imperialism justifies the authority of English artists. For instance, the manifesto states: “(6) The English Character is based on the Sea. (7) The particular qualities and characteristics that the sea always engenders in men are those that are among the many diagnostics of our race, the most fundamentally English. (8) That unexpected universality as well, found in the completest English artist, is due to this.”37 English imperialism – as expressed through its seafaring activity – forms the geopolitical rationale for national and nativist identity and its link to universality. Reversing causality – effectively giving birth to itself – the vorticist manifesto proclaims that Anglo-Saxon identity gave rise to England as a world imperial power. It proclaims the Anglo-Saxon genius to be the 34 36

Lewis, ibid., 11–28. 35 Comentale, Modernism, Cultural Production, 12. Lewis, “Manifesto,” 33. 37 Lewis, ibid., 33.


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source of capitalist expansion and demands a new form of national art based on and justified by this invention. It argues that as this new mode of economic production spreads across the world – colonizing at will – it modernizes old modes of representation. Modern machinery “sweeps away the doctrines of a narrow and pedantic Realism at one stroke.”38 Furthermore, as this mechanical inventiveness spreads all over the Earth, it, in turn, brings “all the hemispheres” back to England, not as “Jungle,” “dramatic tropic growths,” or the “vastness of American trees,” but as artificial and “wilder intricacies than those of Nature.”39 This artifice of wilderness checks an unqualified celebration of modernity by positing its return to the industrial center. At this center, the manifesto proclaims Anglo-Saxons’ nativist superiority as the founders of the industrial revolution. This superiority claims the authority to halt the unchecked spread of modernity in favor of the formal stillness and central artifice of vorticist art in dialogue with modernity. Not merely breaking from the past, the manifesto rewrites national history in racial terms to authorize the present geopolitical and aesthetic dominance in self-generating and selflegitimizing terms. Asserting his superiority, Lewis imagines the nativist artist as a gladiator who wages war with modern life. Violently detaching from modernity’s multiple assaults waged both at home and abroad, he remarks later in Blast on what the modern town-dweller sees: the frontier’s interpenetrate [sic], individual demarcations are confused and interests dispersed . . . We all to-day (possibly with the coldness reminiscent of the insect-world) are in each other’s vitals – overlap, intersect, and are Siamese to any extent . . . All clean, clear cut emotions depend on the element of strangeness, and surprise and primitive detachment.40

Lewis deploys “strange” to denote a nonorganic, nonkinship relation between city dwellers. The denizens of the modern metropolis, coming from all frontiers, conjoin promiscuously and sometimes violently, as Lewis likens these encounters to boxing matches or duels. Modernity dissolves individual “demarcations” and disperses autonomous interests: an urban subject perceives him or herself to be situated in proximate, multiple encounters. These absurd, mechanical, violent interpenetrations of disparate people and things, however, may be superseded by an indifferent artist whose “clean, clear cut emotions” are based on detachment from “the interstices of a human world.” Extending this 38

Lewis, ibid., 39.

39

Lewis, ibid., 36.

40

Wyndham Lewis, “The New Egos,” Blast, 1, 141.

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antihumanist indifference to critique the sentimentalism of the English, the manifesto asserts that the English people, as the source of this raw form of brutal art, “should be the great enemies of Romance.”41 Such a lack of sentiment halts the forward unfolding of modernity. The vorticist manifesto presents a taxonomic disorder in the heart of empire, but it ultimately preserves the unquestioned racial superiority of Anglo-Saxon artists, affirming the timeless and despotic compensatory heterotopia of the colonies. The contradictory nature of vorticism’s embrace of modernity in all of its transformative dimensions and simultaneous reinscription of nativist racial categories may be understood through the manifesto form. The manifesto’s temporal emphasis resides in the future as it asserts a program of change. But with this revolutionary impetus, the will to remake one’s self and one’s world completely anew – as Franco Moretti notes in terms of another genre of the future, the Bildungsroman – runs “the risk of destroying itself as form.”42 The permanent revolution of modernity with its incessant change can appear meaningless and threatening and thus must be curbed. Moretti adds, “Only by curbing its intrinsically boundless dynamism, only by agreeing to betray to a certain extent its very essence, only thus, it seems, can modernity be represented.”43 For Lewis, race – since it was believed to be outside history – curbs modernity by producing great artists who can redeem the nation’s collective destiny. While England’s supremacy as a world power results in an overcivilized decay and multitudes of “effeminate lout[s],” it also results in the greatest artistic genius.44 The new possibilities in art “by origin” belong to the English, who “are the inventors of this bareness and hardness.”45 And while England is usually thought of as an “unmusical, anti-artistic, unphilosophic country,” the contradictions between its imperialist universalism and its sober utilitarianism produce the necessary tension whereby “art and imagination could burst up here, from this lump of compressed life, with more force than anywhere else.”46 This destiny is formed outside history as a biological and cultural group’s primordial essence – a “lump of compressed life” – and only then can it be realized through actions within history. Lewis posits an ontology prior to the manifesto’s active, generative speech act, an essence that halts the 41 42 43

Lewis, ibid., 41. Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (New York: Verso, 1987), 5. Moretti, ibid., 6. 44 Lewis, “Manifesto,” 11. 45 Lewis, ibid., 39. 46 Lewis, ibid., 32.


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manifesto from more radically refashioning the future. In effect, Lewis’s manifesto does not change history. It repeats the past by fitting smoothly into popular conceptions of British national supremacy. It repeats these racial myths of modernity without changing them, believing them to be outside of history and modernity. Yet Lewis imagines that a metaphysics of race curbs modernity and allows the artist to shape national consciousness. As mentioned earlier, Lewis envisioned creating “a new race” of philosophers (and artists) who both participate in and expose the dynamic and destructive forces of modernity. This new race adheres to a “‘spatializing’ process of a mind,” one that relies on a “plastic or . . . visual intelligence” that thinks according to formal principles.47 This “‘spatializing’ process” halts the flux of modernity by means of rigid spatial demarcations. These demarcations foster tensions that limit, as Comentale argues, individuals, classes, and nations.48 For Lewis, a refusal of development, a frozen temporality, jams the process of modernity’s perpetual transformation and offers instead the confines of racial destiny. Within this felt racial destiny, national consciousness is intensified because it is limited. The artist is, as Blast announces, at his “maximum point of energy when stillest,” a tension that combines the contingency of performativity with the stasis of essence.49 Lewis explicitly connects racial preservation to the second compensatory heterotopia of colonial despotism in his 1919 pamphlet The Caliph’s Design: Architects, Where is Your Vortex? Lewis begins with a parable called “The Caliph’s Design.” The Caliph is portrayed as an Oriental despot: sneaky, arbitrary, exorbitant, and lazy. He rose “stealthily” and traced some “hieroglyphs” on paper with a turquoise pen. He sinks back on his luxurious pillows in exhaustion, then calls his chief engineer and architect, Mahmud and Hassan, to his side: “I am extremely dissatisfied with the shape of my city, so I have done a design of a new city, or rather of a typical street in a new city. It is a little vorticist effort that I threw off while I was dressing this morning.”50 The Caliph gives Mahmud and Hassan one day to plan and execute a complete urban renewal, or their “heads will fall.” At first, the two are paralyzed with fear, then they pull together their “brilliant faculties.” By the next morning, “a series of the 47 49 50

48 Lewis, Time and Western Man, xix. Comentale, Modernism, Cultural Production, 7. Lewis, “Our Vortex,” 148. Wyndham Lewis, The Caliph’s Design: Architects, Where is Your Vortex? [1919], ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1986), 19.

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most beautiful plans that had yet been made in Baghdad (retaining with an exact fidelity the masses and directions of the potentate’s design) were ready . . . And within a month a strange street transfigured the heart of that cultivated city.”51 Removed from history, Lewis’s artistic utopia unfolds in colonial space. Unlike a novel of development that unfolds in the unbounded time of modernity as the Bildungsroman does, Lewis’s parable suggests frozen time, or what Sara Suleri calls “imperial time.” This temporality, according to Suleri, is “a disruptive sequence of present tense perpetually surprised, allowing for neither the precedent of the past nor the anticipation of a future.”52 Modernity – in this case, urban renewal – negates chronology, imposing its will from without. Given this imagined juxtaposition, between modern aesthetics and the violence of absolutism, The Caliph’s Design suggests that the English avant-garde should assume a pose of unquestioned racial authority in order to sever their art from the conventional and the continuous. This rupture places a fantasy of aristocratic absolutism at the center of vorticist practices. Moreover, Lewis’s parable of art indicates modernism’s effort at regeneration through the consumption of racialized otherness. Cabaret modernism animates both forms of heterotopia at once: a contingent and monstrous mixing of racial and other categories in tension with a rigidly structured racial hierarchy. REBECCA WEST AND THE IMPERIAL EXOTIC

In contrast to Lewis’s manifesto that champions Anglo-Saxon superiority, Rebecca West’s story “Indissoluble Matrimony,” also published in the first issue of Blast, appears first to embrace more fully taxonomic disorder through racial mixing. As an antiromance romance, “Indissoluble Matrimony” parodies the racial dangers believed to arise from colonial mixing, as well as the triumphalist imperial romance in which colonial heroes undergo trials and overcome adversity to demonstrate their racial superiority. “Indissoluble Matrimony” presents a violent encounter within a lower-middle-class London home between a mixed-race singer and her white husband and critiques the sensationalized dangers of the weakening of the white race through overcivilization. Adapting the romance genre for her tale of a suburban encounter with otherness, West transforms romance narratives that relate how dependency, intimacy, and 51 52

Lewis, The Caliph’s Design, 19–20. Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 113.


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estrangement between colonizer and colonized occur.53 She demonstrates how geographical and racial interpenetration threaten to displace fixed categories of race and nation, particularly as these displacements are felt in the imperial metropolis. Because of the story’s narrative form and realist language, it has been excluded by critics from discussions of vorticism. But West’s contribution to Blast provides a further instance of the categorical mixing of heterotopia, with its disparity of avant-garde aesthetics and popular narrative fiction. As a socialist feminist, West’s point of view and relation to dominant language is as much an intervention in the settled language of literature as avant-garde experimentation. West’s story also provides evidence of vorticism’s ambivalent (and failed) attempt to attract a wide public audience. Furthermore, as a colonial allegory, its subject matter parallels vorticist concerns as it expresses an erosion of autonomy that results from England’s dependency on and intimacy with its colonial subjects. The conventional narrative, when seen as part of Blast’s heterotopic arena, becomes just one discourse and style among the wide range of disparate forms presented in Blast. In terms of content, it remains in line with Lewis’s apocalyptic vision of frontiers interpenetrating and antagonistic, violent duos exchanging blows. In fact, Lewis’s “War Crowds” story, published in the second and final issue of Blast, compares the crowd to a married man. The domesticated man brings a crowd into being “in the bowels of his wife.” For Lewis, married life is a metaphor for the phenomenon of proliferating, amorphous masses of people, the “black London war-crowds.”54 Romantic intimacy symbolizes modernity’s dangers, the promiscuous sexual and racial mixing within the metropolis that erodes individual autonomy and freedom. West, like Lewis, references the languages of political militancy and popular entertainments, but for her own purposes: to redefine notions of female sexuality refracted through the lens of Orientalism. West wrote this story just after she left drama school in 1911. At age nineteen, already a seasoned veteran of bloody street brawls in support of women’s suffrage, 53

54

Suleri argues that the romance conventions of nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian fiction “reorganiz[e] the materiality of colonialism into a narrative of perpetual longing and perpetual loss . . . ‘India’ becomes the absent point toward which nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian narrative may lean to but which it may never possess, causing both national and cultural identities to disappear in the emptiness of representational mirage.” Suleri, ibid., 10–11. West’s story exposes and comments on this dynamic, undercutting its phantasmic nature, in order to show the historical density of Evadne in her lived, everyday time. Wyndham Lewis, “The Crowd Master,”Blast, 2 (June 1915) (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1981), 94–102, here 94.

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West moved to London from Edinburgh to study theater, lured by the promise of performing unconventional gender roles. As her biographer Carl Rollyson reports, the catalyst in West’s decision to become an actress had been watching Sarah Bernhardt perform in La Dame aux came´lias. West has been enchanted by Bernhardt “pythoning about.”55 The sexualized and exoticized elements of Bernhardt’s performance were a heady source of inspiration for West’s efforts to reimagine femininity. As Sander Gilman demonstrates, Bernhardt’s visibility as a woman stage performer and as a Jew was, at the turn of the century, a composite of “sexuality” and “race” that merge to reinforce the category of exotic femininity.56 Failing to become an actress, West channeled her advocacy of unconventional gender roles into writing, expanding exoticism into an ethnographic reassessment of conventional gender roles. Lewis admired West’s journalism, claiming that she was “the best reviewer in contemporary England.”57 West’s satirical story uses music-hall iconoclasm and suffrage militancy (as discussed in Chapter 2) to restage sexual and racial subjectivity. In West’s story in Blast, George Silverton, a solicitor’s clerk, marries a passionate, sensual singer of mixed race, Evadne, who reads widely and, later in their married life, becomes a socialist speaker. The story is narrated from George’s perspective as he nurses his grudges toward his wife and reflects on their courtship and their marriage of ten years. Evadne is more interested in workers’ struggles than in cleaning the house and caring for her husband. As her name implies, she evades traditional gender roles in her quest to be modern. When George sees his wife’s name advertised as a socialist speaker, he flies into a rage and forbids her to go. She refuses, and begins to practice her speech. They fight and she leaves the house, shattering the glass in the front door and signaling a breakdown of private, domestic space. George, in a state of paranoid delusion, follows her, expecting to catch her in an adulterous rendezvous. She merely goes to a pond for a swim. They physically attack each other and he attempts to drown her. Walking back home in the belief that he has drowned his wife, George fantasizes that he is Napoleon, a fantasy that allows West to satirize imperial militarism. Idealizing his act of ridding the world of Evadne, George decides to make the ultimate self-sacrifice, suicide. When he returns home, however, he finds Evadne asleep, having 55 56 57

Carl Rollyson, Rebecca West: A Life (New York: Scribner, 1996), 31. Sander Gilman, “Salome´, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt and the ‘Modern Jewess’,” German Quarterly, 66, 2 (Spring 1993), 195–211. Jeffrey Meyers, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis (New York: Routledge, 1980), 31.


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escaped his murderous intentions by plunging deeper into the water and swimming away from him. Before going to sleep, she turned off the gas at the main, preventing George’s suicide attempt. The story ends as Evadne embraces George in her sleep, suggesting that the conflict has been resolved in favor of Evadne’s stronger role within the marriage and George’s continued dependency. However, West denies to Evadne a fully interiorized subjectivity and thereby presents her at times as an exotic stranger. Nevertheless, West’s attempt to give Evadne a fully lived, historical location in the metropole imaginatively alters the geographical and racial boundaries of Englishness. West’s story places imperial critique within the affective, generative center of British nationalism, the home. By so doing, it effectively displaces imperial and domestic delineations of space. It opens with a cutting jab at imperialism: “When George Silverton opened the front door he found that the house was not empty for all its darkness.”58 West rewrites Heart of Darkness by locating “the horror” not in the depths of Africa but within the heart of the metropolis, in an ordinary London home. Marlow’s romantic lie in the home of the Intended covers over “the horror” with a hollow nod to conventions in much the same way that the Silvertons initially conform to the conventions of marriage. West’s story, however, confronts the lie of colonial desire, allowing George’s egocentric, dismissive judgments of Evadne and his insecure overcompensations to become satire. Moreover, she refuses the existential emptiness in which Kurtz’s “horror” is allowed to reverberate. West’s colonial subject is a modern, ordinary person. Evadne Silverton inhabits the darkness of the house and is, in fact, struggling to light the lamp when George enters the house. The banality of her everyday life undercuts race as spectacle. Indeed, West’s story exposes the phantasmatic nature of race and desire, specifically, that raced subjects serve as an empty marker onto which the colonizer’s ghostly imaginings of the racialized other are projected: “There was something about the fantastic figure that made him feel as though they were not properly married.”59 Imperial romance procures much of its political love from colonial encounters replete with phantasmatic imaginings, unfulfilled longings, and nostalgic reminiscences. As West places a colonized subject in everyday British suburban life, she alters the definition of modernity that casts racialized subjects outside history.

58 59

Rebecca West, “Indissoluble Matrimony,” Blast, 1 (June 1914), 98–117, here 98. West, ibid., 99.

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In her colonial allegory, West makes clear how colonial partnership produces an intimacy of economic and social dependence that is based not on mutuality, but on fantasy and misremembered history. What West’s story suggests is that once colonization takes effect and “vows” are exchanged – that is, once economic and cultural interdependence forms – there is no escape from what Robert Young calls the ambivalence of colonial desire. As Evadne is presented through George’s point of view, he is both attracted and repulsed by her: “She was one of those women who create an illusion alternately of extreme beauty and extreme ugliness.”60 She is both modern as she “unwind[s] her orange motor-veil” and primitive; intellectual and sensual; weak and strong; chaste and promiscuous.61 Undercutting George’s dramatic views of Evadne’s alterity, the third-person narrator instead posits Evadne’s ordinariness. None the less, the overall effect of the narrative presents Evadne as contradictory and fragmented, largely through the dislocating effects of colonization. She is caught between modernity’s promised freedoms and a raced and sexed position that is constructed as elsewhere and prior to the modern. Even while presenting an anti-imperial perspective and making visible multiple locations of modernity (Evadne’s racial and gendered difference within the metropolis), West reimposes hierarchies of racial difference. She achieves this through the couple’s violent confrontation, a climax that closely resembles an avant-garde event, though their sublime hatred for one another replaces vorticist indifference. The couple argue over Evadne’s public-speaking engagement, breaking from their ten-year pattern of interaction. The marital conflict between Evadne and George generates heightened energy that overshadows the past. The ten years of their marriage disappear behind this “intense event” like “the pale hair trails behind the burning comet.”62 This moment of reckoning produces a warlike hostility where the past dissolves before the intensity of the moment: “A sublime loathing was between them . . . For the first time they were possessed by a supreme emotion and they felt a glad desire to strip away, [sic] restraint and express it nakedly. It was ecstasy; they felt tall and full of blood.”63 The ordinary language of domestic fiction is subsumed by the metaphysical register of their passion as the characters experience an intense urge to kill each other. History and mimetic representation fall away before dissolving, violent action. This sublime desire is described as a magnetic current that decomposes the electrolyte, a 60

West, ibid., 98.

61

West, ibid.

62

West, ibid., 109.

63

West, ibid., 110.


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burning comet, and “stars [that] trembled overhead with wrath.”64 The couple’s crisis takes on cosmic, absolute proportions: “with an uplifting sense of responsibility they realized that they must kill each other.”65 This moment of freedom to act regardless of social implications suggests the effects of speech-act declarations: the couple’s cursing and painful truth-telling severs marital bonds and enacts a break in their relationship. Their accusations involve the memory of Evadne’s mother, who, in George’s words, is “that weird half-black woman from the back of beyond,” a phrase that, for him, consolidates a chasm of racial difference and spatial dislocation.66 However, this moment of marital liberation falters, stopping short of its most far-reaching implications of racial struggle and domestic dispute. It preserves, in one essentializing moment, racial and gender hierarchies. For the first time, the narrator presents Evadne’s thoughts: These things were so strange that her civilized self shrank back appalled. There entered into her the primitive woman who is the curse to all women: a creature of the most utter femaleness, useless, save for childbirth, with no strong brain to make her physical weakness a light accident, abjectly and corrupting afraid of man. A squaw, she dared not strike her lord.67

Though this moment passes quickly and Evadne regains her sense of intellectual superiority, her virtue – as the narrator puts it – lies in her desire for meek surrender. West’s reluctance to present Evadne on absolutely equal grounds with George at the moment of crisis suggests that the metaphysics of race and gender persists. Evadne’s subordinate hesitation allows George to strike the first blow. Even though George ultimately loses the battle, Evadne’s gender difference is racialized and excludes her at a crucial moment from access to full subjecthood. Her decision to remain married to George – the story circles back to their domestic abode and ingrained patterns of behavior – suggests West’s need to contain Evadne’s difference through an assimilative – and sterile – marriage, even while George’s hypocritical Victorian moral codes are exposed and critiqued. In effect, West unsettles spatial demarcations and racial classifications from within the metropolis but carefully recontains such critique within a Eurocentric, liberal framework. For the most part, Evadne remembers to enact her modern, cosmopolitan self. But the essentialist difference she carries in her blood will, in West’s estimation, always exclude her from becoming a full subject of modernity. Preserving 64

West, ibid.

65

West, ibid.

66

West, ibid., 109.

67

West, ibid., 111.

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such hierarchies, West’s story contributes to Blast’s heterotopia because it stands in formal contradiction to the innovative aesthetic of vorticism and, in the end, upholds Lewis’s reclamation of Englishness by showing it to be, underneath the satire, ultimately superior in racial conflict. None the less, West is canny in demonstrating that Evadne’s subservient housekeeping – shutting off the gas main – preserves George’s life and negates his self-sacrificing, heroic story in which he overcomes domestic and racialized constraints. “Indissoluble Matrimony” renders race and gender categories contingent even while they are recuperated in order to preserve English dominance. ENEMY OF THE STARS

The third and final instance of heterotopic juxtaposition in Blast is Lewis’s experimental closet drama Enemy of the Stars. The drama attempts to put into practice the aesthetic positioning Lewis calls for in his manifesto. It represents the interpenetrating geopolitical spaces of nation and world while pursuing the possibility of universal aesthetic judgment that depends upon an autonomous subject. Lewis wrote Enemy of the Stars for the first issue of Blast in an effort, as he remarks in his autobiography Rude Assignment, “to show the way” to his literary contemporaries, whom he “looked upon as too bookish and not keeping the pace with the visual revolution.”68 Lewis’s paintings redeploy space, flattening and fragmenting it, and foreground abstract, geometrical designs. So, too, the play’s temporal unfolding is disrupted. Its action and dialogue are presented as a series of surreal images and episodic fragments. A synopsis for the uninitiated goes something like this (this need was anticipated by Lewis and parodied within the play): the artist-protagonist, Arghol, retreats from Berlin, “in immense collapse of chronic philosophy” in order to purify his soul, feeling ascetic revulsion toward the world. He travels to Siberia, seeking escape from metropolitan art scenes, and finds work at his uncle’s wheelwright shop. Arghol, whose name may be a reference to “Algol,” the double star, is shadowed by his double, Hanp, a fellow worker who represents the philistine audience. Arghol is violently mistreated by his uncle and Hanp continues this abuse. Arghol passively submits to Hanp’s blows until, at last, he turns with equally violent disgust to Hanp. Edward Comentale argues that by withstanding the 68

Wyndham Lewis, Rude Assignment: An Intellectual Autobiography [1950] (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1986), 139.


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beatings, Arghol “transforms the shocks and barbs of the modern world into his defense, an armor as well as an arsenal.”69 They generate a “guilty fire of friction” until at last he acts on a worldy rather than transcendent impulse and turns violently on Hanp.70 He kicks Hanp out of the hut and falls asleep, dreaming of his untidy student years in which he rejects the solipsistic thinking of Max Stirner’s 1844 philosophy of egoism. (Lewis here makes an intertextual reference to the Egoist editor, Dora Marsden, who promoted Stirner’s philosophy.) Meanwhile, Hanp’s hatred of Arghol increases. When Arghol acts with violence, Hanp realizes that Arghol is not otherworldly, but, rather, depends upon him. He has been a dupe to the artist: “He had just been feeding on him – Hanp!”71 The play ends as Hanp kills Arghol while he sleeps and then Hanp commits suicide by drowning. If the vulgar audience is represented by Hanp, Lewis suggests that the integrity of the artist was never pure and detached but always dependent upon – and constituted in relation to – his despised audience. By the same token, when the philistine kills the artist, he discovers that his life becomes unlivable; he is further enslaved and commits suicide. Two critics have recently situated this play within the context of Lewis’s vorticist manifesto and the entire founding issue of Blast. Puchner argues that “Enemy is directly under the sway of the journal’s programmatic propaganda, the manifesto-like, uneven layout, the montage-like changes, uneasily hovering between theory and art. Both its failure and its appeal are products of the collision between the literary form of drama and the genre of the manifesto.”72 Mark Morrisson posits that the proper modernist stance Lewis envisions for the vorticist artist is not one of self-assertion (as Stirner, whom Arghol explicitly rejects in the play, would have it) but self-promotion, a contingent, performative stance.73 Morrisson contextualizes this stance within the advertising culture that saturates the play, and argues that Lewis revels “in the public arena of competition that is modernity.”74 I extend these readings to argue that Lewis’s self-promotion occurs most explicitly, as Puchner suggests, via the manifesto that immediately precedes Enemy. Unlike Puchner, I hold that this particular manifesto not only hovers uneasily between theory and action, but that it also articulates the contradictions of empire for Lewis, a 69 70 71 73 74

Comentale, Modernism, Cultural Production, 15. Wyndham Lewis, “Enemy of the Stars”, Blast, 1, 55–85, here 67. Lewis, ibid., 81. 72 Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution, 120. Mark S. Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 126. Morrisson, ibid., 131.

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process of modernization that both promotes his art and threatens to dissolve its cultural distinction. The contradictions of empire might begin to be understood through the ways in which heterotopia operates in the play. It is set in a “non-place of language” that transforms linguistic categories of meaning, including subject and object positions and racial and gender categories that become radically intersubjective and mutually constitutive. As a closet drama, it blends performative mimesis with narrative diegesis to transform both categories of representation. Though the plot may be summarized, its episodic form, stuttering language, and phantasmagoric setting enact a doomed confrontation between the artist and his modern audiences and between the text and the production of meaning. The play demonstrates the illusory space of standardized philistine conformity and crass commercialization. It begins as a circus spectacle, deploying the block typography of poster art and “advertising” the opening scene: “some bleak circus, uncovered, carefully-chosen [sic], vivid night. It is packed with posterity, silent and expectant. Posterity is silent, like the dead, but more pathetic.” Moreover, it is “very well acted by you and me.”75 Lewis sets the drama near the Arctic Circle, a place where, at the time, it was widely believed the “Aryan” race originated: “Type of characters taken from broad faces where Europe goes arctic, intense, human and universal.”76 Then, Lewis punctures that originating myth and primitive setting by positing a very particular and bourgeois audience reacting within and without this (falsely) universal setting: “ ‘Yet you and me: why not from the English metropolis?’” Lewis situates “our intimate ceremonious acquaintance” of writer and audience who gather for the drama neither here (the English metropolis) nor there (Siberia) but in a hallucinatory conflation of space and time, where whiteness none the less remains paramount.77 The circus arena presents an intensely focused, but imaginary, space holding together different representational registers and allowing Lewis to experiment with nonmimetic language. The circus may suggest classical Greek and Roman theater, but it also overlays that space with references to modern spectacle: electric lights and box office success. Though the text is privately read, it insists on its performative status by declaring to its readers that it is “very well acted by you and me.” However, if the projected audience is posterity, then the text must circulate as a literary work. This textual instability challenges a knowable locus of 75

Lewis, “Enemy of the Stars,” 55.

76

Lewis, ibid., 59.

77

Lewis, ibid.


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enunciation: who and where are these characters? David Graver argues that “the closest physical corollary to the performative display of this text would be a multi-ring circus.”78 Just as the instabilities of heterotopia shatter language, syntax, and taxonomies, “the groundlessness of Lewis’s theatrical display is achieved not by dissolving particularities of place but, rather, by multiplying them” and by “placing the drama in a bewildering array of conceptually disparate milieux.”79 The ontological turbulence, moreover, exceeds the montage effect of fragmented forms that is often taken to be the central point of vorticism.80 It destabilizes the very ground on which such fragmented representation occurs. Indeed, sentence structure, grammar, and generic form are so altered that Fredric Jameson calls the textual world Lewis creates one of hypallage: “a world in which the old-fashioned substances, like marbles in a box, have been rattled so furiously together that their ‘properties’ come loose and stick together.”81 This form is a continuously transformative, asymmetrical, destructive, and kinetic structure that refuses closure. The performance space is unfixed; it opens boundaries simultaneously to abstract and particular spaces. Metropolis and Siberian wheelwright’s shop blend into each other in a dubiously unstable aesthetic space. We are never quite sure where we are: in Siberia or in a distorted, dangerous, shifting artscape that forcefully unsettles any conventions for representation and any possibility of certain meaning? Taxonomic disorder extends to the level of syntax and grammatical structure as Lewis creates a linguistic and discursive conception of unstable polarities. The text is so volatile we are not sure how to read it; at points it resembles narrative fiction, and, at other points, it oscillates between circus spectacle, metaphysical allegory, and science fiction. Subject and object are at times indistinguishable and their ontology is obscure. For instance, Arghol “lay silent, his hands a thick shell fitting back of head, his face grey vegetable cave.”82 Eluding personification, Arghol is composed of disparate items, organic and otherwise. Syntax is broken, injecting spatial disjunction into the temporal unfolding of meaning. The presence of meaning also is frustrated as the play’s sentence structure drags against its forward momentum. Active verbs and clausal subordination are eliminated as far as possible. Often Lewis presents phrases that are strung loosely 78 79 81 82

David Graver, The Aesthetics of Disturbance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 204. Graver, ibid., 204. 80 Edwards, “Afterword,” 459. Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 27. Lewis, “Enemy of the Stars,” 65.

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together: “Bastard violence of his half-disciple, me´tis of apache of the icy steppe, sleek citizen and his own dumbfounding soul.”83 This description of Hanp renders the character ontologically incomprehensible. He is primitive, modern, and a metaphysical projection of Arghol simultaneously. The unsynthesized dualism between Arghol and Hanp underscores the influence of Nietzsche on Lewis. Like Nietzsche, Lewis problematizes language and foregrounds the claim that representation is always misrepresentation, even at the level of subjectivity. The dilemma for Lewis, then, is that representations of race are emptied of meaning and yet impossible to avoid. In a contradictory both/and formulation, which both dissolves racial categories and reinscribes them, Lewis shows in Enemy of the Stars the impossibility of preserving aesthetic and individual autonomy within the “non-place of language.” This impossibility makes plain the multiple temporalities of modernity: how one’s racial positionality determines one’s place in history and modernity, even though such categories are contingent. To explain how the meaning of identity categories is broken down in this shifting nonplace, Lewis wrote an explanatory essay about his play called “Physics of the Not-Self.” The exercise of the Not-Self, represented by Arghol as that which can rise above the self, is that of a “breaker-down of walls, a dissolvent of nations, factions, and protective free-masonries.”84 He calls the notself an inhuman force. It is both a devil and a force of love: “there is something indefinably disreputable about it. It is not ‘clean.’ It cannot be described confidently as ‘white’ . . . It is unquestionably not ‘top-drawer.’ It is irreparably ‘un-pukka’.”85 Breaking down walls and categories, the artist is “both a devil and a force of love,” neither one nation nor another, one political faction or another, not quite white, neither morally nor socially reputable, and imperially suspect, “unpukka,” not authentic. Lewis defines the artist’s universality in contrast to his disparate and encyclopedic lexicon of terms: “un-pukka” coming from the British Raj; and “top-drawer” coming from English bourgeois society. The artist shatters commonplace expressions, identity categories, and the meanings and values that arise from them. Though Lewis celebrates the artist’s ability to wage war on hardened meanings and values, he demonstrates in Enemy of the Stars how this 83 84 85

Lewis, ibid. Wyndham Lewis, “Physics of the Not-Self,” in Wyndham Lewis: Collected Poems and Plays, ed. Alan Munton (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1979), 198. Lewis, ibid., 198.


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ability is fatally compromised. The artist-protagonist, Arghol, cannot achieve aesthetic or individual autonomy. He is described as a “statuemirage of Liberty in the great desert.”86 Freedom is only a mirage in modernity, where commodification colonizes all aspects of human activity. The narrator describes Arghol’s difficulty: “When mankind cannot overcome a personality . . . It becomes it. It imitates and assimilates the Ego until it is no longer one.”87 Hanp is this imitative force. He is a “black bourgeois,” which suggests Lewis’s 1916 description of the London (pro)war crowds as “black,” and stands as a metaphor for conformity, imitation, and the dissolution of the clear subject boundaries of the white (male) race. But Lewis may also mean “black” literally, as modernization spreads to the colonies and produces black bourgeois subjects, as I discuss in Chapter 1. Art’s emancipatory potential is further compromised as the artist contributes ineluctably to the spread of art as bourgeois spectacle. Arghol attempts to “liberate” his philistine double, Hanp, by assisting in the process of turning him into a projection of himself. He realizes, however, that this vanguard position would merely spread a different sort of conformity, a false copy of himself: “I find I wanted to make a naı¨f yapping Poodle-parasite of you. – I shall always be a prostitute. I wanted to make you myself; you understand?”88 Unable to break the cycle of conformity, Arghol depends on Hanp, his vulgar double, to make his universal aspirations known at all. The imitation-self is approximate and imprecise, but it is perceived by the world as real in its particularities. Lewis’s “notself,” the artist, transcends racial categories (though, according to Lewis in his manifesto and play, only the Aryan race can ever become universal). Once this transcendence is achieved through art, it can still be conveyed only through the distorting and fragmenting lens of his imitation self/racial double, Hanp. As Hanp and Arghol pummel each other, the recognition of their mutually constitutive relation – their radical intersubjectivity – blocks the possibility of an autonomous ground for judging and creating art. This problematic dualism plays itself out in racial terms as a reactionary antimodernism that ominously predicts the death of art and the end of Western civilization. Lewis concedes that the Anglo-Saxon artist needs racial difference to make himself known at all, and it is precisely racial difference that modernity threatens to erode as it transforms the colonies. Lewis’s pessimism over such a contradiction stands in direct contrast to 86

Lewis, “Enemy of the Stars,” 59.

87

Lewis, ibid., 66.

88

Lewis, ibid., 73.

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West’s affirmative, if ultimately recuperative, struggle between Evadne and George. Enemy of the Stars presents the failure and death of the avant-garde artist. As Arghol prepares to die, he imagines himself trading blows with Hanp as a “clown in the circus . . . with obsequious dignity down gangway.”89 The artist becomes a gladiator, his life and dignity sacrificed for the audience’s pleasure. What is left is modernity’s expansionary drive, where all is grist for the commodifying mill, including humanity itself. The play closes as the audience slowly sinks into the “hypnotic trance of art”: “THEY BREATHE IN CLOSE ATMOSPHERE OF TERROR AND NECESSITY TIL THE EXECUTION IS OVER.”90 With this conclusion, Lewis suggests that the danger of mass forms of popular entertainment is that they allow for a mechanical perpetuation of the past, a grinning unreality that is always in the present and lures the masses into happy forgetfulness and then to totalitarianism. His ending brings modernity to its logical conclusion when viewed from the imperial metropole. (In subsequent chapters, I discuss more fruitful alternative modernist responses to modernity.) In Lewis’s imagined confrontation between the avant-garde artist and his audience, heterotopic space is simultaneously invoked and negated by the eventual “execution” of the artist. Only the most reified aspects of modern metropolitan entertainments remain. Enemy of the Stars also suggests that the fashionable primitivism of racial spectacle, celebrated by modernists in cabarets for the power to awaken spectators through shocking and sensational performances, distracts society from modernity’s dehumanizing effects. And yet, the artist who would warn spectators of these consequences is compromised by this very spectacle. As Blast’s contributors, Wyndham Lewis and Rebecca West, demonstrate, modernists deploy the spectacle of racialized performance to suggest modernism’s transgressive and transformative nature, but, in so doing, they reveal a new dilemma. Racial spectacle – deconstructed by Lewis and West – calls racial essentialism into question and inadvertently adds to the crisis of authority and legitimacy encountered by metropolitan writers in the face of expanding mass culture at home and in the colonies. Though Lewis redeploys race as nativism, he recognizes that the double movement of modernity back to the metropolis (and, in his eyes, back to the future) deterritorializes and dehistoricizes race. It thereby interrupts the production of racialized subjects and potentially undermines the 89

Lewis, ibid., 82.

90

Lewis, ibid., 61.


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spectacle of race. West, on the other hand, appropriates racial difference within a liberal model of national belonging in a manner that undercuts race as spectacle, but ultimately excludes Evadne from full subjecthood. Race, for both West and Lewis, is fodder for modernity’s assimilative mill, and yet, conversely, is productive of modernism’s disruptive, discontinuous forms that momentarily halt modernity’s endless novelty. I conclude with a footnote to an endlessly oscillating, unstable aesthetic that refuses the rigid demarcations Lewis so longed for. Lewis rewrote Enemy of the Stars twice during his lifetime. The first time, in 1932, he removed much of the semantic and formal instability that I have traced here. The second time, he wrote a screenplay of Enemy of the Stars that is unpublished. The typescript is undated, but it was certainly written near the end of his life, after he returned to England from Canada and became blind, sometime after 1946.91 In this version, Lewis intercuts the battle between Arghol and Hanp with representations of his own career as “The Enemy” (Lewis’s authorial persona). The screenplay’s opening voice-over is not attributed to a character but seems to come from Arghol’s point of view. It rails against the failure to remove historical contingency, that “loathsome deformity called self: affliction got through indiscriminate rubbing against their fellows.” But the failure is none the less a “subsequent hygiene,” a prophylactic against conventionality. Next Arghol addresses Hanp: “Why do I speak to you? Its [sic] not to you but myself. I think its [sic] a physical matter: simply to use one’s mouth.” The camera cuts “at exactly this moment to the ‘Enemy,’ “that increasingly abstracted and impotent apparition. He seems to have missed a nonexistent cue. He crosses the screen rapidly and exits.” He appears to share Arghol’s sense of futility in speaking only to himself and out of time with his historical moment. The self-parody reflects both social alienation and a life-long battle against social conformity. Consider this authorial image: After Hanp attacks Arghol, the camera returns again to Lewis: A jovial middleaged Lewis stands swathed in a huge ankle-length fur coat with matching Muscovite hat. His arms are slowly lifted and slapped around opposite shoulders. The sky-blue backdrop is studded with caged birds of exotic plumage.

The metonymic relation between a “jovial” Lewis and the “caged birds of exotic plumage” suggests Lewis’s own commodified enclosure within the modernity he fought against. The Muscovite hat and coat suggests a 91

Wyndham Lewis Collection, #4612, Rare Book and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

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mocking, faux alliance with the left, the ideology Lewis condemned throughout his life as a new instance of social and political conformity. The left’s appeal to the social “elsewhere” of an imagined utopia becomes just another desire produced by modernity, as suggested by the reference to the exotic birds. The stills incorporated into the screenplay produce a montage of past and present. After cutting to the jovial, middle-aged Lewis, the camera returns briefly to Arghol and then to “a black and white still photograph of the building where once was situated 29a, Kensington Gardens Studios, Notting Hill Gate.” Since Lewis reclaimed this studio after he returned to England, the verb tense evokes a melancholic loss. The studio was seriously damaged by war and neglect. The screenplay moves next to Hanp, “standing on waste ground alone and neglected” only to have the camera next “[track] along innumerable bookshelves in an as yet undiscovered location.” That Hanp stands alone reflects Lewis’s refusal to engage the masses at this late date. The next scene, after another cut to Hanp and Arghol, continues its quest along bookshelves and finds Lewis, “blind, upright in a chair, scrawling longhand on a pad whose leaves are shed rhythmically to the floor. The camera stops past Lewis, returns slowly, halting in front of him. He continues to write.” This scene is the last we see of Lewis. His blindness and the shedding of paper to the floor horribly and comically relate a sense of the futility of his work. Lewis’s 1941 novel The Self Condemned also conveys this sense: I still get a little cross sometimes: to have everybody thinking in exactly the same way about everything, is, humanly speaking, a nightmare . . . An orthodoxy is certainly hardening all around us. There is a good illustration of this in the fine arts, the anti-academy rebels are automatically raising up a new academy . . . Everyone is a zealot today, they cannot paint a water-colour without doing so as if it were a religious rite. I read some of their writings. You must abstract. It is categorical, it is as if it were a branch of revolutionary politics. Oh, I do not like that must of theirs, I hate these twentieth-century Absolutes!92

The revolution that Blast’s manifesto declared and the heterotopia in which many categories of expressive art cohabitated were over. While Lewis enjoyed the way that Blast’s iconoclasm opened a course past artistic orthodoxy, by the 1940s a new conformity had spread. But the conformity and pessimism that might be true of certain familiar strands of British modernism did not invade other avant-garde circles. The next part of this book, “Transnational Modernisms,” 92

Wyndham Lewis, The Self Condemned (Chicago: H. Regnery, Co., 1955), 135.


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examines the rising tide of democratic and anticolonial movements and their manifestos, from which Lewis took such pains to distance himself. These movements and manifestos impacted greatly the aims of 1930s modernists, including C. L. R. James, Aime´ Ce´saire and his wife, Suzanne Ce´saire, Virginia Woolf, and Nancy Cunard. I turn next to the collective work organized by Lewis’s one-time lover, the shipping fortune heiress, avant-garde poet and editor, social activist, and journalist, Nancy Cunard.

PA RT II

Transnational Modernisms, 1934–1938

CHAPTER

5

Nancy Cunard’s Negro and black transnationalism

The manifesto as represented in the first part of this book intervenes in national discourse by staging alternative communities of avant-garde artists and performers, mothers, and women suffragists and socialists. It exhorts these communities to seize the present moment in order to produce a history and a modernity alternative to the “homogeneous empty time” of the rationalized present. Part I situated England within its empire so that the contradictions of race and colonial modernity are visible within manifestos and trouble bourgeois nationalism. Part II, “Transnational Modernisms,” foregrounds the emergent rhetoric of decolonization and black transnational community formation articulated in black manifestos, as well as in the anticolonial rhetoric of international communism. This chapter highlights this rhetoric and community formation in order to reread Nancy Cunard’s anthology Negro within the transnational circulation of manifestos and other important black publications, such as: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “London Manifesto;” Langston Hughes’s artist statement “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” excerpted in Paulette Nardal’s “L’E´veil de la conscience de race chez les e´tudiants noirs” (The Awakening of Race Consciousness), published in Le Revue du monde noir in April 1932; and the publication in the Harlembased newspaper New York Age of an article, “Color in England,” that featured an interview with Dr. Harold Moody of the London-based League of Coloured Peoples on racial discrimination, as well as the group’s founding proclamation. Each document aims to arrest the flow of progessivist history in order to intervene in the struggle to define who and what is modern. Each can allow for a better understanding of how Cunard’s obsessive collecting and quotation from black transnational texts and artifacts that comprise Negro contribute to this endeavor. Negro articulates modernity’s uneven developments by bringing racial difference 157

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to the center stage of metropolitan and cosmopolitan modernisms. Similar in its aims to black manifestos, Negro participates in building a pan-African community and envisioning a black modernity in ways that demand that we understand modernism as being fully embroiled in the geopolitical shift in racial and colonial relations underway in the 1930s. I turn first to Cunard’s involvement in international socialism and anticolonialism in order to situate the discontinuous and often contradictory aims of Negro within these two conflicting movements. After her death in 1965, the cosmopolitan aesthete and dandy Harold Acton recalled Nancy Cunard’s frenetic activities in Paris during the early 1930s: The clock did not exist for her: in town she dashed in and out of taxis clutching an attache´-case crammed with letters, manifestoes, estimates, circulars and her latest African bangle, and she was always several hours late for any appointment. A snack now and then but seldom a regular meal; she looked famished and quenched her hunger with harsh white wine and gusty talk.1

Cunard’s avant-garde activities – which Wyndham Lewis, with whom she had a brief affair in the 1920s, would have deplored – combined radical aesthetic practices with collectivist politics, exemplified by her “letters, manifestoes, estimates, and circulars.” By the early 1930s, Cunard’s activism focused on “the Negro” as she engaged in a worldwide fight against racial discrimination and colonization. This effort led to Cunard’s nonmember alliance with the Communist Third International (Comintern). In the 1920s and into the early 1930s, the Comintern linked class struggle with anticolonial and antiracist resistance and lent its support to both fronts. While it solicited representatives from colonized countries to participate in its worldwide revolution, anticolonial leaders “resist[ed] the imposition of a standard political strategy designed to work universally in a global dimension” and instead “push[ed] for the political necessity of recognition of their own cultural identities, the sometimes radical differences of their own ideological heritages, and even for the creation of a separate Colonial International.”2 In so doing, they challenged the communist center and put in constant tension the unleashing of local differences against a Eurocentric political strategy that moved from the center of empire to its colonies. This tension between a single narrative of communist liberation 1 2

Anne Chisholm, Nancy Cunard: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1979), 147–8. Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), 129.


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and the heterogeneity of an emergent “colonial international” also animates Cunard’s most famous political and aesthetic collectivist work, the anthology Negro (1934). This tension can be understood as a confrontation of nonsynchronous temporalities, between “traditional” colonized societies (thought to be mired in the past and outside history) and the “modern” time of revolutionary socialism, primarily articulated from within the European center. I suggest that Negro combines the historical reconstruction and revaluation of African and African-diasporic pasts with vanguardist rupture (as best articulated in manifestos) in order to convey the uneven times of black modernity. This reading undoubtedly goes against the grain of Cunard’s often primitivist and vanguardist intentions. While critics (e.g. Archer-Straw) have read Negro as an instance of modernist primitivism, with its hierarchies of center/periphery and new/old, I want to reread this document with a transnational eye on the discontinuous histories and temporalities of black experience in order to show how it instantiates an alternative modernism in which the colonial repressed returns and the racial margin takes center stage. By reading Negro as a transnational modernist text articulated (at least in part) from the perspective of colonized and subject peoples of color, modernism looks less like a radical break with the past than a disjunctive crossing of past, present, and future. I hope to demonstrate through this reading that black engagement with vanguard rupture creates the temporality of a future anterior, a joining together of past, present, and future in which the past is retrospectively fulfilled only in the future by means of present action. In other words, Cunard’s anthology keeps both past and future in dialogical play, where the present is “suspended between past and future” and between the repetition of the past (the unchanging sameness of oppression and colonization) and what might be called a “replacement” for the future.3 The linchpin in this chapter for understanding how “modern” and “nonmodern” temporalities uneasily coexist in manifestos and other performative texts will be Walter Benjamin’s notion of historical materialism. As argued in Chapter 1, historical materialism brings to light all forms of occluded history, from the “modern” to the “primitive,” in order to generate alternative modernisms and to reconceptualize modernity itself. In advocating this historical and aesthetic practice, he 3

Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 262.

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was not alone. Benjamin, as is well known, was strongly influenced by surrealism’s interest in, as Benjamin puts it, “outmoded” objects that “bring the immense forces of ‘atmosphere’ concealed in these things [of everyday life] to the point of explosion.”4 Via their mutual interests in surrealism, both Benjamin and Cunard conjoin. (Besides being politically and aesthetically influenced by surrealism, Cunard was Louis Aragon’s lover for several years just prior to the making of Negro. The pair would comb the docks and streets of East End London and other seaports looking for African artifacts.) By linking Benjamin, surrealism, and Cunard’s anthology, I read Cunard’s anthology as a disparate collection of historical ephemera, the archival detritus of the overlooked shards and fragments of an African and African-diasporic past. In placing avant-garde practices next to overlooked colonial histories, I show how Negro offers an alternative modernism of the colonized and racial margins. In this endeavor, I refuse – much as Puchner does – to create a linear history of the manifesto that culminates in the “death” of the avant-garde and the “death” of modernism. Rather, I am tracing the ongoing permutations of manifestos and other interruptive texts as they encounter different historical and political contexts. Negro is a documentary project and its interventions must be understood within the context of a revisionary history of colonial and racialized “peripheries” and “prehistories.” In the case of Negro, I am investigating how avant-garde rupture meets the occulted history of African and African-diasporic modernity and how it intervenes in the racialized ground of Anglo-European modernism. POLITICAL EPHEMERA

In Walter Benjamin’s 1931 essay, “Unpacking My Library,” he remarks that: There is no living library that does not harbor a number of booklike creations from fringe areas. They need not be stick-in albums or family albums, autograph books or portfolios containing pamphlets or religious tracts; some people become attached to leaflets and prospectuses, others to handwriting facsimiles or typewritten copies of unobtainable books; and certainly periodicals can form the prismatic fringes of a library.5

Cunard’s Negro can certainly qualify as a “booklike creation from a fringe area.” As Benjamin suggests, these border paraphernalia can take the form 4 5

Walter Benjamin, Reflections (New York: Harcourt, 1978), 182. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Harcourt, 1968), 66.


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of scrapbooks, political ephemera – such as manifestos – and other detritus of the archive. Anthologies, of course, are collections of a sort. They contain disparate literary, musical, or artistic passages, works, or pieces, and are usually framed by an introduction. This frame, as Brent Edwards has argued, “flesh[es] out [the anthology’s] history of use; and imagin[es] its scope of implication, its uses, its ‘future’.”6 Anthologies can often, as in the case of Alain Locke’s The New Negro and certainly of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, institute a group of writers as canonical and envision a future in which the national assimilation of the “Negro” occurs. Such was not the case with Cunard’s Negro. It was banned in the British West Indies and several West African colonies on the grounds of its “seditiousness,” and it prompted reactions from black activists and writers ranging from silence, to guarded praise, to great enthusiasm.7 6 7

Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 38. “Negro Anthology Banned by Trinidad as Seditious,” The New York Times, April 13, 1934. The Crisis, as well as left-leaning journals such as The Liberator and New Masses, did not review Negro. Henry Lee Moon praised Negro in both The New Republic and Amsterdam News, calling it a distinguished contribution to the “world literature of the black race” (The New Republic, October 24, 1934). The Afro-American ambivalently called the volume “one of the most pretentious and inclusive of any ever published” and noted that “much of [Cunard’s] material on injustices to the colored man is taken from the weekly press,” the very press that Cunard maligned in Negro – along with Harlem cliques, the NAACP and Du Bois – for catering too much to the white establishment (The Afro-American, March 31, 1934). But contributor Arturo Schomburg, who reviewed Negro for the Associated Negro Press, which was distributed to three hundred Negro papers around the United States, enthused: “We are highly indebted and express our keen delight for the unselfish contribution on the part of Nancy Cunard, to the cause of the downtrodden lowest man, in helping him to see the light on the road of human emancipation” (Nancy Cunard Collection, Harry Ransom Humanites Research Center, University of Texas at Austin [HRC]). Contributor Eugene Gordon recollected that the anthology was most frequently criticized at the time of its publication for being too wide in scope and too varied in content, and, surprisingly, for the fact that Cunard had ignored black women and youth. This latter criticism, Gordon felt, was due to fallout from her sexual relationships with black men and the lurid gossip that surrounded her. Problems with Negro at the time of publication stemmed from Cunard’s communist leanings and interracial sexual relations, not from her primitivism and racial essentialism (Nancy Cunard Collection, HRC). Further praise for Negro came from other black writers who contributed to it. Langston Hughes cabled Cunard immediately with the message: “Your book is marvelous.” He maintained a thirtyyear friendship with her and continued to praise the volume, borrowing from its folklore section for his 1960 anthology, An African Treasury (Langston Hughes Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University). Jazz pianist Henry Crowder, Cunard’s first black lover, to whom Negro is dedicated, enthused, “The gratitude of the Negro race is yours, and the admiration of all people of every race who believe in justice.” Crowder would later retract his praise in his memoir As Wonderful as That? William Pickens of the NAACP, Alain Locke, John Frederick Mathews, Taylor Gordon, Josephine Schuyler, and Eugene Gordon also wrote privately to Cunard to comment favorably on the volume. Taylor Gordon called it “the talk of the country” and a textbook for students who are inclined to “think black” (Nancy Cunard Collection, HRC). Nigerian contributor T. K. Utchay named his daughter Nancy and founded the Cunardia School in her honor (Hugh D. Ford, “Introduction,” in Nancy Cunard, Negro: An

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What could not be denied about Negro’s achievement, however, was its articulation of a transnational African and African-diasporic world. Negro was certainly not the first text to elaborate a black transnational solidarity. With a variety of political aims, W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Negro and The Crisis, Marcus Garvey’s Negro World and Black Man, other Anglophone black periodicals such as the New York Age, London-based The Keys, and Duse´ Mohamed Ali’s The Ethiopian Times and Orient Review, and Francophone journals such as La de´peˆche africaine and La Revue du monde noir aimed at creating transnational solidarities. (I am using the term transnationalism rather than internationalism as it was historically used by modernists, communists, and pan-Africanists. The term transnationalism better denotes how colonization and the slave trade created nation-states composed of multinational populations who are situated both within and without a given territorially-bound nation.) Yet Cunard’s Negro far outstripped previous efforts to document the formidable history and cultures of black people around the world. Negro’s transnational effort has, by and large, been obscured by critical attention to Cunard’s racial romanticism and her refusal to acknowledge her race and class privilege as a white vanguard poet and activist. These critics see Cunard freezing temporality into modern and nonmodern locations and racializing that divide into black and white. Critical protests over Cunard’s primitivism have, in part, resulted in Negro becoming a nearly forgotten anthology. Besides objections to Cunard herself, Negro’s idiosyncratic collection of documents of African and African-diasporic experience – including accounts of the middle passage, slavery, segregation, lynching, rape, forced labor, and hunger as well as black artistic, historical, and cultural achievements – has recently been read as a “personal and anecdotal [rather] than global collection.”8 I suggest, however, that Negro can be understood as recontextualizing white avant-gardist and socialist rupture within an African and African-diasporic modernity in order to explore the possibility of alternative modernisms. The anthology combines a historical reconstruction of African and African-diasporic pasts with the revolutionary impulses documented by Negro’s communist- and surrealistinspired contributions, especially its manifestos and interruptive montage

8

Anthology, ed. and abridged Hugh D. Ford (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1970), xxvii). Claude McKay refrained from contributing, saying that he had expected payment (Claude McKay Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University). Eric Walrond also declined to contribute. Petrine Archer-Straw, Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 168.


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forms. The collection, as an avant-garde event, in my estimation, reconfigures the relationships between race, nation, and modernity in a manner that allows for a revision of Eurocentric modernism. This reading undoubtedly goes against the grain of Cunard’s primitivist intentions when examined by themselves. But I propose that we also read Negro as a collective and transnational text that sutures African and African-diasporic experience together – their linguistic diversity, their generic fluidity, their wide-ranging and fragmented international and historical scope – to expose their gaps and contradictions. These gaps might be considered symptoms of transnationalism, its differences in unity, its uneven temporalities and locations, rather than its flaws. I see Negro as a fringe document, a border-crossing hybrid that has been historically overlooked as a signal articulation of the uneven race relations of the 1930s: situated as it is between anti-imperialist – yet often racially hierarchical – initiatives of white cosmopolitanism and an increasingly powerful and organized black transnationalism. Negro is a document of war against imperialism and capitalism. It does not deconstruct the color line, but rather it seeks to make clear the stakes involved for the underdeveloped world in a situation of ongoing capitalist accumulation and bourgeois forms of nationalism. At first glance, Negro does indeed appear to be a byproduct of modernist cosmopolitanism, offering from the standpoint of European universalism a collection of artifacts from “primitive” and “modern” cultures. The anthology – with its 200 entries by some 150 contributors (two-thirds of whom were black) and 385 illustrations – contains poetry, manifestos, history, ethnography, photographs, and rant. It traverses Europe, the United States, South America, the West Indies, and Africa, and includes hate mail, a confidential French military circular, advertisements, French children’s comics, folk songs and scores, ethnographic maps, and reproductions of African art. Its contributors include Zora Neale Hurston, Theodore Dreiser, W. E. B. Du Bois, Michael Gold, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Arthur Schomburg, and the poets Arna Bontemps, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Sterling Brown, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Alfred Kreymborg, and Louis Zukofsky, to speak only of the American portion of the anthology. Its international contributors include Jomo Kenyatta, T. K. Utchay, Ben N. Azikiwe, the Cuban poet Nicola´s Guilień, the Haitian poet and novelist Jacques Roumain, the Brazilian modernismo Mario de Andrade, George Padmore, Raymond Michelet, along with translations by Samuel Beckett, contributions by Richard Aldington, surrealists Andre´ Breton, Rene´ Crevel, Rene´ Char, Benjamin

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Peret, Yves Tanguy, Pierre Unik, Paul E´luard, Roger Callois, the South African writers William Plomer and Beatrice Hastings, and many others. In many ways, Negro testifies to Cunard’s mobility and access to circles of all sorts as a privileged cosmopolitan subject. It also gives evidence of the growing numbers of colonial elites at home in major metropolitan centers, if not necessarily the world. Cunard gathered material for the anthology between two transatlantic trips to the United States and the Caribbean. The anthology was made in New York, Paris, and London, where Cunard solicited contributions from members of avant-garde, scholarly, modernist, communist, pan-Africanist, and black entertainment circles. The occluded significance of Cunard’s Negro in accounts of modernism stems, in part, from the sheer critical difficulty of accounting for its contradictions and multiple temporalities: between its editorial endorsement of a programmatic communism and its contributions of sober historical scholarship, and between detailing the horrors of colonization and racism, the cultural and historical accomplishments and modernity of black people, and a jubilant and often primitivist celebration of popular black entertainers, folk art, and African arts.9 Michael North contends that the anthology’s “episodic nature” creates “a weirdly dissociative effect,” one that positions blacks within a rigid dichotomy as either “objects of pity or comedy.”10 But far more than a rigid dichotomy, the anthology aims at a “panorama” of black struggles and achievements against a racist modernity. While Cunard’s intent, at times, is “no less than a comprehensive history of the cultural, social, political, and artistic achievements of the black people of the world,” what surrealist Georges Sadoul called “une ve´ritable encyclope´die de la question ne`gre,” at others, her aim is much more provisional.11 Negro is not, Cunard claims, “a literary anthology,” but, rather, it aspires to achieve a certain method of accounting for race. Negro, as Cunard wrote to Claude McKay, is “a very 9

10 11

Reviewing Negro, Edward Thompson in The Observer (London, April 15, 1934) wrote that “This is the most difficult book I ever had to review . . . Its editor is without inhibitions, and has therefore been able to accept from every quarter and to put out her stuff as it came to her, straightforwardly. The result is not an anthology, but an encyclopedia, a book for two entirely different publics [the ultra-modern aesthetic public and the ‘square-toed sombre public’], each of which, I think, will look askance at the other.” Herbert Read in The Spectator (February 23, 1934) began his review by indicating that it was “no light matter to review; and its very varied contents are beyond the scope of a single reviewer” (277). However, he could boil down its purpose to being that of “a manifesto and a protest” (277). Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 191. Circular, April 1, 1931, Nancy Cunard Collection, HRC. Georges Sadoul quoted in Ford, “Introduction,” 148.


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large symposium indeed with a definite and clearly defined intent: to throw light on the appalling way the entire colour ‘question’ is handled.”12 Its method – demonstrated by Cunard’s manic accumulation of documents and photos of black experience and racism – can be compared to surrealist ethnography, with its found objects and recognition of the occult practices of everyday life. Negro collects the scraps and ephemera of black expressive life in order to patch together a history – combined with the revolutionary energy of vanguard communism – that can transform the present. That Cunard became all-consumed by her documentary project might be understood as a desire for another kind of life that entailed an abnegation of self. The “prismatic fringes” of the library, as Benjamin suggests above, operate through desire: one becomes “attached” to sundry periodicals, leaflets, manuscript copies, and other scraps of the past. Even after the anthology was published, Cunard obsessively added to it, cramming her battered, torn copy of Negro with more newspaper clippings and notes.13 Her desire for an alternative world registered itself through a frenzied accumulation of “stuff ” about the Negro. In so doing, Cunard sought to escape the privileged claustrophobia of her background through an identification with black diasporic and African cultures. RACE AND UNEVEN TIMES

In this section, I examine the avant-garde context within which Cunard organized Negro and connect the surrealists’ concerns with the fragments and detritus of modernity (as a form of social unconscious) with Cunard’s primitivist fascination with Africa and African-diasporic subjects. I do so because what might at first glance pass for primitivism tout court, when placed in the context of surrealist aesthetic practices, looks more like a radical revisioning of the historical present. I begin by returning to Benjamin, and his indication (in its emphasis on ephemera and the contingent) of the powerful influence that the French surrealist movement had on his thinking. Suggesting an unconscious symptom, Benjamin argues that a collection tells more about the collector than about the objects themselves).14 The collector attempts to reconstruct a past that is lost in order to give meaning to his or her own sense of haphazardness in the present. A collector’s mania reveals an excessive 12 13

Letter from Nancy Cunard to Claude McKay, January 28, 1932, Nancy Cunard Collection, HRC. Ford, “Introduction,” xi. 14 Benjamin, Illuminations, 59.

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disorder, a “whimsicality” and arbitrariness, that serves as “the scene” and “the stage” in and on which to perform the fate of their objects, their final appropriation by the owner: “The period, the region, the craftsmanship, the former ownership – for a true collector the whole background of an item adds up to a magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object.”15 The encyclopedic quality of a collection suggests a comprehensive yet contingent quality, marking a vanished past and attempting to fill in the present with found scraps of that hidden past. The collection provides a materialist history of the present, a collage that depends on the recontextualization and revision of a hidden past in order to construct a new kind of future. It fills in the present moment through reference to a vanished or nostalgic past that, if recontextualized and recirculated, might compose an alternative future to the ever-changing sameness under capitalism. One can witness this desire for an alternative to race relations and life more generally under capitalism in Cunard’s paean to Harlem in Negro, “Harlem Reviewed”: Notice how many of the whites are unreal in America; they are dim. But the Negro is very real; he is there. And the ofays [whites] know it. That’s why they come to Harlem – out of curiousity and jealousy and don’t-know-why. This desire to get close to the other race has often nothing honest about it . . . This [spectacle of Negroes entertaining whites] applies of course to the mass of whites who treat Harlem in the same way that English toffs used to talk about “going slumming.” The class I’m thinking of is “the club-man.” They want entertainment.16

In place of entertainment, Cunard finds the “restless, desire, brooding” of Harlem. She praises its nostalgia that articulates a “gorgeous roughness” composed of people in the street, their language and dress, and “the eternal radio seeping through everything day and night.”17 In short, she discovers in black expressive culture the material and affective means of embracing an alternative class- and race-based relationship to modernity. Though primitivist, it provides both an imaginative and real means of rejecting bourgeois culture. Cunard’s scandalous desire for the “Negro” puts herself, as collector, into the picture. She crosses the boundary between bohemian slumming and something entirely else. Her intensely personal but very public rupture with her mother, for instance, which occasioned the 1931 pamphlet “Black Man and White Ladyship: An Anniversary,” broke the 15 17

Benjamin, ibid., 60. Cunard, ibid., 73.

16

Nancy Cunard, Negro (London: Wishart, 1934), 69–70.


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taboo of privacy by publicly exposing her mother’s Anglo-American bigotry and hypocrisy. She combined matriphobia with radical politics to repudiate her class and race privilege, advocate racial justice, and critique British imperialism.18 In the pamphlet, distributed to all of Cunard’s friends and family (and a portion of it published in The Crisis), she refers to the color question “with its CLASH or SHOCK aspect” as it generates hysteria in her mother.19 Cunard writes, “she does not mind the Negroes now artistically or in an abstract sense but . . . oh, that terrible colour! (I invite Her Ladyship to send in writing a short definition of a Negro in the abstract sense).”20 Cunard’s strategy against racism is to generate written commentary on “Colour.” By documenting and collecting its material manifestation, she aims to concretize and show the lie of “race.” In a similar collecting fashion, her response to the press scandal that erupted while she was in Harlem gathering material for Negro was to invite the public to comment on why it was that Americans could not deal with race. On May 2, 1932, the New York Daily Mirror printed a story suggesting that Nancy Cunard came to Harlem to seduce Paul Robeson, who was staying at the same hotel as she. Both Cunard and Robeson denied the story by telegram, and when the story refused to die out, Cunard called a press conference. After discussing the purpose of her visit to Harlem, she asked: And now after your interest in my private affairs (I hope I have sufficiently satisfied this) I want something in return . . . Why are you Americans so uneasy of the Negro race? This question is the epitome of the whole colour question as it strikes a plain English person such as myself. Who’ll write me the best answer to this? I’ll print it in my book on Colour.21

Eventually, Cunard was forced to go into hiding on an upstate farm to escape constant press harassment. But in response to her query, she received approximately five hundred letters, of which two or three dozen contained obscenities and threats of abduction and violence. These letters, some of which Cunard reprinted in Negro, suggest the gender and sexual meanings read into her transgressive interest in “Negroes”: I don’t know what they call your kind in England but here in America they call them plain nigger fuckers or prostitutes of the lowest kind

18 19 20

Susan Stanford Friedman, “Introduction [to Nancy Cunard],” in The Gender of Modernism, ed. Bonnie Kimi Scott (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 65. Pamphlet, “Black Man and White Ladyship: An Anniversary,” Nancy Cunard Collection, HRC, 1. Ibid., 3. 21 Chisholm, Nancy Cunard, 195.

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You dirty lowdown cocksucker, you are trying to convince the white race of NYC that you came here to write a book about the negro race, we know that you came here to suck the black pricks I feel certain that in the eyes of this world of white humanity, you Miss Nancy Cunard, are lower, [sic] than the lowest of prostitutes, in your phoney outbursts, and belley-hoo [sic] you are making since your arrival to this country. If you for one moment think that you are fooling the US people with your book writing pretext, you are mistaken22

To be fair, Cunard also printed supportive letters by whites, including Southerners, thanking her for her work. But lest one thinks that Cunard’s boundary-crossing was a species of pure pleasure-mongering voyeurism, these letters alone testify to the political and social stakes of her work. In fact, Cunard received the fifteen hundred pounds needed for the printing of a thousand copies of her anthology by Wishart and Co. from the proceeds of a successful libel trial conducted in England over the outraged accusations circulating in the British press about the alleged affair. (No damages were collected from the American press.) Literally, then, the anthology rests on the scandal of interracial desire. Cunard herself commented very little on the gender implications of the scandal. For her, the “sex scandal” is merely an effort to detract from antiracist work: “any interest manifested by a white person, even a foreigner to America (such as myself ), is immediately transformed into a sex ‘scandal’.”23 She explains, “No chance is ever missed by the American press, and the type of American that believes it (vastly preponderant) to stir up as much fury as possible against Negroes and their white friends. To do this the sex motive is always used. As in the South it is always the lie of the ‘rape’ of white women by black men, so in the North it is always the socalled ‘scandal’ of inter-racial relations.”24 Cunard extends the implications of the Scottsboro Case, perhaps following Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s lead, to an analysis of how gender relations support race and class divisions wherever color and class lines exist, not merely in the South. BLACK TRANSNATIONALISM

Cunard’s initial interest in race and class politics stemmed, in part, from her affiliation with surrealism and, later, with communism. Both groups 22 23

Quoted in Maureen Moynaugh, “Cunard’s Lines: Political Tourism and Its Texts” New Formations, 34 (Summer 1998), 70–90, here 85–6; see also Cunard, Negro, 198–9. Cunard, ibid., 197. 24 Cunard, ibid., see also Moynaugh, “Cunard’s Lines,” 86.


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in the early 1930s concerned themselves with anticolonial and antiracist struggles in order to contest colonization. The “elsewhere” they envisioned offered a disjunctive and space-clearing gesture through which, in Negro, a black revolutionary tradition could emerge within the interstices of white cosmopolitanism. I am suggesting that surrealist attacks on progressivist or developmental history supported black revisionary histories and militant movements. To be sure, black revisionary history already existed prior to the avant-garde, but 1930s avant-garde radicalism would fuel (by relativizing history, attacking progressivism, demanding action) increasingly organized and militant anticolonial and antiracist movements. Negro articulates this crucial turning-point in history in which anticolonialism, Marxist internationalism, and avant-garde representational rupture combine to reshape the geopolitical and geocultural terrain of modernity in a manner that prefigures postcolonial hybridity. The format of the anthology borrows from surrealist ethnography, a practice that displayed the irrationality of the primitive, the unconscious, and the mad. For surrealists, African and Oceanic artifacts, in particular, represented the farthest limits of human sensibility. Through encounters with the primitive, surrealism sought freedom from oppressive social constraints and freedom to imagine and enact the future differently. They combined subjective aesthetic practices (primitivism) with an analysis of objective material conditions (Marxism and anticolonialism). The juxtaposition of civilized and savage contested European taxonomies and hierarchies of value. Consider Cunard’s 1931 plan for the anthology, which promised to contain: 1) The contemporary Negro in America, S. America, West Indies, Europe (writers, painters, musicians, and other artists and personalities). With photographs. 2) Musical section. Last century and modern American Negro compositions (Spirituals, Jazz, Blues, etc.) – Reproduced. As much African tribal music as obtainable – Reproduced . . . 3) African. Ethnographical. Reproductions of African Art. Ivory Carvings, etc. Recent African photographs. 4) Political and sociological (the colonial system, Liberia, etc.) by French, English and American writers – the French translated beside the original text. Accounts of lynchings, persecution and race prejudice. The book also to contain – Poems by Negroes, Poems addressed to them. A list of Museums containing African Art. Reproductions of Colored Advertisements25

Cunard’s juxtaposition of celebrities, musical scores, African art, political and sociological analysis, poetry, and racist memorabilia lacks an 25

Nancy Cunard Collection, HRC, n.p.

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overarching narrative. Like a scrapbook, it relies on the juxtaposition of many unrelated or loosely related materials. Similarly, surrealist ethnography uses montage-effects to defamiliarize everyday life and reveal unconscious taboos. In the technique of montage, contradictory materials (whether visual or verbal) are placed side by side and left unreconciled. There is no hierarchizing of significance. As a result, no one perspective can be said to dominate. The revolutionary energies provoked by surrealist techniques are not channeled into any authorizing practice but instead engage the reader to see the whole, including the gaps where difference exists without reconciliation and where translation produces misrecognition and the uncanny. It becomes an open-ended system. There is no subordination of one perspective into a single dominant perspective. Benjamin said that montage had “special, perhaps even total rights” as a progressive form because it “interrupts the context into which it is inserted.”26 It lacks a unifying argument and instead threatens to burst the confines of any form or normalizing context. But more than merely deconstructing European modernity, surrealist ethnography began to move away from primitivism tout court toward an affiliation with anticolonial and workers’ movements. The relation between surrealism and communism in the service of African and Africandiasporic history is a fascinating conjunction between avant-garde aesthetic practices and global anti-imperialism. Communism in the 1920s and early 1930s explicitly promoted a doctrine of anti-imperialism. But by 1935, the Communist Party made antifascist initiatives their focus and let anti-imperialist concerns dwindle in importance. However, their backing of anti-imperialist organizations before 1935 was groundbreaking. For instance, they supported anti-imperialist proposals within colonizing countries. The Resolution of the Communist International on the “Negro Question in the United States,” cited in Negro, declared that “these social antagonisms [the remnants of slavery] . . . stink of the disgusting atmosphere of the old slave market. This is downright robbery and slavewhipping barbarism at the peak of capitalist ‘culture’.”27 The Communist International also organized worldwide conferences of anticolonial leaders. After recognizing the success of the Universal Negro Improvement Association under Marcus Garvey, as well as that of the Pan-African Congresses of 1919 and 1921 organized by W. E. B. Du Bois, the leading members of the German Communist Party founded the 26 27

Quoted in Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 67. Cunard, Negro, 229.


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League against Colonial Oppression. They held an international conference in Brussels in 1927 that included future nationalist leaders Jomo Kenyatta (a contributor to Negro) and Jawaharlal Nehru. The League made important steps in coordinating various struggles for national liberation in the colonies and passed a resolution that proclaimed, “Africa for the Africans, and their full freedom and equality with other races and the right to govern Africa.”28 The Comintern’s resolutions regarding the right to self-determination of black peoples, including those in the southern United States and South Africa, affirmed that “Black people had their own unique revolutionary tradition.”29 This pronouncement, of course, was not news to black people. Prior to, but also mobilized through this affirmation, African and African-diasporic writers had recovered a worldwide black revolutionary tradition within modernity, but distinct from European traditions. Brent Edwards defines this tradition as both transnational and molded through attempts to appropriate and transform the discourses of internationalism . . . the discourse of international civil society as embodied by the League of Nations, the counter-universalism of proletarian revolution envisioned by the Communist International, and the globe-carving discourse of European colonialism.30

Black transnationalism borrowed, to varying extents, from communism, European liberalism, and black vernacular traditions. To begin with, contributors to Negro such as George Padmore, James W. Ford, and W. E. B. Du Bois affirmed a long history of black resistance, from Toussaint Louverture in Haiti to Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, and Gabriel Prosser in the United States and to the contemporary and controversial Haile Selassie in Ethiopia. Contributors to Negro recovered the history of African civilizations, the slave trade, and slave resistance articulated in and against Eurocentric modernity. This recovery of black history and cultures had an enormous impact on the transvaluation of racial identities and was a significant element of Negro’s aims. Moreover, Negro united across cultural and linguistic barriers a worldwide racial identity, a move that somewhat opened the idea of “race” to historical and geographical contingency without challenging racial difference itself. Negro articulated the underside of imperialism, the experience of multiple local histories interwoven into a provisional and transnational identity of the 28 29

Robin D. G. Kelley, “Introduction,” in C. L. R. James, A History of Pan-African Revolt (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1995), 7. Kelley, ibid., 7. 30 Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, 3.

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Negro (an identity, moreover, that emphasizes difference in unity). For instance, Gordon O. Bell, in an article in Negro entitled “The Negro in Barbados,” indicates the instability and incommensurability of the term “Negro”: There is a definite dissimilarity between the American and the West Indian interpretation of the term “Negro.” In America the definition is universally applied to those persons who are not 100 per cent. white; in the West Indies it is apparently reserved for those who are 100 per cent. black. Indeed it is noticeable that in the society of people of Negro descent the word seems taboo, and is religiously eschewed, the term “colored” being used to classify the multiplicity of shades existing between the pure white and the pure black. To call the average colored West Indian a Negro is to affront him.31

Reading across the discontinuities of diasporic and African locations in Negro – from the Congo, South Africa, Liberia, Kenya, West Africa, Uruguay, Brazil, British Guiana, Trinidad, Cuba, Grenada, Jamaica, Haiti, Europe, and the United States – produces a pragmatics of race that is performative. That is, these racial lines are not prelinguistic givens; rather, they are citations of previous scripts, repetitions of past usages that are open to change and difference. Negro’s boundaries and meanings are contingent and contested rather than, as often occurs in nationalist formations, metaphysical and fixed. The anthology requires that readers move between multiple temporalities (the old in the new) and between multiple locations and perspectives, including racist attitudes and European cosmopolitanism. This reading practice is mobile, improvisational, open-ended, and, importantly, critiques the racial ground of the modern, to which I return below. Despite Negro’s anticolonial and antiracist critique, it allows for primitivist perspectives to circulate freely and problematically in the anthology. For instance, Cunard’s cosmopolitan perspective and interests infuse the anthology. Her editorial comments are interspersed among contributions, hierarchizing the interpretation of its contents despite the anthology’s montage form. (For instance, she condemns Du Bois’s affiliation with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP] for catering to the bourgeois class.) Many of the white contributors (William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Robert Goffin) universalize their point of view, relegating Negroes to objects of history. In the Africa section, Cunard displays her bracelet collection, to which she adds a contextualizing caption that discusses the significance of the 31

Cunard, Negro, 484.


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bracelets for Ibo women in Nigeria: “With the older women these ivories are priceless treasures, and they will endure any hardships in preference to degrading themselves by selling them, however great the inducement may be.”32 Cunard’s caption alludes to the suffering that allowed these bracelets to come into her possession. Is she indifferent to or unaware of the irony of this? Or perhaps she attempted to exorcise this past when she staged her infamous bondage photos, in which the primitive beads she wears threaten to choke her (see Figure 1). Jane Marcus’s incisive reading of Cunard’s staging of herself as a “white Negress” asks: Can the figure of that white woman hanged, bound, manacled, enslaved – ever disrupt in private performance the racial fears of sexual mixing she wants to explode? . . . It is clear that there was some private connection between Cunard’s enactment of the erotics of the white slave in photographs made for her own pleasure, and her unshakeable commitment to the politics of protest against racism . . . How can one say that anyone’s motives are pure? Or deny the agency Cunard earned by performing the bondage of blacks in dress, art, and sexual style as an aid to political bonding in the struggle against racism?33

If one considers Negro’s documentary project as a whole, its aim is clearly to make visible exactly this sort of suffering and cross-racial eroticism in order to foster anti-imperialist and antiracist sentiments and action. The scale of one’s interpretation defines how to judge Negro. The anthology, as Cunard envisioned it, was to be a “symposium” for the ways in which “colour” is handled. The anthology frames “race” – here I borrow from George Hutchinson’s analysis of The New Negro anthology – as “a field of commerce and conflict.”34 Dismissing the most militant aspect of this conflict, critical appraisals of the anthology downplay Cunard’s communist pronouncements.35 These appraisals are in part correct, given that Cunard was never politically active in the Communist Party or in any other political organization. None the less, Cunard draws on communism as a unifying and militant force that rejects European universalism and promises social and political equality rather than assimilation for blacks. In the preface to Negro, Cunard proclaims that “The Communist world-order is the solution of the race 32 33 34 35

Cunard, ibid., 731. Jane Marcus, Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 134–6. George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 397. See, for example, Ford, “Introduction,” Edwards The Practice of Diaspora.

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Fig 1 Negative of Nancy Cunard in beads. Solarization by Barbara Ker-Seymer. Courtesy of Photography Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin.

problem for the Negro,” and she praises the virtues of the Soviet Union and its race relations.36 It has, she confidently asserts, “once and for all solved the ‘problem’ of races, turning instilled conflicts into co-operation, wiping out 36

Cunard, Negro, iii.


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the false concept of ‘inferiority’.”37 In one contribution to Negro, for example, surrealist Georges Sadoul compares French and Soviet children’s cartoons in order to show French imperial versus Soviet egalitarian (though paternalist) race relations.38 For my purposes, far more important than speculations about what the Soviet Union may have accomplished (and did not) in terms of race relations, is the appeal of revolutionary rupture to open the present moment to alternative visions and possibilities outside of European cosmopolitanism. Cunard’s preface concludes with a call, “The White Man is Killing Africa!” She elaborates, “I have ended it [the anthology] on this note, for the chord of oppression, struggle and protest rings, trumpetlike or muffled, but always insistent throughout.”39 The chord, collective, often dissonant, strikes one note and is held “throughout,” extending the present moment to envelop reconceptions of history. In this revisioning of history through recourse to an “elsewhere,” avant-garde rupture shares affinities with the discontinuous history of the black diaspora. The alternative history of transnational affiliation that is articulated through revolutionary rupture gives rise to a new politics of reading, one that interrupts cosmopolitan appropriation of other cultures by means of a multiply inflected modernity. As the chord rings out “trumpet-like or muffled” in a manner that distends the present moment, it creates the present moment as unevenly experienced, imbued with memories of an unredeemed past and tense with urgency regarding future possibilities. As Benjamin writes, “this ‘now time’ is recognizable as the truth of the past charged to the bursting point of time.”40 Because Cunard pronounces it, this note might, at first glance, appear to participate in an imperialist nostalgia, what Caren Kaplan describes as a remorse for the cultures and environments being destroyed by modernity even while continuing the same practices.41 But even as Cunard romanticizes the vanishing African and African-diasporic ways of life, she refuses European modernity that colonizes these cultures, which, in effect, opens a space for the articulation of an alternative modernity based on black transnationalism. Negro’s exhaustive statistical documentation of atrocities committed by Europeans across the African continent – of the division and theft of land, onerous taxation, forced labor in which workers die of hunger and 37 40 41

38 Cunard, ibid., iv. Cunard, ibid., 573. 39 Cunard, ibid., iv. Benjamin, Illuminations, 261. Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 59.

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exhaustion, the conscription of African soldiers to European armies, police and judicial repression, genocide, the destruction of traditions – views the history of Western political thought and practice through the perspective of Africa, its constitutive outside. I return to the question of an alternative modernity below. For now, I investigate more closely the interruptive temporality of the avant-garde event in order to make the case that manifestos and other event-texts are instrumental in opening the present moment to Benjamin’s “image of the past” as “it flashes up at a moment of danger.”42 Moreover, in Negro this image concerns the unredeemed past (experienced in the present) of colonial and racial suffering. Its moment of untimely danger reconfigures the relationship between race, modernism, and modernity. Cunard’s rejection of capitalist modernity operated in the best traditions of avant-garde modernism. She recalled “the indignation, the fury, the disgust, the contempt, the longing to fight” over the color bar and all it stood for that motivated Negro.43 Rejecting the historical present that created the segregation and class oppression of black people, she proclaims her anthology to be on the cutting edge of the new. Her 1931 circular, which announces the formation of a book on Colour (Negro’s first title), asks for “outspoken criticism.” She envisions the collection as an antibourgeois gesture and promises that this will be “the first time such a book has been compiled in this manner. It is primarily for Coloured people and it is dedicated to one of them. I wish by their aid to make it as inclusive as possible.”44 By any estimation, Cunard successfully published what every anthology is: an event. Anthologies make history by their very publication and they repeat other histories as they script their intervention. (As indicated earlier, however, the critical reception of an anthology conditions the extent to which that history is made or forgotten.) Her call for contributions produces a scaffolding of future expectations of what the anthology will be. She proclaims: “I want outspoken criticism, comment and comparison from the Negro on the present-day civilisations of Europe, American, South America, the West Indies, African Colonies, etc. . . . individual documents, letters, photographs from those that have travelled and can judge of the attitude of diverse countries and races.”45 This call for the massing of archival documentation serves as a founding moment of the anthology, which has prompted literary scholars to call this 42 44

Benjamin, Illuminations, 255. 43 Nancy Cunard to Hugh Ford, Nancy Cunard Collection, HRC. Circular, April 1, 1931, Nancy Cunard Collection, HRC. 45 Circular, Ibid.


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circular a manifesto.46 And while I would argue against this analogy as an unnecessary dilution of the manifesto genre, the two forms share a performative function. Unlike the European vanguardist manifestos I have previously explored, the documentary challenge of Negro’s circular seeks to compile “images of the past” that open the script of “the new” to include black experience and culture. The historical and temporal disjunction of the newly visible racial margin reconfigures “the modern” as a future anterior. The “new” becomes a dangerous confrontation between an overlooked racial past and the ever-changing same that results in a radically re-envisioned future. Yet the circular shares an affinity with European vanguardist manifestos in that it relies on the rhetoric of the new. It presents a prefatory explanation of new art and literature by a new group to come, and the anthology becomes the realization of its call. As in typical modernist ruptures, other anthologies (such as The New Negro and Fire!!) are by default declared superseded in favor of the “new” anthology. Cunard announces that the anthology will be “the first” of its kind and original in scope. Indeed, the scope of Negro, with its painful, unsettling documentation of forced labor, chain gangs, the middle passage, slave resistance, lynching, and poverty, enacts what Neil Lazarus has called modernism’s absolute refusal to accommodate itself to modernity as it exists: “what at least some modernist work has done from the outset: namely, says ‘no’; refuses integration, resolution, consolation, comfort; [it] protests and criticizes.”47 Modernism’s refusal to cooperate with bourgeois modernity finds its critical and racial edge in Negro, an edge that challenges a Eurocentric understanding of modernism. The modernist energy of rupture functions as a space-clearing gesture through which modernity can be revised according to African and African-diasporic perspectives. In addition to contextualizing and revising Negro identity, the ground of white liberalism was excavated as well. Some contributors to Negro subjected the contradictions and hypocrisies of a universalized European history to critical scrutiny. For example, the surrealist manifesto in Negro, “Murderous Humanitarianism,” signed by Andre´ Breton, Roger Caillois, Pierre Unik, Benjamin Pe´ret, Rene´ Char, Rene´ Crevel, Paul E´luard, and Martinicans J. M. Monnerot and Pierre Yoyotte, targets “counterfeit liberalism” with its notion of progress: “It is 46 47

Alan Warren Friedman, ed., Beckett in Black and Red: The Translations for Nancy Cunard’s Negro (Lexington: Kentucky University Press, 2000), xix. Neil Lazarus, “The Politics of Postcolonial Modernism,” in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 423–38, here 431.

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no good blustering about the Antilles and the ‘happy evolution’ that has enabled them [blacks of the Antilles] to be assimilated, or very nearly, by France.”48 In place of such ameliorism, the surrealists declare “Revolution first and always.”49 This break from continuous, reformist discourse for the surrealists occurs not simply by ushering in the “new” but by staging a disruptive confrontation between the familiarity of France and its strange territories, with which it is more than ever closely entwined. Rather than using the colonies and colonial display to normalize European modernity (as did, for instance, the International Colonial Exhibition of Paris, held in 1931), the surrealists confronted European narcissistic self-satisfactions. They did this much as they organized their exhibit protesting the Colonial Exhibition, called “The Truth about the Colonies.” In “The Truth about the Colonies” the surrealists articulated a crisis of modernity as they punctured the smooth unfolding of modern time with the assemblages of tribal objects, polemical graphics, and Western religious objects resignified as the fetishized ritual artifacts of Catholicism. The surrealist manifesto also displaces the spatial and temporal ordering of modernity to bring the shock of anticolonial war to France. They announce: “We Surrealists pronounced ourselves [in response to the 1925 French war against Morocco] in favour of changing the imperialist war, in its chronic and colonial form, into a civil war.”50 This civil war interrupts self-glorification and self-identity. Describing France as “hideously inflated from having dismembered Europe, made mincemeat of Africa, polluted Oceania and ravaged whole tracts of Africa,” the surrealists reject an abstract universal (France as harbinger of liberty, equality, and fraternity) and instead make concrete a gluttonous, butchering France “hideously inflated” and morally corrupt, descriptions that match those often used to describe the colonial “problem.”51 The terrain of the world is cannibalized by France. The surrealists’ revision of national mythology attempts to alter narratives of modernity where “civilized” men travel to savage territories and back to the “past.” Similarly, their strategy in “The Truth about the Colonies” exhibit contests the colonial temporal and geographical order of things through the montage of tribal and European “modern” artifacts. The moment’s urgency in the manifesto is underscored by a photograph of a “Colonial Negro tailor in a small factory in France.”52 This shot is still and dark; it gives a sense of waiting, but its calm, smooth 48 51

Cunard, Negro, 574. 49 Cunard, ibid., 574. 52 Cunard, ibid. Cunard, ibid., 575.

50

Cunard, ibid.


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detachment also contrasts with the manic and barbaric excesses of France. It positions the “Colonial Negro” squarely in modernity (in the factory) and as a force of revolution. The photograph provides a sense of lived immediacy and contact with the physical presence of the colonial suffering in the center of empire. Yet inscribed as a photographic image, he represents a present moment lost forever. The unfulfilled need for redemption might potentially be altered in the present moment of revolutionary change. The present is pregnant with anticipated change, thickened but also haunted by a past of unredeemed suffering. Lived experience expands to take in the waiting of the black proletariat and the expectation that modernity will arise from there, as the manifesto states, as a “torrent of those energies . . . will close over [the Frenchman’s] head.”53 Benjamin, in his essay on surrealism, locates revolutionary potential in what might otherwise appear to be the detritus of modernity. I suggest that the surrealists wished to draw attention to this potential in the contingent photo of the black worker. Benjamin writes: “Only when in technology body and image so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself to the extent demanded by The Communist Manifesto.”54 The Communist Manifesto demands action now: a transformation of the narrative of suffering into a collective physical explosion of the suppressed past in the present that transcends the repetition of the same. Moreover, Benjamin draws attention to the body at the center of the popular revolutionary impulses in a manner that crucially revises the more abstract progressivism of Marx and Engels’s Manifesto. The practice of liberty, for Benjamin as well as for Foucault, begins at the site of the body. While these beliefs in the revolutionary potential of the Negro may be romanticized – the Negro is believed to be elsewhere – and thus surrealism participates in an exoticized primitivism, there is also the uncanny presence of the familiar and ordinary in the photograph. Subjects such as the black tailor might be said to dream a future revolution that never came, what Langston Hughes calls “dreams deferred” or Michael Hanchard calls a “futures past” in need of redemption.55 The lost present becomes an aspect of the future anterior, a 53 55

54 Cunard, ibid. Benjamin, Reflections, 191–2. Michael Hanchard, “Afro-Modernity: Temporality, Politics, and the African Diaspora,” in Alternative Modernities, ed. Dilip Parameshwar Goankar (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 272–98, here 279.

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past event whose promise can only be fulfilled in the future and which renders the present incomplete. The archival materials in Negro generate such revolutionary discharge by transforming the historical constraints of global capitalism that place black workers in slave-wage jobs into a discontinuous but unified worldwide anti-imperialist force. This force includes those forgotten in the past. Negro contains many references to these occluded subjects through its archival retrieval. In John L. Spivak’s essay in Negro, “Flashes from Georgia Chain Gangs,” he scours the files of the Georgia prison system: “the pathetic letters from convicts complaining of cruelty and barbarity, the doctors’ reports on sickness and injuries and deaths, the punishment reports – those little slips of paper gathering dust that told the stories of hopeless lives.”56 Letters such as this one from Eugene Brown, sent from Gwinnett county on May 2, 1931: Mr. E L Reany lissen hear Mr Reiny This is Eugne Brown talking Mr Reiney I am begging you with tears in my eyies for a trancefor Becais I cannot make my time here Becais this worden and county C B M is beating us over the head with pick handle and they draw their guens on us and make us stand and let these trustes Beat us up and Let the hare gun to Mr Reiny I dont Belive that you know how they is treating us prizners you auto come and see Mr Reiney I want you to do all you can I am willing to go anywhere and make my Time Becais my hand is all messed up and every time I ask the doctor for anything they is ready to punish me my hand is so bad till I cant hardely hold a shurvle and I am asking you now for help I am looking for your awancer wright away Yors, Eugne Brown.57

In response to these forgotten scraps from the past, black transnationalism calls for unity in difference. James W. Ford, the 1932 Communist Party candidate for Vice President of the United States, concludes his discussion of “Communism and the Negro” in Negro with the following call: We admonish our brothers in Africa and the West Indies who are held in subjugation by British, French and Italian imperialism, to also embrace Communism and to unite with our brothers in China and India for national liberation, and with the revolutionary working class in the mother countries to overthrow world capitalist-imperialism and establish world-Communism.58

This latent possibility haunts the still image of the black tailor and the desperate appeal of Eugene Brown in the Georgia chain gang. The patchwork assemblage of Negro articulates nostalgia and loss as well as revolutionary resistance. 56

Cunard, Negro, 211.

57

Cunard, ibid., 213.

58

Cunard, ibid., 287.


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One can still point to the revolutionary romanticism of surrealist readings of the black proletariat. They impute to the “Negro” tailor a subversive intent merely because he is marginal. But the same cannot be said of the manifesto reprinted in the “Africa” section of Negro. It circulated in the Belgian Congo and takes the form of Engels’s early version of the Communist Manifesto, that of catechism or dialogue, between a naı¨ve worker and a politicized organizer. For instance, the first question “What is a Negro?” is answered: “A Negro is a man like any other, whose skin is black as the skin of Europeans is white and that of Arabs is brown.”59 Race is a particularity that fails to negate the universality of the Negro subject as a “man.” The next question is: “Are Negroes treated like men in the Congo?” “No, in the Congo Negroes are treated as beasts and often worse than beasts.” “Give an example of this.” “A dog can go into a white man’s cafe´, club, cinema, or house. A Negro cannot.”60

A crucial difference between the surrealist and Belgian Congo manifestos is that of societies “structured in dominance,” the need to simultaneously critique modernity and nation-building in one location, France, and embrace it – albeit differently, within its own local idiom and history – in the Congo.61 In the 1931 surrealist manifesto “First Appraisal of the Colonial Exhibition,” the surrealists state that “just as the opponents of nationalism have the duty to defend the nationalism of oppressed peoples, so the opponents of that art which is the fruit of capitalist economy also have the duty to place the arts of oppressed people dialectically in opposition to it.”62 In an engagement with Marxist thought as a solution to the problem of colonization, the black/white or metropolitan/colonial divide is baldly dialectical. The contradictions are not deconstructed, at least not until synthesis becomes possible. Instead, the surrealists embrace the paradox of being against one form of social organization for their own location and supportive of it for the colonies. The Congo manifesto, too, demands nation-building and an increased engagement with modernity within its colonized location. It lists workers’, soldiers’, and villagers’ demands: They are asking to be masters in their own country, to be able to come and go as freely as the white man does – they are asking to learn what the whites 59 61

62

Cunard, ibid., 794. 60 Cunard, ibid. Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,” Black British Cultural Studies, ed. Houston A. Baker, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), 16–60, here 33. Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijałkowski, eds, Surrealism against the Current: Tracts and Declarations (London: Pluto Press, 2001), 186.

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learn – they are asking for the right to edit their own newspapers – they are asking for the rights to gather freely – they are asking for the right to trade as it suits them – they are asking for the right to travel without restrictions – they are asking not to continue having to pay the native tax – they are asking for the liberation of Simon Kibangi and all others who are in prison for having defended their rights.63

Their strategy for achieving these demands is to unite as one nation, “Bangala with the Batetele, the Azande, the Swahili, the Bakongo.” “By what means?”: By making this manifesto known. By getting together in the villages, in the work centres, in the army camps and discussing it. By backing up strikes and the risings that are breaking out everywhere in the Congo. By forming groups for their own defense.64

The manifesto demands action to build a practical consciousness of a black revolution underway. It does this by exposing the contradictions of imperialism and directing action toward the means of achieving unity, rights, and sovereignty. The Congo manifesto incorporates Marxist demands for better labor conditions with human rights and Kimbanguism, an indigenous millenarian religious movement led by Simon Kimbangu. Kimbangu combined Protestantism with ancient Congo ideas concerning the organization of the universe, and urged against witchcraft and magic and for the restoration of moral order. He miraculously healed the sick and dying and preached anticolonialism. Arrested in September 1921 by the Belgian authorities, he died in prison thirty years later, yet the church he founded thrives today in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. NEGRO AND THE RACIAL GROUND OF THE MODERN

The previous section explored the consciousness-raising function of Negro’s manifestos. The surrealist manifesto critiqued European liberalism and its reliance on primitivist desire, the othering of colonized subjects. The Belgian Congo workers’ manifesto articulated its colonized position as an alternative modernism, drawing on elements of international Marxism along with indigenous and Western religious practices. This final section argues that Negro critiques the foundational racial 63

Cunard, Negro, 795.

64

Cunard, ibid.


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structure of modernity itself. In temporal terms, modernity constitutes itself as what is new as opposed to what is traditional or old. Nations and peoples who make history are modern, unlike those who are deemed prehistorical, and that dividing line is cast in racial terms. My contention is that Negro effectively intervenes at both levels: consciousness-raising and critique – history and theory – and that the two levels combined are necessary for anticolonial and antiracist activism. This final section considers how black modernity is performatively articulated within the amorphous, discontinuous materials of the anthology. Theodore Mason calls the publication of anthologies of underrepresented peoples “both text and event,” a literary production carrying extra literary weight that makes visible the process by which a community “represent[s] and codif[ies] in a formal way the history of its own expressivity.”65 While Cunard is a privileged outsider to the community she represents, the intention of the anthology, she claims, is to speak from within and to a newly visible collective (“coloured people”), who announce their presence and engagement in modernity. This effort is necessarily belated given that modernity has long been articulated as a European-centered phenomena. This very belatedness then becomes performative, a reiteration of previous scripts. The time-lag of modernity indicates modernity in all its global complexity, the articulations “structured in dominance” that comprise its world-system. But the time lag also allows for difference (Benjamin’s “leap in the open air of history”) in the repetitions of modernity’s script. Negro, as Brent Edwards has argued, articulates “over and over again” the link “between politics and performance.”66 And, so, I wish to think of Negro in light of its performative interruption (its repetition and difference) that serve as a critical intervention in the racial structure of modernity. Its status as an avant-garde event opens historicism to overlooked histories of blacks in the New World, biographies of uncanonized black authors, and subaltern experiences within the imperial center (the U. S., Britain, and France) and throughout the black Atlantic and Africa. Negro testifies to the way in which avant-garde rupture can open the present moment to the forgotten histories and peoples disavowed but present in modernity. These forgotten histories critique European-centered modernity as they present alternative forms of black modernism. 65 66

Theodore O. Mason, Jr., “The African-American Anthology: Mapping the Territory, Taking the National Census, Building the Museum,” American Literary History, 10, 1 (1998), 185–98, here 193. Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, 317.

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This politics of reading is not straightforward. Rather, it is angled, asymmetrical, and refracted through black relations to the white world. Consider Alain Locke’s congratulations to Cunard on the publication of her anthology: I congratulate you, – almost enviously, on the finest anthology in every sense of the word ever compiled on the Negro. When I saw the announcements, I feared a scrap book, but by a miracle of arrangement, you have built up a unity of effect and a subtle accumulative force of enlightenment that is beyond all contradiction and evasion.67

Rather than the unwieldy failure (“a scrap book”) that Negro is often taken for, Locke emphasizes “unity of effect,” a delayed force that achieves its ends through the slow, “subtle” prism of black modernity. Here, the term “scrap book” might mean a collection of unrelated fragments, but Locke realized, as we might today, that these disparate pieces build a sense of unity in difference, a transnational allegiance against racism. Moreover, its “accumulative force” of meaning depends upon its readers’ experiential encounter with it. Nowhere is this more evident in Negro than its diverse musical scores (folk tunes like “Cricket Gills and Dried Barnabis,” “Congo Songs,” and “Negro protest songs”) that demand its readers’ participation to make meaning. One needs to “play” or “hum” Negro. By “arrangement,” each article, photo, and poem contributes to a heterogeneous, fissured understanding of the black diaspora. Brent Edwards suggests a politics of reading diaspora as that which navigates the “break” modeled by Negro’s very difficulties and discontinuities. Reading across such discrepancies, he argues, negotiates the condition of the African diaspora, its demand for translations across modernity.68 And, I would add, that attention to occluded histories revises our concept of avant-garde rupture, not as a clean break from the past, but, rather, as a “refiguration of temporality” that opens the present moment to its radical incompleteness, its “time out of joint.”69 Negro was deeply invested not only in breaking from narratives of Western progress and bourgeois complacency but in presenting an alternative history, that of color. This crossing and recrossing the expanse of modernity, I suggest, opens the present moment to a “future anterior.” Aldon Nielsen glosses such temporality as follows: 67 68 69

Alain Locke to Nancy Cunard, April 14, 1934, Nancy Cunard Collection, HRC, n. p. Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, 13. Krzysztof Ziarek, The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 19, and Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994), 3.


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In order for intellectuals of the African diaspora to posit New World Africans as progenitors of modernity, in order for us, now, to follow them in thinking of African peoples as not simply subjects encompassed by modernity but as active producers of the modern, we must have modernity already there before us, and this is why all such writings are haunted by a “post-” and why all such histories must immediately be seen as revisionist.70

This temporality, he adds, accounts for African-American modernity being usually posited as a “counter” or “alternative” modernity that interrupts a singular modernity with a particularly disjunctive cultural crossing. Modernity must already have been in place in order for “us” to recognize its counter-culture. Zora Neale Hurston, foregrounded prominently in Negro, affirms this temporality in her essay, “Characteristics of Negro Expression.” She first acknowledges the Negro’s belated position in narratives of modernity. She admits that the Negro is often said to be “lacking in originality,” hence incapable of the “new” or of doing anything but mimicking the white man.71 Then, Hurston spins this timelag around to make this mimicry constitutive of black modernity: “While [the Negro] lives and moves in the midst of a white civilisation, everything he touches is re-interpreted for his own use. He has modified the language, mode of food preparation, practice of medicine, and most certainly the religion of his new country, just as he adapted to suit himself the Sheik hair-cut made famous by Rudolph Valentino” his resignification actively constitutes black experience as different from everyday dominant modes of perception in modernity.72 It opens the present by bringing together fragments of discarded and overlooked materials – remnants of black life: hieroglyphic language; active, emotive religious customs; and geographical/racial identification (a black man sporting a Sheik hair-cut). But rather than inscribing these remnants onto a premodern past, Hurston demands that they be understood as a confrontation of dominant narratives of modernity in the present moment. For instance, she asserts that Negro folklore is “not a thing of the past” but still in the making: “Its great variety shows the adaptation of the black man: nothing is too old or too new, domestic or foreign, high or low, for his use. God and the Devil are paired, and are treated no more reverently 70

71

Aldon Nielsen, “The Future of Allusion: The Color of Modernity,” in Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity, ed. Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 39. 72 Cunard, Negro, 42. Cunard, ibid., 43.

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than Rockefeller and Ford.”73 The bricoleur is detached from sacred narratives of nation, class, culture, and religious cosmology. He resignifies these disparate fragments in new forms. The aesthetic aura (of detached, ritualistic art forms) disappears as Hurston positions black folk culture as an avant-garde undoing of modernity’s empty, futile forms. What could be more modern, capable of grasping the contingent and ephemeral, the exotic and the detritus of modernity, than a black painter of modern life? More than effecting a transvaluation of black culture, Hurston undermines the racialized ground of the modern. She demonstrates how black resignification has been adopted by white culture as the sign of the modern and repeated with a difference. As blacks adapt whites’ musical instruments to their own ends, those modifications are adopted by the white man himself and then reinterpreted. Hurston glosses this dizzying exchange as follows: “Paul Whiteman is giving an imitation of a Negro orchestra making use of white-invented musical instruments in a Negro way.”74 Hurston’s mise en abıˆme of performing racial difference, as Michael North has noted, is more than turning the tables on white judgments of Negro mimicry. Rather, North says, it is precisely because it [Negro art] is already imitative that it cannot be further imitated. It is precisely the self-conscious awareness, the ironic indirection, of black art and language that makes it original and impossible to mimic. White performers, because they are unself-conscious, naı¨ve, and obsessed with a false concept of originality, are helpless to rival the race they long to emulate.75

While white modernity has long sought representations of blackness to affirm the modernism of their art, blacks have reinterpreted these representations of themselves, and so folded the linear temporality of the modern into a “post” within black modernity, a future anterior. Negro dismantles the racial subtext of the modern from the opposite direction as well. The surrealist Rene´ Crevel’s surrogate essay, “The Negress in the Brothel,” is omitted from the table of contents of Negro. Fearing censorship on account of the explicit language and content in this essay, Cunard printed the essay separately through the Utopia Press in London and inserted it without page numbers into the anthology (its Roman numerals I, II, III mark the gap). It both literally and figuratively articulates a gap between an erotic desire for interracial intimacy and how that desire is manifested within modernity’s racial organization. It names within this overlooked location the repressed black female sexuality erased 73

Cunard, ibid., 42.

74

Cunard, ibid., 43.

75

North, The Dialect of Modernism, 182.


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by Cunard’s attention to white women’s liaisons with black men. Crevel names the fetish of race as the enabling condition of modernism and locates its formative moment in Baudelaire’s poetry: “Charme inattendu d’un bijou rose et noir: Baudelaire adores the dark flesh of Jeanne Duval.”76 The structure of this relationship, Crevel writes, is akin to “the Taylor system with division of labor [sic].”77 Moreover, the brothel and drawing-room mutually constitute each other in modernity, the brothel compensating for the alienation attendant to stifling bourgeois society: “Even when for one reason or another [the Frenchman] is obliged to remain at home [rather than in the colonies] he demands to be entertained and debauched by the exotic curiousity that lifts him clear of the national fact into an illusion of renewal.”78 Interracial intimacy cannot be achieved in this scenario; it, too, is a product of the same forces that create modernity’s abstractions of labor, exchange, and ideas, the Taylorization of work, and, here, of consumption. Modernity creates the spectacle of race, a “scenic organisation,” in which the “object of desire becomes an object in the dećor of desires.”79 The black prostitute is seen indirectly, through a racial organization of society. The gutter, the inadmissible, the venal are inscribed onto the “erotic machinery” of Baudelaire’s relationship with Jeanne Duval. As such, Crevel accuses Baudelaire of anticipating reprisals from critics who would deprecate his “liaison with this whore” and making fine poetry from the dilemma. The structure of sadism and superiority represented in this relationship demonstrates, he writes, a “hypocritical servility before things as they are.”80 This servility to the racial organization of modernity not only produces the means by which modernism constitutes itself in relation to alterity, but it also, Crevel insists, contributes to the eroticized mise en sce`ne by which white audiences gaze at black entertainers: “Hence the popularity of Martinique jazz, Cuban melodies, Harlem bands and the entire tam-tam of the Colonial Exhibition.”81 White modernism, as it partakes of a racial obsession with alterity, realizes itself in commodified black entertainment. Puncturing this reified, sterile structure of white voyeurism of blacks, Hurston resignifies black performance as akin to the dandy in its self-asspectacle.82 Like Baudelaire’s self-fashioning as flaˆneur, which Benjamin 76 80 82

79 Cunard, Negro, II. 77 Cunard, ibid. 78 Cunard, ibid., III. Cunard, ibid. 81 Cunard, ibid., II. Cunard, ibid., III. Elisa F. Glick writes that “the black dandy conflates aesthetics with the cultural politics of black nationalism and consolidates anxieties about African Americans as modern subjects. They rebel against both wage slavery and the imperatives to perform a racialized construction of Otherness.”

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calls “a publicity stunt” necessitated by the poet’s “loss of halo,” the dandy signals the canceled distance of the aura. The disenchantment of art necessitates for Baudelaire an “exhibit of his own person on the market.”83 So, too, black performance presents the commodification of self, a construction of black identity for white onlookers. Hurston asks her audience: “Who has not observed a robust young Negro chap posing upon a street corner, possessed of nothing but his clothing, his strength and his youth? Does he bear himself like a pauper? No, Louis XIV could be no more insolent in his assurance.”84 Though Hurston likens the dandy to the French aristocracy in his coldness and pride of bearing, she domesticates him within a heteronormative structure of reproduction: this dandy has a female counterpart: “A Negro girl strolls past the corner lounger. Her whole body panging and posing . . . A hippy undulation below the waist that is a sheaf of promises tied with conscious power. She is acting out ‘I’m a darned sweet woman and you know it’.”85 They betray what Baudelaire would call a “characteristic quality of opposition and revolt”: that which is “finest in human pride, of that compelling need . . . of combating and destroying triviality.”86 He calls this a “native energy,” a “new kind of aristocracy,” the “last spark of heroism amid decadence.”87 Effecting detachment through their self-creation, Hurston’s black flaˆneurs inject desire into a black modernity: “These little plays by strolling players are acted out daily in a dozen streets in a thousand cities, and no one ever mistakes the meaning.”88 In narrating these scenes as performance, Hurston draws attention to their status as collective ritual. Negro expression, Hurston contends, is a communal art. It is an active constitution of the everyday as “experience,” of intimacy blended with detachment that produces a conscious selfcreation whose meaning will only be completed by the audience. Negro art, because its possibilities can only be realized through its “beholders,” proves, in Hurston’s estimation, their superiority in art from whites. She explains: “The difference in the two arts is this: the white dancer attempts to express fully; the Negro is restrained, but succeeds in gripping the beholder by forcing him to finish the action the performer suggests.”89 Negro dancing is “dynamic suggestion” that “gives the impression that the dancer will do more.” The dancer assumes a pose of flexed knees and a

83 86 87

Elisa F. Glick, “Harlem’s Queer Dandy: African-American Modernism and the Artifice of Blackness,” Modern Fiction Studies, 49, 3 (2003), 414–42, here 418. Benjamin, Reflections, 355. 84 Cunard, Negro, 39. 85 Cunard, ibid., 39. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays [1863] (New York: Phaidon, 1964), 28. Baudelaire, ibid., 28. 88 Cunard, Negro, 39. 89 Cunard, ibid., 41–2.


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ferocious face and “thrusts the upper part of the body forward with clenched fists, elbows taut as in hard running or grasping a thrusting blade. That is all.” The spectator, on the other hand, “adds the picture of ferocious assault, hears the drums and finds himself keeping time with the music and tensing himself for the struggle . . . That is the very reason the spectator is held so rapt. He is participating in the performance himself – carrying out the suggestions of the performer.”90 The dialogics of art, the experience of imagining its possibilities, transforming the everyday into a jungle fantasia, opens the present moment to its political unconscious, those narratives that legitimize colonization. Rather than promoting romantic subjectivity – the expressive individual self, articulated in and through an autonomous aesthetic – Hurston’s anthropological vision situates the Negro within a community with which he interacts, the objective social world. Hurston posits Negro expression as discontinuous with the present and able to reformulate modern life through the prism of black performativity. As such, it forms a characteristically avant-garde refiguration of temporality. It injects into modern life new modes of sentiment and an “elsewhere,” both part of and “post” modernity. But while Hurston’s reconfiguration of Negro expression and Crevel’s analysis of white desire for blackness conceptually challenge the racial ground of the modern, their analyses remain static. They are, in effect, caught by an anthropologically local gaze. It is only when Hurston’s and Crevel’s writings are considered alongside Negro’s consciousness-raising documents of rupture – its manifestos, preface, and political calls to action – as well as its expressions of white racial superiority that a black transnational resistance to global imperialism can arise. In articulating a black transnationalism as a counter to capitalist modernity, Negro’s avantgarde scrapbook form unsettles racial and class hierarchies, offering in its stead a way of linking together African and black diasporic experiences in the context of resistance to colonialism and racism. Specifically, the black diasporic writers in the anthology offer what Paul Gilroy calls “a counterculture of modernity,” based on performative interruption of the smooth narrative unfolding of modern time.91 In this “counterculture of modernity,” we can see “the future oriented present” of black diasporic modernism as giving rise to “culturally distinctive innovations” that are 90 91

Cunard, ibid., 41. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 38–40.

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“historically redemptive of a sense of past.”92 Negro’s reworking of an unredeemed past offers what Benjamin calls “a leap in the open air of history.” It anticipates the postcolonial era of colonial national sovereignty, and perhaps, in some future future, it heralds a postneocolonial era, too. Negro, as a “booklike creation from a fringe area,” is an innovative, border document in the best sense, one that generates new ways of imagining how modernism travels: its gaps, discontinuities, conflicts, and historical differences. Moreover, the recontextualization of manifestos and other forms of avant-garde rupture in the anthology demands that we understand them less as a clean break from the past (and the progressivist notion of history that this sort of rupture entails) than as a recrossing of the expanse of modernity, a return to the past with a difference. In the next chapter, I read across the color line as I transpose, transgress, and translate the activist texts of Virginia Woolf, C. L. R. James, and Aime´ and Suzanne Ce´saire as a crossing and recrossing of the terrain of modernity. 92

Frank M. Kirkland, “Modernity and Intellectual Life in Black,” The Philosophical Forum, 24, 1–3 (Fall–Spring 1992–3), 136–65, here 159.

CHAPTER

6

Reading across the color line: Virginia Woolf, C. L. R. James, and Suzanne and Aime´ Ce´saire

At the outset of World War Two, Virginia Woolf ’s posthumously published novel Between the Acts (1941) predicts a postcolonial world. In the novel, the English history pageant staged by local villagers concludes with civilization in ruins “rebuilt (witness man with hod) by human effort; witness also woman handing bricks [building a wall] . . . Now issued a black man in fuzzy wig; coffee-coloured ditto in silver turban; they signify presumably the League of . . .”1 Postwar civilization would be rebuilt, Woolf imagines (with a good dose of racial caricature thrown in), in a manner that includes the sovereign participation of African and Asian nations mediated through the League of Nations. In envisioning postwar development, time unfolds progressively. Black and brown nations follow the lead of white civilizations: man and woman (presumably white) rebuild the world and “now” the black and brown men emerge to signify an international community. Woolf brackets the question of development and modernity in the colonized world in this scene, and she avoids the question of racial difference. The black and brown men conform to a European image of Africans and Asians: the English villagers perform these roles in a manner that repeats racial stereotypes. “Ditto” and “fuzzy wig” suggest the “folksy” nature of a blackface minstrelsy that typecasts racial difference and fails to challenge racial hierarchies through which white people represent persons of color. Because history unfolds from a white perspective, black and brown men and their nations still lag behind the racially unmarked “man with hod” and “woman handing bricks” who rebuild civilization. This scene (and indeed the entire pageant play) is undoubtedly satirized by Woolf. Yet even as the novel’s ironic detachment asserts a critical perspective on this folksy scene, I suggest that Woolf 1

Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (New York: Harcourt, 1941), 181–2.

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presents the racial structure of modernity in this vision of postwar reconstruction without irony. This scene repeats the past without difference, an unchanging same that underlies the notion of time as progress. Even while Karen Jacobs rightly argues that Woolf in this novel deploys an interruptive structure and dialectical images to contest a progressivist history, in this scene, Woolf’s notion of postwar development, led by the West, is not ironized or contested.2 In this vision of progress, modernity begins in the European center and travels in one direction to the colonized periphery. While the center continues to modernize, peripheral nations and peoples struggle to catch up. This rhetoric ignores the colonial history of exploitation and expropriation that ensured the “backward” nature of colonized territories and the contributions to modernity that originated in the colonies. Woolf’s vision of a break with the past (“civilization in ruins”) fails to transform the idea of modernity exported from the West in which colonized nations and peoples on the periphery remain always less than modern. And, yet, Woolf’s lifelong concern with building a democratic British society led her to envision the means by which time as progress could be challenged even in the colonial world. For instance, in the pageant play in Between the Acts, Woolf follows the scene discussed above with an avantgarde undoing of this scene. The pageant play concludes as the village performers flash “hand glasses, tin cans, scraps of scullery glass, harness room glass, and heavily embossed silver mirrors” before the audience.3 A disembodied speaker asks the audience to look at themselves and then to “ask how’s this wall, the great wall, which we call, perhaps miscall, civilization, to be built by (here the mirrors flicked and flashed) orts, scraps and fragments like ourselves?”4 The multiplicity of “orts, scraps and fragments” undercuts time as progress by challenging the center from within. The diverse audience might repeat the past differently because they arrive at the present from different pasts. The heterogeneity of the fictional audience’s perspectives and histories (gendered, intergenerational, American, English, French, class-based, heterosexual, and homosexual) interrupts the presumption of what civilization (and, by extension, modernity) might mean. Woolf does not, however, include the perspectives of those from racial and colonized locations. In problematizing this omission, this 2 3

Karen Jacobs, The Eye’s Mind: Literary Modernism and Visual Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). Woolf, Between the Acts, 185. 4 Woolf, ibid., 188.

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chapter asks: how might the call for an avant-garde undoing of representation in Woolf’s political rhetoric suggest a space for anticolonial contestation of Anglo-European racial myths, as well as for contesting the gendered boundaries of race and nation? Woolf, as is well known, refrained from speaking for working-class or colonized subjects. Her war against patriarchy was fought, as Laura Doyle notes, “from within the empire; . . . [and] from inside the dominant community, as one of its ‘own’ daughters.”5 In Three Guineas (hereafter abbreviated as 3G ), Woolf holds that any nationalist feeling she may retain in her unconscious, “this drop of pure, if irrational, emotion,” will be channeled into giving “to England first what she desires of peace and freedom for the whole world.”6 England assumes priority in Woolf’s thought, and other nations, especially colonized territories and peoples, lag behind. This spatial and temporal division supports Mark Wollaeger’s contention that Woolf could not imagine racial difference without hierarchy. Though she envisioned decolonization as an inescapable fact in rebuilding civilization following World War Two, it was in Eurocentric terms.7 I propose, however, that Woolf’s gender critique of English institutions and culture – when repositioned in a transnational context – allows for a critique of the racial ground of modernism. I demonstrate this possibility by reading Woolf next to writers who contest Eurocentric forms of modernity from the other side of the color line: C. L. R. James and Suzanne and Aime´ Ce´saire. Their anticolonial confrontations with European history and thought, I suggest, challenge the racial and imperial assumptions of a centrally located writer such as Woolf. By means of this juxtaposition, I find that both the Eurocentric limits and possibilities of Woolf’s texts become clear. Viewing modernism transnationally (in a global sense that is not limited to Western nations), the racial repressed may take center stage. In particular, I wish to investigate “outsiders” not considered by Woolf, such as C. L. R. James, who belongs to no national literary tradition. Such an endeavor on my part responds to the creative and democratic process that Woolf herself envisioned. In 3G, Woolf calls on outsiders to practice intellectual and creative liberty “by finding new words and creating new methods” that would sustain and enrich 5 6 7

Laura Doyle, Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 144. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, 1938), 109. Mark Wollaeger, “Woolf, Postcards, and the Elision of Race: Colonizing Women in The Voyage Out,” Modernism/Modernity, 8, 1 (2001), 43–75.

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democracies.8 My method compares disparate communities located within London (and beyond, in the case of the Ce´saires) in order to read across the gaps between European and colonized histories and cultures. This method challenges European universalism and the hierarchies of value that arise from a Eurocentric model of literary historical inquiry, and, I hope, may generate a new transnational understanding of modernism. Transnational exchanges affect not only local resistances but can potentially – especially when articulated as an avant-garde event – alter the nationscape. Lionnet and Shih argue that minor transnationalisms (minority, racial and gender allegiances within and beyond the nation state) affect the parameters of the national. The national may be imagined as no longer the site of homogeneous time and territorialized space but is increasingly inflected by a transnationality that suggests the intersection of “multiple spatiotemporal (dis)orders.” The transnational, therefore, is not bound simply by the binary of the local and the global but can occur in national, local, or global spaces across different and multiple spatialities and temporalities.9

Transnational forms of cultural and economic multiplicities potentially strengthen democracy by destabilizing a consensus of meanings, knowledge, history, and values. I will be tracking these multiplicities through the hybrid genres that Woolf, James, and the Ce´saires create. Hybrid genres create a space for critical detachment and historical transformation by defamiliarizing aesthetic forms; they retrieve overlooked histories; and they break up narratives that promote time as progress. Each writer opens history to transformation in the present from a different racial location. While Woolf problematizes British identity from the inside out by figuring women as a porous border, capable of fulfilling liberal dreams by enacting an inclusionary, free, and equal society, James and the Ce´saires figure European identity from the outside in and show the racial barriers to equality that continue to prevent colonized subjects from creating autonomous societies on the “periphery” and from participating in a truly inclusive British society. These barriers to national sovereignty, on the one hand, and democratic inclusiveness, on the other, rest upon racially structured temporal differences. As argued in Chapter 1, Europeans considered African and African-diasporic peoples to be outside 8 9

Woolf, Three Guineas, 143. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, Minor Transnationalisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 6.


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of history and therefore outside of modernity. I contend that Woolf, James, and the Ce´saires call for revolutionary democratic practices that can interrupt this historical flow of time and displace temporal and, hence, racial and gender inequality. In so doing, they do not substitute the previous Eurocentric narrative of progress for another that is occupied by a black, rather than white, master as protagonist. Instead, they open the present moment to democratic inclusiveness by refusing an a priori “we” and the singular modernity of European time. Woolf’s, James’s, and the Ce´saires’ hybrid texts call for a performative self-fashioning on the part of the excluded, an ethics that interrupts Eurocentric narratives and the homogeneous, empty time of modernity and the nation. In order to do this, these 1930s writers transmute the manifesto form – the signature articulation of the cutting-edge modern – into narratives and poetics that can better represent democratic inclusivity articulated as an alternative modernity. Woolf’s 3G, in particular, explicitly critiques what Woolf sees as the manifesto’s shortcomings. These hybrid texts unleash heterogeneity rather than recontain it defensively, as did the writers examined in the first part of this book. To overcome what she sees as the manifesto’s shortcomings, Woolf combines essay, manifesto, epistolary, and documentary genres in 3G. She joins the manifesto’s exhortation to action, with a reflective narrative to provide a reasoned response to the current political crisis. Moreover, 3G ’s emphasis on liberal democratic practices places politics in the realm of the everyday and with ordinary, anonymous persons who are staunchly independent of institutional affiliations. Woolf envisions the ground of politics to be located in culture, and more specifically, in the ethics of private, autonomous literary reading and writing. By yoking together masculine vanguardist rupture with women’s literary practices, Woolf ’s hybrid text, at the formal level as well as at the rhetorical level, suggests that impurity and inclusion are the proper attributes of a democratic state. She grounds the practice of political freedom within the sphere of literature, in which new words, new methods, and hybrid forms envision a democracy to come. VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE MANIFESTO

3G self-reflexively comments on its own status as political rhetoric by investigating the linear time and democratic potential of manifestos as they shape the reader’s awareness of agency in the present moment. I first examine how Woolf incorporates the avant-garde event – especially that of manifestos – within her writing. I do this because Woolf

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is extraordinarily clear in stating what she sees as the manifesto’s shortcomings and strengths, and, after examining her analysis, I turn to colonized writers who also drew upon the manifesto in their radical writings. I begin with the much-remarked instance of polemical exhortation that appears in Woolf’s early essay “Character in Fiction.” (Other versions of this essay were published under the title “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown.”) In this essay, Woolf describes a disconnection between Edwardian writers such as Arnold Bennett and the myriad impressions and experiences that beset ordinary readers in their everyday lives. She appeals to her audience’s inherent sense of life: “In the course of your daily life this past week you have had far stranger and more interesting experiences than the one I have tried to describe [Woolf’s fictional encounter in a train carriage with the impoverished widow she names Mrs Brown].”10 She asks the public to “insist that writers shall come down off their plinths and pedestals, and describe beautifully if possible, truthfully at any rate, our Mrs Brown.”11 As writers grope toward the truth of Mrs Brown, “an old lady of unlimited capacity and infinite variety,” Woolf demands that the public: Tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure. Your help is invoked in a good cause. For I will make one final and surpassingly rash prediction – we are trembling at the verge of one of the great ages of English literature. But it can only be reached if we are determined never, never to desert Mrs Brown.12

In this call, Woolf exhorts her audience to action. No longer should they remain passively subservient to the writer’s authority. Rather, Woolf urges the audience to participate in the shaping of literary form through developing a self-consciously critical detachment, comparing their own experiences and impressions against the “truth” of that which they read and offering to the public and to the literary world their critical assessments and protesting when literature falls short of their expectations and experiences. Woolf’s prophetic vision – that we are “trembling at the verge of one of the great ages of English literature” – offers an enthusiastic heralding of a democratic literary age in which writers and the public participate collectively and vitally to create literature that is the birthright of all. Woolf challenges the public, as Melba Cuddy-Keane has recently argued, through a pragmatics of literary engagement where the audience is “reading for themselves, criticizing for themselves, constructing their own 10 11

Virginia Woolf, “Character in Fiction,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie (New York: Harcourt, 1988), vol. III, 436. Woolf, ibid., 436. 12 Woolf, ibid.


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theories.”13 The reading public, Woolf envisions, actively engages in passionate but rational conversations regarding literature and literary history that they claim as their own. Woolf’s own critical practice, Cuddy-Keane notes, is one in which she seeks “contact with her audience, [and] her critical history functions as political praxis, undermining the cultural tendency to construct literature as hallowed, sacred ground and opening it up for repossession.”14 “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” then, borrows from the manifesto genre several of its revolutionary qualities: (1) its prophetic anticipation of a new – and great – era of literature; (2) its exhortation to the audience to take action, becoming involved in the shared project of creating literature suitable to a democratic age of mass politics; and (3) its iconoclastic approach to literary history, one that radically revises esteemed authors, conventional literary forms, and acceptable subject matter. Woolf’s essay narrates how art has fallen into a tradition-bound morass. It advocates the need for drastic critical action within the autonomous sphere of literature in order to transform those traditional conventions. In 3G, however, Woolf’s engagement with the manifesto form is far more complex. Not only does she continue to draw upon the manifesto’s revolutionary qualities as outlined above, but she offers a trenchant critique of what, by the 1930s, she sees as an overuse of the manifesto form. In the first footnote to the third section of 3G, she writes that: It is to be hoped that some methodical person has made a collection of the various manifestoes and questionnaires issued broadcast during the years 1936–37. Private people with no political training were invited to sign appeals asking their own and foreign governments to change their policy; artists were asked to fill up forms stating the proper relations of the artists to the State, to religion, to morality; pledges were required that the writer should use English grammatically and avoid vulgar expressions; and dreamers were invited to analyse their dreams. By way of inducement it was generally proposed to publish the results in the daily or weekly Press. What effect this inquisition has had upon governments it is for the politician to say. Upon literature, since the output of books is unstaunched, and grammar would seem to be neither better nor worse, the effect is problematical. But the inquisition is of great psychological and social interest.15

Woolf’s chief complaint against manifestos is that they may not achieve the effects they desire. This problem with manifestos – their speech-act insistence on achieving with words the effects they name – is apparent as 13 14

Melba Cuddy-Keane, Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 98. Cuddy-Keane, ibid., 99. 15 Woolf, Three Guineas, 172.

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they often fall short of their aims, as in Mina Loy’s unpublished “Feminist Manifesto,” Wyndham Lewis’s “great joke,” or even Marx and Engels’s manifesto that predicted an incipient worldwide socialist revolution that has yet to materialize. But Woolf also explores structural aspects of the manifesto’s shortcomings. She undertakes this investigation through a highly complex form rather than through a mimicry of the manifesto’s regular slapdash style. The framing conceit of 3G is epistolary: Woolf’s persona answers a letter from a successful barrister who is also a member of a peace society. The barrister requests that she: (1) give advice on how to prevent war; (2) sign a manifesto calling for the protection of intellectual and cultural liberties; (3) join a society also dedicated to this cause; and (4) donate a guinea to this society. In the course of replying to this letter, the correspondentnarrator responds to two other letters: one asking her for a donation in support of a women’s college and another asking for money to support an organization aiding women in the professions. These women’s groups, the narrator claims, will contribute to ending the war by allowing women to enter public life as equals and thereby transform society.16 In the end, after much deliberation, the woman correspondent donates a guinea to the man’s peace society and signs his manifesto, but she refrains from joining the peace society and proposes instead to found her own organization. Woolf’s second critique of the manifesto concerns the masculinity of the genre. Its forward, linear momentum and aggressive stance mirrors the self-interest and instrumentality with which men exert their wills within the competitive and often violent public sphere. The woman correspondent in 3G (Woolf’s persona) notes that the manifesto that she is invited to sign is authored and already signed by distinguished men. These men, she points out, have been educated in the public schools and universities “with their elaborate machinery for mind-training and bodytraining.”17 She suggests that the English education system has failed to prevent war, and, therefore, it has failed to protect and strengthen civilization. And its manifesto is likely to fail as well. She asks, “what reason is there to think . . . that your manifesto, signed though it is by . . . distinguished names, is going to convert?”18 And even if one is “converted” to the terms of the manifesto, Woolf’s persona fears that its “abstract” terms that propose to preserve “cultural and intellectual liberty” may serve merely 16 17

This summary is drawn from Naomi Black, Virginia Woolf as Feminist (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). Woolf, Three Guineas, 87. 18 Woolf, ibid., 87.


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as fashionable rhetoric, a trendy opinion that one holds and repeats automatically. 3G criticizes the flurry of manifestos littering the public sphere for their empty rhetoric, abstract language, and desire on the part of their signers for money, publicity, and fame. The manifesto could itself “adulterate” cultural and intellectual liberty by allowing its signers to “prostitute” their beliefs for advertisement, money, or publicity purposes.19 Inverting sexual purity rhetoric, Woolf accuses men of failing to protect the “purity” of their liberty by wantonly entering the commercial sphere of “advertisment, money or publicity.” This latter desire, Woolf’s persona claims, furthers competitive and hierarchical value distinctions between sexes, races, and nations. The manifesto form, seen in this light, promotes masculine, hierarchical values that conflict with its ostensible democratic aims. Woolf, in this regard, could be criticizing the rearguard modernist manifestos of Wyndham Lewis and F. T. Marinetti (discussed in Chapters 3 and 4). She compares the empty rhetoric of male orators and manifesto writers to “a gramophone whose needle has stuck” and grinds out “with intolerable unanimity” its militaristic message.20 Whether Hitler or Churchill, Lewis or Marinetti, Woolf compares the public rituals of fascism to the private dominance of patriarchy in England, arguing that they are the flip-side of the same coin: they both embrace the rituals and myths of belligerent male society and exclude women. After listening to one of Hitler’s Nuremberg Rally speeches, Woolf reported in her diary that his language was like “a savage howl like a person excruciated; then howls from the audience . . . Cheering ruled by a stick.”21 Moreover, Woolf deplored in her diary how British counter-rhetoric exuded by the BBC and the papers took on “that dreary false cheery hero-making strain” that flees from reality in its “myth making” abstractions.22 These manifestos and oratory “convert” their signers and listeners through mythic or atavistic beliefs that appeal to what Woolf calls their primitive or unconscious instincts of violence and their desire for a hierarchical, disciplined sense of collective unanimity.23 In contrast, Woolf’s persona argues that the manifesto she is invited to sign will be effective only if its signers “put that opinion into practice.”24 The manifesto, in her opinion, cannot succeed by words alone. Rather, its 19 21 22

Woolf, ibid., 92, 93. 20 Woolf, ibid., 105. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. V, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (New York: Harcourt, 1984), September 13, 1938, 169. Woolf, ibid., June 3, 1940, 292. 23 Woolf, Three Guineas, 105. 24 Woolf, ibid., 94.

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signers must practice an ethics of critical thinking in order to “protect cultural and intellectual liberty” and thereby prevent war.25 To sign a manifesto, donate money, and attend a meeting where like-minded people repeat their beliefs to each other, all in agreement, she cautions, “is a cheap way of quieting what may conveniently be called one’s conscience.”26 Crucially, for Woolf’s persona, these actions fail because they do not appease the emotions of horror and disgust wrought by war’s devastation. She describes photos of dead bodies and bombed houses from the Spanish Civil War and demands that “Some more energetic, some more active method of expressing our belief that war is barbarous, that war is inhuman . . . seems to be required.”27 While Woolf’s persona deplores most manifestos’ inefficacy, they are, for her, psychologically and socially significant in that they register a healthy questioning on the part of the public. Not only does the recent spate of manifestos seek to ascertain the goals and visions of a society (a questioning of the inevitability of historical progress), but they also demonstrate “a general self-dissatisfaction and desire ‘to live differently’.”28 Finally, Woolf notes positively that this “desire to live differently” is no longer discussed solely within private houses and salons, but it is debated publicly in radio broadcasts, newspapers, and other public venues. But how to put into effect – as all manifestos strive to do – this “desire to live differently”? According to Woolf’s analysis, a transformation of everyday life can only be achieved through an ethics of “disinterestedness.” And “disinterestedness,” as Woolf’s persona informs her addressee, may be found only in the profession of literature, the “pursuit of reading and writing the English language.”29 The profession of literature, argues the persona, “differs . . . from all the other professions.”30 In the institution of literature, there is no head of the profession; no Lord Chancellor . . . no official body with the power to lay down rules and enforce them. We cannot debar women from the use of libraries; or forbid them to buy ink and paper; or rule that metaphors shall 25 27

28 29

26 Woolf, ibid. Woolf, ibid., 11. Woolf, ibid., 12. Nancy Cunard, a friend whom the Woolfs published, exemplified the type of activity Virginia Woolf promotes. In 1937, Cunard produced a series of war poetry pamphlets that included works by W. H. Auden, Tristan Tzara, and Pablo Neruda. She also published in Left Review a compilation of writers’ views on the Spanish Civil War called Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War, and she served as a war-time correspondent in Spain. Woolf, ibid., 172, quoting the Rickman Godlee Lecture as reported in The Times, November 23, 1937. Woolf, ibid., 91. 30 Woolf, ibid., 90.


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only be used by one sex, as the male only in art schools was allowed to study from the nude.31

Women writers are frequently anonymous and therefore seek neither publicity nor advertisement; they need not attend university in order to learn to read and write their tongue; and, as the “daughters of educated men who have enough to live upon” – as a very small, almost utopian, portion of the population – they need not prostitute their literary output in order to earn enough money via the literary marketplace to survive.32 In this manner, Woolf’s persona translates the manifesto’s abstract term “disinterest” used on the part of its distinguished signers’ empty rhetoric into an everyday praxis of anonymous activity. Disinterest allows for a self-conscious means by which to pursue democratic questioning rather than marketplace success. Anonymous women writers occupy a space apart (akin to the spatial trope of “a room of one’s own”) from commercial and institutional interests, and their manifestos, then, would serve as a liminal genre that questions the boundaries of representation. These manifestos, Woolf’s persona envisions, scatter unanimity and make porous the fixed, exclusionary spaces of the nation, its ruling institutions, and the laws of its literary market. Woolf grounds “disinterest” in the pursuit of cultural and intellectual liberty, “the disinterested pursuit of reading and writing the English language.”33 Through this practice, “intellectual liberty” is defined as “the right to say or write what you think in your own words, in your own way.”34 Virginia and Leonard Woolf practiced this envisioned intellectual liberty through their privately owned Hogarth Press. They established a print forum – as did so many publishers of little magazines and independent presses, including Cunard – by which the institution of arts and letters is potentially open to all persons writing and reading in iconoclastic ways. The Hogarth Press extended this openness to colonized subjects and antiimperialist writers through such works as Norman Leys’s Kenya (1924), Lord Olivier’s The Anatomy of an African Miser (1927), G. S. Dutt’s A Woman of India: Being the Life of Saroj Nalini (Dutt was the founder of the Women’s Institute Movement in India) (1929), Horace B. Samuel’s Beneath the White-wash: A Critical Analysis of the Report of the Commission on the Palestine Disturbances of August, 1929 (1930), Denis Ireland’s Ulster To-day and To-morrow: Her Part in a Gaelic Civilization (1931), Leonard Barnes’s The New Boer War (1932) and The Future of the Colonies (1936), C. L. R. James’s 31

Woolf, ibid.

32

Woolf, ibid., 92.

33

Woolf, ibid., 91.

34

Woolf, ibid.

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The Case for West Indian Self-Government (1933), K. M. Panikkar’s Caste and Democracy (1933), W. G. Bollinger’s Race and Economics in South Africa (1934), and Parmenas Githendu’s Mockerie: An African Speaks for His People (1934). Woolf’s positive vision of literary practice as strengthening democracy leads her to revise the manifesto in order to salvage its positive qualities, especially the form’s proleptic shaping of a potentially radical democratic praxis. In 3G, Woolf avoids the vanguardism of earlier manifestos that rigidly distinguish between “modern” and “nonmodern” subjects. Her essay seeks to eliminate the “chalk marks” scoured onto the floor by men “within whose mystic boundaries human beings are penned, rigidly, separately, artificially.”35 The first way in which Woolf dismantles vanguardism is by introducing reflection and hesitation into her text. She distends the present moment in a manner that interrupts an unchanging same of homogeneous time, moving ever-forward and repeating the past. Its opening line: “Three years is a long time to leave a letter unanswered” injects a space of thoughtful disinterestedness in contrast to the notoriously urgent rhetoric of manifestos.36 It halts the forward momentum of time as progress and insists on multiple temporalities: various perspectives that are not positioned at the cutting edge of the new but instead assert private (feminine) and/or belated (racialized) temporal positions. This pluralized space of critical detachment is also produced by ellipses that undercut exhortations and suggest an untranslatable gap in time and space between writer and audience. For instance, the letter writer self-consciously remarks on the difficulty of communication indicated by her ellipses: “those three dots mark a precipice, a gulf so deeply cut between us that for three years and more I have been sitting on my side of it wondering whether it is any use to try to speak across it.”37 This gap asserts a multiplicity of responses and range of experiences and histories available to address the problematic of “how to prevent war.” Less militant than Cunard’s anthology, Woolf substitutes reasoned dialogue for the dialectical confrontation that both animates and problematizes Negro. Second, Woolf avoids vanguardism by foregrounding the epistolary tradition in literature. A total of twelve fictional letters is addressed or quoted in the essay. The prominent place of letter writing emphasises the burden of response on the letter’s recipient and thereby implicates the readers of 3G, who are positioned as a voyeuristic audience of the private correspondence between Woolf’s persona and her male interlocutor. The 35

Woolf, ibid., 105.

36

Woolf, ibid., 3.

37

Woolf, ibid., 4.


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audience peers over the shoulder of the letter writer so that the letter read demands of them a need to take action. In addition, the blurring of private and public reading audiences echoes Woolf’s wider argument that masculine repression of the private sphere provides the psychological, economic, and political structure for public acts of imperialism, war, and other violence. In contrast to manifestos, Woolf’s interpolation of an audience occurs, not as an authoritarian “us versus them,” but in the potentially egalitarian and inclusive tradition of epistolary correspondence. Despite her measured and critical response, Woolf’s essay includes a militant call for immediate action. Her persona answers the imagined interlocutor’s question: how to reach the public “without putting my own mind through the mincing machine and turning it into sausage?” by proleptically calling into being – much as manifesto writers must – the public’s lively interactive response: “The public, Madame,” we may assure her, “is very like ourselves; it lives in room; it walks in streets, and is said moreover to be tired of sausage. Fling leaflets down basements; expose them on stalls; trundle them along streets on barrows to be sold for a penny or given away. Find out new ways of approaching ‘the public’; single it into separate people instead of massing it into one monster, gross in body, feeble in mind. And then reflect – since you have enough to live on, you have a room, not necessarily ‘cosy’ or ‘handsome’ but still silent, private; a room where safe from publicity and its poison you could, even asking a reasonable fee for the service, speak the truth to artists, about pictures, music, books, without fear of affecting their sales, which are exiguous, or wounding their vanity which is prodigious.”38

In the spirit of manifestos, Woolf calls for a transformation of writing practices and reading publics as urgently needed actions to change the world. She foregrounds the physical and material practice of reading and writing as she exhorts women to “fling,” “expose,” “trundle,” and “speak.” As an ethical practice, literary activity resists normative institutional “truths” and interrogates conventional representations. Multiplying production and distribution practices, dismantling the “herd-like” militarist unanimity often believed to be the only discourse capable of reaching the masses, Woolf imagines the public responding intelligently and creatively to truth-seeking manifestos. In stimulating a widespread, lively public conversation about the arts, an iconoclastic literary culture strengthens democratic practices and prevents war. Importantly, Woolf does not collapse politics into aesthetics. Rather, she sees a rich aesthetic field underlying and informing the conditions for healthy political institutions. 38

Woolf, ibid., 98.

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Crucially, Woolf’s vision of this aesthetic field, as an autonomous sphere of activity and value, opens a space within language and culture for the return of the colonized and racially repressed (an opening through which James and the Ce´saires will enter more fully). Consider Woolf’s intervention at the level of signification. The disaffiliation of educated men’s daughters from centers of symbolic power denaturalizes unifying signifiers such as “our country,” “Britannia,” “God” and makes visible ˇ izˇek calls a mećonnaissance: what appears to be unitary and what Slavoj Z imbued with metaphysical fixity is in fact predicated on the disavowal of those with different relations to “our country,” “Britannia,” and “God.” The false unity of these abstract terms depends on a repression of difference, as Michele Pridmore-Brown argues in a reading of Woolf’s Between the Acts: the “‘we’ (white, imperial homogenous England) is . . . a phantasm predicated on the repression of the idiot and the homosexual and on the exploitation [of colonial subjects].”39 In 3G, this group of disaffiliated subjects includes educated men’s daughters, evident when Woolf calls them “step-daughter[s] of England.”40 By demonstrating how the repression of this group enables a sense of false unity, Woolf allows – and here I extend Pridmore-Brown’s argument to 3G – “the act of mećonnaissance [to be] the point of departure for a pluralist politics that affirms internal difference and that consists of a perpetual formation, expansion, and linking of subject positions.”41 Daughters of educated men form an Outsiders’ Society that opens language and identities to shifting, plural formations. They give the lie to unanimity. Unlike other modernist manifestos that rely on metaphysical fixities in their construction of a firm, fixed “we,” Woolf’s “we” is avowedly conditional and predicated on provisional identity formations within particular contexts and actions. Woolf’s essay demands that the Society of Outsiders break up certainties and fixities, opening the future to unforeseen possibilities. Her text is ethical rather than metaphysical. Moreover, Woolf’s ethics of deferral, refusal, and absence works against nationalist obsessions with racial purity and superior breeding. Doyle argues that Woolf’s proposal in 3G “counteracts precisely that eugenic obsession with determining and codifying the superior qualities of the ‘insider’.”42 The Society of Outsiders refuses to compete for membership, 39 40 42

Michele Pridmore-Brown, “1939–1940: Of Virginia Woolf, Gramophones, and Fascism,” ˇ izˇek. PMLA, 113, 2 (May 1998), 408–21, here 417, quoting Z Woolf, Three Guineas, 15. 41 Pridmore-Brown, “1939–1940,” 417. Doyle, Bordering on the Body, 140.


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as Doyle says, “in the racial elite of the nation.”43 Woolf’s moniker, “stepdaughter[s] of England,” foregrounds women’s subordinate role in forging national identity.44 Their relation to Britain is based on legal ties that are severed when women marry a foreigner. In that case, they must renounce their British citizenship. This latter fact, which prioritizes women’s matrimonial and reproductive ties ahead of their birthright, leads Woolf, as an Outsider, to refuse any national affiliation whatsoever: “As a woman, my country is the whole world.” As a result, the Outsider bind[s] herself to take no share in patriotic demonstrations; to assent to no form of national self-praise; to make no part of any claque or audience that encourages war; to absent herself from military displays, tournaments, tattoos, prize-givings and all such ceremonies as encourage the desire to impose “our” civilization or “our” dominion upon other people.45

This Outsider resists the rush to marriage as the only profession open to her and, in so doing, refuses the desire for “‘our splendid Empire’ . . . ‘the price of which’ . . . ‘is mainly paid by women’.”46 The Outsider refuses the positive eugenic function of breeding the empire’s rulers so that Britain can affirm its racial and national dominance. She stands apart from normative social categories. Woolf affirms the Outsider as she protests the racial and national hierarchies that depend on controlling women’s role in reproducing that society. Yet, as mentioned earlier, Woolf still prioritizes Britain in building a democratic society. In contrast to Britain’s implicitly understood eugenic practices, the Society of Outsiders’ actions of refusal and anonymity unsettle social groupings and conventional representations. Its undoing of conventional representations occurs within the realm of the everyday, not within the autonomous aesthetic of high art. Prefacing her call for this “Outsiders’” modernism, Woolf’s persona remarks that “We have no time to coin new words, greatly though the language is in need of them.”47 Rather than promoting the new as such, Woolf defines “old” words based on the practical actions of obscure and “private” women “outside” of history. She calls them to engage in modernist revolt. “You shall have [your guinea] . . . on condition that: [3] by chastity is meant that when you have made enough to live on by your profession you must refuse to sell your brain for the sake of money . . . But 43 44 45

Doyle, ibid. Woolf, Three Guineas, 15. See also Jane Garrity, Step-Daughters of England: British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary (New York: University of Manchester Press, 2003). Woolf, ibid., 109. 46 Woolf, ibid., 39. 47 Woolf, ibid., 78.

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directly the mulberry tree begins to make you circle, break off. Pelt the tree with laughter; [4] by derision – a bad word, but once again the English language is much in need of new words – is meant that you must refuse all methods of advertising merit, and hold that ridicule, obscurity and censure are preferable, for psychological reasons, to fame and praise. Directly badges, orders, or degrees are offered you, fling them back in the giver’s face; [5] by freedom from unreal loyalties is meant that you must rid yourself of pride of nationality in the first place; also of religious pride, college pride, school pride, family pride, sex pride and those unreal loyalties that spring from them. Directly the seducers come with their seditions to bribe you into captivity, tear up the parchments; refuse to fill up the forms.48

These bullet points demand a series of negatively inflected modernist actions based on refusal and anonymity. Woolf turns the militarist and exclusionary demands of manifestos into ethical actions of deferral, rejection, and creative reconstruction. Woolf deploys women’s “private” temporality to expose the present moment to political and aesthetic possibilities beyond a militarist reduction of democratic discourse into a monotone of mass propaganda. A laughing refusal breaks up received forms, meanings, and traditions. It anticipates a society that does not yet exist while working to bring it into being in the present moment. 3G refashions the manifesto into a fluid, critical, and imaginative work in progress, one with an open-ended future that allows for unforeseen creative and critical engagement on the part of its audience. While it specifies the kind of critical and creative actions necessary to build a democratic society, it does not describe exactly what that society should look like or what actions its readers should take. But a focus on the future is not enough. Woolf makes clear that achieving such a future possibility may only arise when present and past are also reconfigured, a move that opens history through a return to the archive. The disparate nature of the archive breaks up hierarchical spatial and temporal ordering and is reflected in Woolf’s hybrid text as it sutures together letters, historical evidence, photos, satire, literature, and manifestos, and as its narrative recursively considers the problem of “how to prevent war?” This generic hybridity is also contained in Woolf’s scrapbooks collected between 1931 and 1937 while she composed 3G.49 The practice of 48 49

Woolf, ibid., 80. The scrapbooks and readers’ correspondence regarding 3G are held at the University of Sussex Library, Manuscripts Collection, Monks House Papers, Box B 16, 86. The readers’ correspondence has been published in Anna Snaith, ed. and intro., “Wide Circles: The Three Guineas Letters,” Woolf Studies Annual, 6 (2000) 1–168.


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reading the scrapbooks necessitates reading across gaps in knowledge, genres, and speakers as well as across nations and races. Consider the second scrapbook: it begins with a newspaper clipping, entitled “Keep Science Open to All” and relates how Oxford University admonished the University of Heidelberg for its exclusionary anti-Semitic practices. Woolf’s irony here is that Oxford hardly keeps science open to women. Next follows an article reporting on the elaborate male and female dress code for George IV’s funeral. After that, Woolf includes an appeal for funds for a church; a petition by the National Council of Women concerning widows’ pensions; a humorous article about how men feel that their home is their castle; a letter to an editor in which a man notes that the “good old days” weren’t really so good in terms of labor conditions; an article on the first woman certified as an airplane navigator; an appeal for funds for Newnham College for Women; an essay on how men must have war to express their manly instincts; and a summary of the life of a woman artist, Margaret Collyer. The scrapbook moves from Germany and an instance of Nazi racism (a phenomenon that another of Woolf’s clippings argues was learned from British racial practices), to Oxford, to Windsor, to London, to an ordinary English home, to an unnamed English city, to the airspace above England, to Newnham College, to the fields of Flanders, and back to London and the Slade Academy of Art.50 And it contains perspectives from across classes, genders, and Western nations as they grapple with contemporary happenings and muse on historical developments. The scrapbooks foreground the contested nature of history making and remembering in the present moment. As I argued in Chapter 5, scrapbooks seek to fill in a vanished history, a history of the contingent and contested. Scrapbooks can be both comprehensive and arbitrary; they supplement the present with found scraps of what is overlooked and unremarked. They provide a materialist history of the present by means of a recontextualization and revision of a hidden past in order to construct a new kind of future. The scrapbooks return to the past with a difference, a return that retrieves the detritus of history in order to contest temporal, spatial, and formal homogeneity. The overlooked fragments of history provoke a critical halting – a questioning – of time as progress. They thereby challenge the gendered and racial boundaries of the nation as it relies on a narrative of progress. It is my estimation that Woolf’s scrapbooks serve 3G as collective and cumulative 50

Woolf’s clipping on Nazi racial practices and the British color line is taken from the Daily Telegraph, February 3, 1937.

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instances, supporting her argument that appeals to women’s outsider position in society are a means of grappling with questions of imperialism, war, nationalism, and democracy. In the scrapbooks, women’s outsider positions range from workingclass to professional and aristocratic class struggles over gender difference in the economic, social, and political realms. They are sometimes linked explicitly to wider political questions, such as Woolf’s inclusion of Flora Drummond’s recollection of militant suffrage struggles of the WSPU (accompanied by violent images of police brutality against the militant suffragettes); a lengthy eyewitness account of the atrocities of civilian bombing campaigns in the Spanish Civil War; and a report of a German woman thrown in jail for daring to voice doubts concerning the Nazi regime’s vilification of Jews. These fragments multiply historical perspectives and allow for a contestation of time as progress. But they do not explicitly state this critique. As with the radical juxtapositions of montage form, they reveal the event-nature of representation as contingent and untimely (that is, they are not rationalized as history-as-progress, but reveal, in a flash, an unacknowledged history). At the level of national allegory, these critical struggles reject a common national narrative of overcoming obstacles to progress, and instead demand lateral moves between sites of “democracy to come,” actions that can only later be seen to have anticipated a refashioned future. For instance, only after World War Two will the German woman’s protestations be judged to have been heroic. Woolf included several manifestos in her scrapbooks that suggest the problematic of 3G: the relation between critical detachment and militant action. 3G articulates Woolf’s ambivalence toward the antifascist letters and manifestos she was asked to sign. For instance, the first manifesto in Woolf’s scrapbooks includes a cover letter dated August 12, 1936 and signed by Dame Adelaide Livingstone, the Vice-Chairman for the British National Committee branch of the International Peace Campaign (IPC). The letter warned that Britain “should not lag behind” the international work led by France and the United States. The IPC sought signatures of writers, scientists, religious leaders, and other prominent members of society working in tandem with the League of Nations. The IPC manifesto, “War and Writers,” (July 25, 1936) warns that war affects civilian populations in terms of a constant subjection to “militaristic propaganda, to censorship, to repression.” Moreover, it states that war promotes “stereotyped mental habits” in which the populace will “care only for national or racial glory and for the traditional ideas of their tribe.” The


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manifesto, though it is carefully worded in measured, rational tones, announces to “all those who care for the well-being of our civilization” that the “time has come . . . to take resolute action for peace.” It lists possibilities for action, multiplies perspectives, foments critical detachment, and bridges barriers between groups. For instance, its program outlines the following actions: Writers of all countries who care for peace should (1) refuse to be “intimidated by the threats of war-mongers”; (2) understand and interpret conflicting temperaments and ideals of “potential national enemies” and so to “help all peoples to feel their underlying kinship”; and (3) generate self-consciousness concerning one’s motivations, to help persons “feel and think sincerely, and so to fortify themselves against the insidious passions of the mob and the hypnotic influence of mob-leaders.” The manifesto concludes with a special appeal to the cosmopolitan spirit of writers to propagate “the integrity of mind, . . . freedom of expression, [and] education untainted by militarism or racial myths and hatreds.” Rather than a vanguardist exclusivity positioned at the cutting edge of the new, this manifesto appeals to all writers to forge imaginative, critical connections between “all peoples.” This action may seem less immediate than waging war, but by resisting war-mongering rhetoric, writers might diffuse extreme forms of nationalism. The manifesto calls for disinterestedness as a negatively inflected form of action. Woolf did not sign this manifesto, however, because it was too lofty and sweeping. David Bradshaw argues that it was “loaded with the kind of noble sentiment that Woolf had come to regard with suspicion.”51 Instead, 3G ’s hybrid form foregrounds the everyday. Its fragmented form mimics the scrapbook collage, especially as each multiplies historical perspectives in order to contest vanguard notions of being on the cutting edge of time, and each appeals to disinterestedness as a form of negatively inflected political action. Woolf’s Society of Outsiders in 3G presents disinterestedness through its cosmopolitan ethos to account for “outsiders.” This version of modernist cosmopolitanism, however, reveals the limits of liberalism. Liberalism, as discussed in Chapter 1, produces a false universalism based upon race and class blindness. It refuses to acknowledge societies “structured in dominance” who will never catch up with the West. This blindness appears in the unexamined class and racial privilege for which Cunard had been condemned (as demonstrated in the 51

David Bradshaw, “British Writers and Anti-Fascism in the 1930s. Part II, Under the Hawk’s Wings,” Woolf Studies Annual, 4 (1998), 41–66, here 48.

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previous chapter) and which James and the Ce´saires will contest. But the limits of Woolf’s liberalism were also critiqued by one of 3G ’s English readers. William Platt, of Stanmore, Middlesex, wrote to Woolf that while he is sympathetic to her vision of women’s equal opportunities and disinterested, cosmopolitan integrity, she neglects an economic consideration of the labor market. In a letter dated August 1, 1938, he wrote: Whereas you make Man’s opposition to Woman’s claims to seem like a piece of abject folly, the thing that you overlook, surely, is the economic aspect. It was not really a matter of sexual opposition. (Though it often looked as if it were). It was at base an objection to the coming of a new & powerful rival into the labour market. In fact it was intrinsically the same as the Californian Labourers’ objection to the incoming of “Cheap Chinese Labour.”52

Platt sets Woolf’s analysis within a transnational labor market in order to undertake a materialist critique of her literary call. Such a context also allows Platt to remark on the intrinsic flaws in democratic institutions (flaws that James, as we shall see, will critique in terms of imperialism’s race and class divisions) such as the League of Nations and the British Parliament. The logic of Woolf’s anti-institutional Society of Outsiders is that of the “free market,” with its absence of institutional regulation based on democratic principles. The woman typist, Platt argues, makes 30 shillings a week as opposed to the £3 per week of the man whom she replaced. Instead, extending Platt’s argument, women should be paid the same as men and jobs should be created for them. Platt states: Whitman, (whom I adore) says “As if it harmed me, giving others the same chances & rights as myself” and he is entirely right IF our civilisation were an ideal democracy and not a muddled scramble. As things stood, it certainly harmed the male correspondence clerk to lose his job to a woman who undercut him. It would not be the slightest use to tell him he had not been harmed. Obviously he had been.53

Woolf’s appeal to universal liberties over the more contestatory antiimperial and class struggles worldwide marks the limits of her cosmopolitan sympathies. As a further testament to this limit, Woolf’s scrapbooks contain the following letter entitled “Democracy at Stake,” which was signed by both Leonard and Virginia Woolf, along with E. M. Forster, C. Day Lewis, Margery Fry, Julian Huxley, G. E. Moore, H. G. Wells, and other well-known cultural and political figures. It was published in the 52 53

William Platt, “Letter to Virginia Woolf, August 1, 1938,” Woolf Studies Annual, 6 (2000), 65. Platt, ibid., 65.


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Daily Herald on August 20, 1936, and takes a long view of English institutions, noting that over the past three hundred years, the “noblest contribution of the British to European civilization” has been the theory and “still more our practice of political liberty and Parliamentary democracy.” They praise the English for being “pre-eminently a free people” that has thus far avoided a militarist or autocratic government. Moreover, they have defended this liberty against “Spanish, French and German monarchs, dictators, or conquerors.” Advocating sympathy for the Spanish Government, likewise democratically elected and not, they warn, communist or bolshevist, the letter writers advocate “sympathetic benevolence” toward Spain as it fights against military despotism and Fascism for liberty, “and for what in our country we have for more than a century considered to be the bare minimum of political civilisation.” The letter repudiates communist and bolshevist involvement in the war and urges a paternalist “benevolence” in the spirit of existent English liberty rather than a universally inclusive democracy to come. Yet this support for anti-Franco forces was well received by the popular front in Spain.54 Moreover, Woolf’s involvement in signing this letter and in other political campaigns signals her seriousness that “it was now impossible for the artist, who is ‘besieged by voices,’ to avoid taking part in politics.”55 Yet this political writing forecloses the open and shifting linguistic play of a pluralist democracy to come suggested by Woolf’s 3G. C. L. R. JAMES IN LONDON

I turn next to C. L. R. James, the Trinidadian sports journalist, novelist, historiographer, cultural critic, and political theorist, whose pamphlet The Case for West Indian Self-Government was published by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press in 1933.56 James moves beyond the criticism offered by Woolf’s correspondent to demonstrate the limits of liberalism and the threat of fascism from the standpoint of the colonized. His contemporaneous presence in London attests to the tense coexistence of anticolonial discourse with liberal imperialist beliefs in a gradual, color-blind “gift” of sovereignty to the colonies. A consideration of James’s contribution to 54 55

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Bradshaw, “Anti-fascism in the 1930s,” 51. Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996), 675. Quoting from Virginia Woolf, “Why Art Today Follows Politics,” Collected Essays, 4 vols, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus, 1966–7), vol. 2, 230–2. While James’s pamphlet was published by the Hogarth Press, there was little personal involvement between the Woolfs and James.

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modernism is essential here because he contests the Eurocentric logic that structures Woolf’s vision of an inclusive democratic society. He makes evident modernity’s uneven developments by arguing for the modernity of Caribbean blacks, whom Europeans consider to be outside of and prior to modernity. I argue against taking Woolf on her own terms, because it reproduces her class and racial biases in our understanding of modernism. By reading James’s and the Ce´saires’ intervention in modernist discourse, I hope to make evident the coexistence of modern and “nonmodern” temporalities within overlooked modernist texts (James’s “Toussaint Louverture,” Aime´ Ce´saire’s anticolonial poem Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, and Suzanne Ce´saire’s “Surrealism and Us”). These texts reveal an occluded history of race within modernity. In making this alternative history available, I hope that it will allow for a critical reassessment of the multiple places and times of modernism. C. L. R. James, who, like Woolf, wrote in London in the 1930s, places the focus of civilization – its problems and future possibilities – in the Caribbean among the fraught political and economic relations between people of different racial backgrounds. (The Ce´saires make a similar move but, going further, invent a poetic that can convey the modernity of the Caribbean.) Rather than adding black and brown people belatedly to the future of civilization, as Woolf does in Between the Acts, James revises history in order to argue for the central contribution of Caribbean subjects to modernity since the rise of the colonial plantation system. By placing those on the “periphery” within European narratives of revolution, he transforms the temporal structure of those narratives. While his writings in the 1930s offer a teleological narrative of colonial liberation, James also imagines, as Kenneth Surrin argues, “a politics that is yet to come, the politics of new and different imaginative capacities . . . a cartography of singularities and multiple becomings which move restlessly, in the mode of a ‘future anterior,’ into the practical and conceptual ‘spaces’ of this politics that is yet to come.”57 Surrin traces this politics of becoming through a reading of James’s Beyond a Boundary (1963). I suggest that the enfolded temporality of The Black Jacobins (examined in Chapter 1), which goes back to the Haitian Revolution in order to predict the coming anticolonial revolutions, also gives rise (alongside its narrative of liberation) to a future anterior similar to that which Surrin tracks in 57

Kenneth Surrin, “‘The Future Anterior’: C. L. R. James and Going Beyond the Boundary,” in Rethinking C. L. R. James, ed. Grant Farred (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1996), 187–204, here 201.


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Beyond a Boundary. James locates this temporality of deferral and displacement in Haiti’s revolutionary war and uses it to critique Eurocentric narratives of modernity. As a Trinidadian “coloured” immigrant enjoying the intellectual and cultural advantages of London’s Bloomsbury environs, C. L. R. James is particularly poised to articulate black people’s experiences of modernity. In his play Toussaint Louverture (1936) performed at London’s Westminster Theatre and his longer historiography The Black Jacobins (1938), he, much as Woolf suggests, places ordinary subjects at the heart of historical change and radical democratic practice. James shows how colonial subjects, particularly of the African diaspora, are conscripted into modernity as objects of history, not subjects.58 They are, in the 1930s, considered by Westerners to be outsiders to modernity. But because James, like Woolf, adopts a critical stance toward the vanguardism of the manifesto, positioned on the cutting edge of the new, he refuses this metaphysical notion of race and nation.59 Instead, he critiques modernity from within its interstices, in the time-lag of coloniality. James adapts this belated situation to posit an ethics of deferral – a future anterior – by which an alternative modernity can be imagined (and only realized later) for the postcolonial world he promotes. He, like Woolf, highlights the event in order to seize the present moment and transform it. Unlike Woolf, he refuses a historical narrative of civilization that moves from the European center to the periphery. James became an outspoken promoter of anti-imperialism while in England. Living in Nelson, Lancashire, James quickly became a local celebrity and spokesperson for West Indian sovereignty. At first, he advocated West Indian assimilation into the Commonwealth, with greater autonomy for colonial self-government. In 1933, he spoke as a last-minute substitute on a BBC panel in favor of West Indian independence (a very controversial opinion at the time). As in his Hogarth Press pamphlet, The 58 59

The phrase “conscript of modernity” is from David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). In 1942, James participated in a sharecroppers’ strike in southeast Missouri and co-wrote a manifesto that was published by Local 313 of the CIO-affiliated agricultural workers’ union at Lilbourn, South Delmo Project. When the leaders asked James to write it, he said, “I know nothing. This is your strike. You all are doing it, you have to go through it. I have helped you, but this pamphlet has to state what you have to say. Now, have you got something to say about what you think?” James recounts that “each said his piece, and I joined them together.” The result is a combination of militant slogans, “Black and White UNITE AND FIGHT!,” a colloquial prose style that effects a dialogue between a skeptical audience and the committed workers, and reasonable demands. C. L. R. James, The Future in the Present: Selected Writings (London: Allison & Busby, 1977), 89.

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Case for West Indian Self-Government (an excerpt from James’s The Life of Captain Cipriani), his radio address carefully explains how West Indians are Westernized and not primitive. He then outlines the contradictions in imperial ideology (between democracy at home and despotism abroad) and appeals to the public’s sense of fair play.60 He appeals for a democratic constitution much along the lines of The Case for West Indian SelfGovernment, in which James maintains that “hard things are being said today about parliamentary democracy, but the West Indian colonies will not presume to reject it until England and the dominions show them the way.”61 In these early political writings, James advocates that the West Indies should follow the lead of England and the dominions, thereby falling into line with the paternalist narrative of empire in which modernity originates at the center of empire and extends gradually to the peripheries. However, by 1935, through a combination of James’s study of French socialist historiography of the French Revolution, his close contact with local trade union radicals in Nelson, and outrage over the Ethiopian crisis, he converted to Trotskyism. Unlike Trotsky, however, James focused on the revolutionary potential of the colonial “periphery” and came to believe that colonized people alone – through revolution worldwide – could win for themselves equality and liberty. He concluded that the West would never grant autonomy to the peoples it exploited. This distrust of the West extended to Soviet Russia. When the Soviet Union betrayed its early support of anticolonialism and rushed oil to Italy rather than leading the struggle against imperialism, James became “the outstanding spokesman within England and certainly within the Marxist movements for the Ethiopian plight.”62 Writing for the New Leader, the weekly newspaper of the (British) Independent Labour Party, on October 4, 1935, James fiercely attacked both the League of Nations and Britain for putting a “stranglehold on Ethiopia, as tight as anything Italian Imperialism ever intended.”63 Moving section by section through the League of Nations’ proposal to defend Ethiopia, he “expose[d] the brazen lie that any independence is being defended.”64 James concludes his article with an urgent call, repeating the famous slogan from the Communist Manifesto but with a difference: James emphasizes the independence of the masses to 60 61 62 63 64

Paul Buhle, C. L. R. James: His Life and Work (London: Allison & Busby, 1986), 40–1. C. L. R. James, The C. L. R. James Reader, ed. Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 1992), 61. Buhle, C. L. R. James, 50. C. L. R. James, At the Rendezvous of Victory: Selected Writings (London: Allison & Busby, 1977), 13. James, ibid., 13.


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organize as they see fit and not according to a vanguard party of intellectuals. He rejects the authority of this “we” in the following call, emphasizing the popular aspect of Trotskyite communism: Workers of Europe, peasants and workers of Africa and of India, sufferers from Imperialism all over the world, all anxious to help the Ethiopian people, organise yourself independently, and by your own sanctions, the use of your own power, assist the Ethiopian people . . . Let us fight against not only Italian Imperialism, but the other robbers and oppressors, French and British Imperialism . . . Now, as always, let us stand for independent organisation and independent action. We have to break our own chains. Who is the fool that expects our gaolers to break them?65

Here, James argues that race and the class exploitation rationalized by the racially structured temporality of empire remains the dividing line between those nations that can enjoy political modernity and those that cannot. Since Europe views colonized nations as lagging behind Europe, these nations are excluded from the very modernist institutions that Woolf hopes to reform through gender critique (in England first and foremost) and that James hopes to challenge worldwide through mass organization and action. Between Woolf’s and James’s different strategies lies the racial limit of Woolf’s cosmopolitan sympathies. James abandons a liberal model of cooperation with imperial nations to proclaim the need for an independent, worldwide, pan-African, and working-class movement. Unlike his The Case for West Indian SelfGovernment or W. E. B. Du Bois’s Manifesto of the Second Pan-African Congress written in London in 1921 (and published in The Crisis), James refrains from appealing to the League of Nations and to the colonial powers. While Du Bois concludes his manifesto with a lofty: “To our aid we call all men of the Earth who love Justice and Mercy. Out of the depths we have cried unto the deaf and dumb masters of the world. Out of the depths we cry to our own sleeping souls. The answer is written in the stars,”66 James refuses romantic notions of salvation and appeals to “all men.” Instead, he substitutes a materialist and historical analysis of colonial struggle that emphasizes local forms of popular resistance, much like (with a great difference in class and race terms) what Woolf imagines for her Society of Outsiders and their resistance through literary activity. James’s emphasis on popular resistance inserts occluded forms of black experience into modernity’s narrative of revolution, usually understood as a 65 66

James, ibid., 15–16. W. E. B. Du Bois, Pamphlets and Leaflets by W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Herbert Aptheker (White Plains, NY: Kraus-Thomson Organization, 1986), 199.

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linear overcoming of the past. As James foregrounds the history and experience of the black masses on the colonial “periphery,” he joins together those usually held to be “outside history” with the history-making revolution on the “forefront” of modernity. I next show how this combination potentially resolves a contradiction within Enlightenment thought between modernity and the racial and class divide that I explored in Woolf’s later writings. It also expands democratic possibilities: James’s hybrid text does not merely critique the limits of Woolf’s vision, but it challenges European universalism and generates an alternative modernism of the “periphery.” This alternative modernism brings the racial unconscious of modernity into view and demands that we understand modernism stereoscopically, as the uneven developments of imperial and peripheral modernisms together. In his alternative modernism, James places the locus of historical change and anticolonial transformation with the masses’ self-fashioning to create a practical and conceptual consciousness of a politics yet to come. I begin with James’s neglected propaganda play Toussaint Louverture to explore the significance of what James imagines to be Haiti’s revolutionary event from the standpoints of both its leadership and its vernacular slave culture. I do so because, in James’s vision, the generative locus of an alternative modernism lies with the overlooked Caribbean slave cultures, a crucial difference – in race and class terms – from Woolf’s Society of Outsiders. This difference locates resistance to modernity within its most brutal economic and institutional form – slavery – that cast its workers both inside and outside modernity (a designation that James will challenge). Viewing modernity from the perspective of the slaves significantly alters a critical understanding of modernism. James’s play, subtitled “The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History,” details the rise of the slaves in 1793 who declare themselves free and their struggle to achieve their vision. It also portrays Toussaint’s and other leaders’ struggle over how to effectively win the war, Toussaint’s rise to power and his tragic fall, betrayed by his own generals, and his imprisonment in France, where he soon grows ill and dies. Yet the revolution continues without him. As he says, “In destroying me you destroy only the trunk. But the tree of Negro liberty will flourish again, for its roots are many and deep.”67 67

C. L. R. James, Toussaint Louverture, Richard Wright Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Box 89, folder 1102a, 82. I am grateful to Mary Lou Emery for sharing her research concerning the original sources of James’s play with me. This manuscript is an earlier, but perhaps not the original, version of that which is published in The C. L. R. James Reader.


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Writing in the late 1930s, James recasts the Haitian Revolution, not as a horrific scene of primitive barbarism as the West often sees it, but as a modern, nationalist movement. In remembering that revolution, James offers a proleptic vision of anticolonial nationalisms to come, what Fanon in 1961 would call a “zone of occult instability.”68 The people, Fanon argues, do not dwell in the past. Rather, the writer “must join them in that fluctuating movement which they are just giving shape to, and which, as soon as it has started, will be the signal for everything to be called into question.”69 Both James and Fanon define anticolonial democratic movements as eminently modern, as well as messianic (capable of total social transformation in one apocalyptic event). The unstable present, in which the people’s occluded history emerges into the present political moment, calls all history and its future repetition into question. It offers an unprecedented break from the past by inserting black history and experience into the present. It thereby repeats the past with a difference. Arguably, both Toussaint Louverture and The Black Jacobins offer a vanguardist approach to fomenting a revolutionary society, as they both focus on the hero of the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint Louverture. However, I want to track in these early works instances of James’s later focus: the masses as they produce and recognize, as Nielsen puts it, “social and aesthetic history in the making.”70 For instance, James’s analysis of cricket in Beyond a Boundary (1963) places aesthetics and politics in the realm of popular sport, where future possibilities – an event that exceeds the boundaries of a bureaucratic, class- and race-bound society – might be glimpsed, however fluidly and contingently, in ritualized performance. James writes, “What is to be emphasized is that whereas in the fine arts the image of tactile values and movement, however effective, however magnificent, is permanent, fixed, in cricket the spectator sees the image constantly recreated, and whether he is a cultivated spectator or not, has standards which he carries with him always.”71 I wish to show how James combines in Toussaint Louverture and The Black Jacobins the event of vanguardist rupture and ritualized performativity in a manner that might generate “a politics that is yet to come, the politics of new and different imaginative capabilities.”72 68 69 70 71 72

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 227. Fanon, ibid., 227. Aldon Lynn Nielsen, C. L. R. James: A Critical Introduction (Jackson: Mississippi University Press, 1997), 183. C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary [1963] (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 205. Surrin, “‘The Future Anterior,’” 201.

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Toussaint Louverture has been neglected by James scholars in part because of its relatively unknown history and uncertain manuscript status. The idea for the play occurred to James after the formation of the International African Service Bureau (IASB) in 1935. Frustrated by the League of Nations’ failure to protect Ethiopia, Jomo Kenyatta, Amy Ashwood Garvey (Marcus Garvey’s ex-wife), George Padmore, James, and others formed the International African Friends of Abyssinia and the IASB. The IASB was run solely by formerly colonized persons, but it allowed white patrons (including Nancy Cunard, Sylvia Pankhurst, Arthur Creech-Jones, D. N. Pritt, and Victor Gollancz) to support it financially. The IASB’s monthly journal, International African Opinion, was edited by James from July to October 1938. It vowed to “assist by all means in [our] power the unco-ordinated struggle of Africans and people of African descent against oppression which they suffer in every country.”73 The IASB also supported the private production of James’s propaganda play, Toussaint Louverture. The play was produced by Peter Godfrey under the auspices of the Stage Society and performed at Westminster Theatre in 1936 with Paul Robeson in the leading role. James hoped to adapt it for a film also starring Robeson and directed by Sergei Eisenstein, but this project was never realized. The play lasted only a few Sunday performances; its reviews were not favorable: while they admired Robeson’s performance, critics found the script overburdened by dense historical dialogue. The notice in Harold Moody’s journal of the League of Coloured Peoples, The Keys, however, glowed with praise, calling the play “a swiftly moving drama [that] grips the audience from beginning to end.”74 It, too, however, was doubtful as to the play’s long-term success: “The play tells the truth about Negroes, and there are few white audiences which want to know the truth about Negroes.”75 After its quick disappearance, it re-emerged as a full-length historiography: James’s best-known work, The Black Jacobins. The play dramatizes the historical rupture of the Haitian Revolution, yet James problematizes the very notion of rupture. He, like Woolf, produces a hybrid genre (part anticolonial historiography, part activist theater in support of the IASB, and part modernist interrogation of the meaning of revolution and modernity). He combines the manifesto’s exhortation to its audience to act immediately to overturn social and political relations with a critical detachment that defers the revolution. 73 74

Quoted in Buhle, C. L. R. James, 56. G. M., “The Theatre,” The Keys, 3, 4 (April–June 1936), 68.

75

Ibid., 68.


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James suggests that Louverture anticipates Haiti’s failure to achieve sufficient autonomy from the West, positioned as it was belatedly to European revolutions and within the uneven development of modernity (as a slave labor outpost that was racialized and underdeveloped as part of global modernity). James also suggests his contemporary audience’s detachment as they watch events unfold on stage that mirror antiimperialist struggles underway in the 1930s. Like Woolf, James explores the complexity of social and political change by combining revolutionary rupture with historical revision and analysis (though Woolf emphasizes literary activity over historical analysis). In addition, both imagine an inclusive democratic process by means of hybrid texts that question received aesthetic and narrative forms while envisioning a very different society. The play’s opening scene immediately sets forth the conflict between a complete break with French society (as Louverture’s lieutenant Dessalines advocates) and a tense negotiation between European modernity and the slaves’ resistance to it. Louverture wishes to modernize – but from the location and history of Haiti, and not in mimicry of the West – in order to eliminate slave labor and to promote equality. The play begins in San Domingo (the prerevolutionary name for Haiti) in 1791, on the veranda of the home of the French governor of the island, M. Bullet. The audience hears the minuet from Don Giovanni being played inside “and there are glimpses of men and women dancing in the brightly lighted drawingroom. All through the scene there is a faint but insistent beating of drums.” This setting anticipates how Louverture’s decisions are constantly constrained by his torn loyalties to European and slave cultures: the minuet and the drum. The action begins as a mulatto, Baudiere, delivers to the governor a petition demanding equal rights for mulattos. He is answered by Bullet, who declares “I condemn you immediately to death by hanging for propounding ideas dangerous to religion, to the State and the very existence of society.”76 Worse, Baudiere’s slave must dig his own grave, and, once interred up to his head, servants pour honey and molasses on him. Stone-throwing is forbidden, so that over the course of several days he will gradually be devoured by ants and flies. Through this sentence, James briefly conveys the horrific brutality by which the French plantation society – in the midst of the French Revolution – receives a reasoned, moderate petition for mulatto elites’ rights. He demonstrates 76

James, Toussaint Louverture, 4.

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the lived effects of the racial categories that rationalize societies structured in dominance. To counter this racial line, James places history-making agency, not with the mulatto elite, but with the slaves themselves. James shows that the San Dominguan slaves respond most effectively to the events of the French Revolution not by chipping away at the color line, as when the mulattos (who themselves hold slaves) petition for rights in the opening scene. Rather, in a dialectical confrontation, he posits that the unity and organicity of the slaves’ cultural practices are most effective in fomenting revolution. In this sense, James, as does Ce´saire, participates in a primitivist imagining of racial difference. While neither writer contests an African essentialism (something the Creole manifesto writers do, as we shall see), they insert this essentialism squarely within a modernist problematic in order to contest that binary: these “primitive” slaves created an alternative modernity in Haiti. This position is most clearly made in the next scene, which occurs in the depths of a forest. As a propaganda play, Toussaint Louverture presents a real-time performance in which the event is coextensive with its interpretation: political language and aesthetic representation merge. Its ritualized theatricality stalls the narrative much as the suffrage oratory scenes did in Elizabeth Robins’s The Convert, which I discussed in Chapter 2. The Negro slaves “crowd close together, some carrying torches. Most of them are nearly naked, wearing either a loin-cloth or a shirt. All are dirty and unkempt.”77 Drums beat incessantly. In the directorial comments, James states explicitly, “They, the Negro slaves, are the most important characters in the play. Toussaint did not make the revolt. It was the revolt that made Toussaint.”78 The historical conditions of the present moment both enable and constrain the effectivity of Louverture’s words and actions. He cannot afford to repeat the past but must create the untimely moment of the event in which the present moment is experienced as open-ended and excessive in relation to conventional representations. James presents three responses to the crisis in San Domingo, in the form of speeches made by the leaders of the slave revolt. On a rough platform, the first leader, Boukman, addresses the crowd and relates the deeds of the French Revolution and discusses the making of a petition as the mulattos had done. The second leader, Dessalines, emerges out of the crowd and leaps onto the platform, almost naked, and pushes his way to the front: 77

James, ibid., 7.

78

James, ibid.


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The crowd, hitherto quiet, is at once astir. (The Negro is Dessalines, soon to be known as the Tiger, and afterwards the first Emperor of Haiti.) No petition – we have to fight! (Stir in the crowd.) Not tomorrow but today – now! (crowd responds.) No more work. (response from the crowd.) No more whip. (There is almost a cheer.) Black man eat bananas. Black man eat potatoes. White man eat bread. If white man want bread let white man work. (There is a great laugh.) If we kill the whites we are free. (The drums are beating faster, as if quickened by Dessalines’ speech.) I, Dessalines, will work no more. Liberty! (With deep passion the crowd takes up the word: Liberty! Liberty!).79

Dessalines’s staccato address insists on the revolutionary potential of the present moment “Not tomorrow but today – now!” He constructs the present as a break from the past: “I, Dessalines, will work no more.” And his audience responds more and more strongly and quickly, joining him in his messianic temporality of rupture and apocalyptic change, and becoming aware of their ability to seize the present moment to make history. In this scene, James locates his materialist analysis of the conditions of colonial exploitation within the self-consciousness of those on the “periphery.” The crowd’s laughter, movement, and chanting mark a structure of feeling, as James says elsewhere, “where the formal concepts of social living are in such direct opposition to what people so obviously feel that it is ripe for drastic social transformation.”80 The slaves’ celebration deep in the forest marks the absence of the society they desire in their everyday lives. Yet they refashion themselves and their community through collective ritual in this location. This ritual enacts their liberty within the temporal and spatial (midnight in the forest) constraints of a racially structured colonial system. Their need for immediate action in order to achieve their autonomy produces the temporality of a future anterior in James’s 1930s audience (and his present one) that still hopes that transformation will come. The slaves fleetingly and potentially surpass their present conditions to envision an alternative modernity, one that opens the present to the occluded history and experience of black people. They envision their full participation in political modernity (liberty) and in economic (bread) and social development (freedom) on their island. In presenting Dessalines’s passionate oratory in his play, James joins Woolf in a discomfort with the vanguardist self-interest of most manifestos, as well as with revolutionary rupture. Dessalines’s instrumental will – the will to act, to obey, to sacrifice, so often seen in manifestos – seeks to 79 80

James, ibid., 7–8. C. L. R. James, American Civilization, ed. Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1993), 130.

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define and actualize this passing moment of creative enactment. He represents the masses and advocates immediate action: violence, strikes, and a complete break from the past. He refuses to send written petitions to France and instead intuitively knows that black people must give themselves the liberty they desire. The passage intercuts Dessalines’s speech with the audience’s responses. His call for immediate action strikes a chord with his audience and generates their willingness to act, without reflection or hesitation. The oratory seeks to produce an instrumental effect on its audience, something toward which manifesto writers strive. James’s London audience, in watching the staged audience, might feel a Brechtian alienation effect in so far as they feel discomfort with how Dessalines collapses critical detachment in the exigency of the moment. The reader may recall from Chapter 2 how Elizabeth Robins’s middle-class heroine flees from the burlesque orator who riled her crowd and mocked middleclass pretensions to decorous politics. James produces in his contemporary audience a space and time for reflection and hesitation that is lacking in Dessalines’s fiery rhetoric, which, like manifestos, demands action, now! Indeed, there is another element of historical change that Dessalines neglects, and this element is represented by the third leader, Toussaint Louverture. Toussaint occupies a position at the rally midway between the leaders and the masses. He does not speak at this meeting, as he has not yet assumed leadership, yet he reluctantly drinks blood as part of the ceremony, as do the other leaders. As with Woolf’s letter-writing persona, Toussaint displays critical detachment and hesitates before joining any group. Literate and educated in European Enlightenment thought, Toussaint cannot fully participate in slave society rituals that James represents as African and primitive and lacking in self-conscious and reflective restraint. Both Woolf and James interrupt the forward momentum of collective thought in order not to break completely from the past but to critique modernity from within, a critique that challenges social and political institutions but does not completely overthrow them. Toussaint tempers Dessalines’s refusal to acknowledge French authority and his advocacy of action without restraint. When Dessalines insists to Louverture: “I’ve told you a thousand times. Declare the island independent. It is ours. Our blood and our sweat have made everything that is here,” Louverture replies: Freedom – yes – but freedom is not everything. Dessalines, look at the state of the people. We who live here shall never see Africa again. – some of us born here have never seen it. Language we have none – French is now our language. We

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have no education – the little that some of us know we have learnt from France . . . We must stay with France as long as she does not seek to restore slavery.81

Louverture recognizes the constraints of modernity’s asymmetrical development, its societies structured in dominance based on the color line. This complexity in historical development – its uneven developments – cannot be answered by a simple overthrow of the French, a romantic overcoming of history. Because Haiti has been produced by the West as an object of modernity, the product of the West’s imperial and colonial designs, it cannot simply throw off the colonizing yoke. That romantic overcoming of history, in the context of breaking completely from Western political, social, and economic dominance, proved to be disastrous for Haiti. Instead, Louverture seeks to work from within the interstices of Western modernity in order to gain limited sovereignty. But the rhetoric of constraint, with its careful maneuvers between past and present, lacks the messianic excitement of a total social transformation, now! James writes that Louverture’s downfall occurred because the people of San Domingo could not discern whether his loyalties lay with San Domingo or France. He refuses the manifesto’s polemical “us versus them,” “now versus then” formulation, and adopts a long view into the future, the future anterior, in the hope that it can still rally the present moment. Louverture’s fraught position between revolutionary rupture and gradual modernization becomes impossible as France invades San Domingo to restore slavery. After Louverture is imprisoned in France, Dessalines’s methods prevail, and he is eventually goaded by the English, according to James, to massacre all the French on the island, an act that gives the excuse for Haiti’s economic and political isolation from the West and crippling war reparations to France. James remarks in The Black Jacobins that “If Dessalines could see so clearly and simply, it was because the ties that bound this uneducated soldier to French civilisation were of the slenderest. He saw what was under his nose so well because he saw no further.”82 In contrast, Louverture disparaged an uncritical alliance with the Haitian masses. His vacillation between France and Haiti, as James puts it, both “made him what he was . . . [and] ruined him.”83 Louverture’s residual vanguardist sensibility saw social and economic development only in European terms rather than as a multiple, 81 82

James, Toussaint Louverture, 47–8. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins [1938] (New York: Vintage, 1989), 288.

83

James, ibid., 290.

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coterminous network in which San Domingo, for all its “backward” nature, played a central part. What James sees as the tragic flaw of Louverture and the Haitian Revolution – namely, Toussaint’s Eurocentrism – establishes the future anterior temporality of The Black Jacobins. In his revisionary historiography, the Haitian Revolution can be redeemed only in the future anticolonial struggles, which, in turn, will only be successful by understanding this recovered past. The future anterior opens the present moment in which James writes to hauntings of the past and yearnings for a different future. Writing from the hindsight of the Russian Revolution as well as the French and Haitian Revolutions, James admonishes Louverture for crushing the revolutionaries rather than realizing that they worked against the same enemy, the French: “Instead of reprisals Toussaint should have covered the country, and in the homely way that he understood so well, mobilised the masses, talked to the people, explained the situation to them and told them what he wanted them to do.”84 James recognizes the revolutionary potential of the masses as they defy the constraints of slavery by enacting their liberty, even if only momentarily. This vision of a future anterior is denied to Louverture. It is this future potential that Louverture rejects as he classifies the slaves as “backward” and “primitive,” precisely because he was ensconced within European narratives of development.85 While Louverture discerned that San Domingo needed the economic, political, and social benefits of modernity, he could not recognize that San Domingo was already a coeval counterpart to the West. Its tragedy was that it was impoverished and uneducated, constrained by the very modernity it sought. Writing in 1936, James, however, is attuned to this admixture of local history and global constraint through modernity’s uneven developments. In his play, he demonstrates how the words “liberty, equality, and fraternity” travel to the Caribbean and become transformed. For instance, the French commissioner Roume declares his revolutionary sympathies with San Domingo: “More than our bullets and guns [the monarchies of Europe] fear the words liberty, equality and fraternity, which tear the veils of tradition from the minds of all the oppressed who hear them. Tyranny the world over is trembling.”86 The rhetoric is overblown and romantic, yet James embeds these stirring slogans and prophecies within a historical and economic analysis that cools down such triumphalist proclamations. He demonstrates how these slogans travel and change on the racial and 84

James, ibid., 285–6.

85

James, ibid., 290.

86

James, “Toussaint Louverture,” 33.


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colonized “periphery.” As the slaves fight for their liberty, they translate the songs and beliefs of the French Revolution into the context of their own struggle. The French elite witness the ex-slaves’ military band playing the “C ¸ a ira” and the “Marseillaise.” One onlooker, Pauline, becomes quite upset: “The Marseillaise? That is the song of the Republic.” Her mulatto companion, Suzanne, responds, “But it is our song too, Madame . . . . When we fought for freedom we sang those songs. The revolutionaries in France sang them and we sang them too. We made our own songs but always our soldiers march to the Marseillaise.” Pauline answers, “But that is impertinence. They have no right, the black savages.”87 Yet Delafosse, a general of the French army, defends the military courage of the “black savages.” He recollects the courage displayed by the San Dominguan rebels: “That massed square! Marching to death! Gaily singing! Lighted by the magnificent sun! Years have passed; but today as always that imposing and grandiose picture returns to my imagination as vividly as the first instant.”88 James transplants the modern into what Westerners thought of as a primitive culture in order to contest the center-periphery geography and temporality of the modern and nonmodern. James also locates the idiom of modernity in the population at large. Imbued with the desire to be free, the San Dominguan ex-slaves fight a civilian war in which they will never be defeated, a resistance in which, James notes, women fight more fiercely than men: When Chevalier, a black chief, hesitated at the sight of the scaffold, his wife shamed him. “You do not know how sweet it is to die for liberty!” And refusing to allow herself to be hanged by an executioner, she took the rope and hanged herself. To her daughters going to execution with her, another woman gave courage. “Be glad you will not be the mothers of slaves.”89

As the woman takes the rope to hang herself, she asserts her agency in the context of the most totalizing of unfreedoms. She fashions herself as free, even if it is only to inflict colonial violence upon herself. None the less, the uncanny difference of her participation interrupts colonial history and insists on the slaves’ future freedom. Transposing the self-fashioned literary freedoms of Woolf’s woman writer into the context of Haitian slave society, the anonymous woman slave rewrites colonizing scripts of dehumanization and violence. Performed within the context of anticolonial protest in 1930s London, these scenes serve to critique Eurocentric modernity and to provide a 87

James, ibid., 76.

88

James, ibid., 77.

89

James, The Black Jacobins, 361–2.

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consciousness-raising narrative of incipient black nationalism and modernist revolt. Its temporality is recursive, a marker of historical defeat and future anticipation of victory. James remarks bitterly in The Black Jacobins that such heroism remains caught up in the web of racial degradation, its modernity brutally disavowed by the West: “[The French] enslaved the Negro, they said, because he was not a man, and when he behaved like a man they called him a monster.”90 The colonized are excluded from narratives of heroism and historical progress. Instead, because their revolution fails, their resistance becomes cyclical. Their future revolutionary acts reinscribe past memories of resistance with a difference, as James remarks in his 1963 Afterword to The Black Jacobins: “In 1963 the old colonial system is not what it was in 1863; in 1863 it was not what it had been in 1763 or 1663. The fundamentals . . . , however, have not changed.”91 While one may at first suspect from this elevation of the masses’ struggle that James defaults to a romantic overcoming of obstacles and celebrates the autonomous will of the people, his play and historiography, however, complicate this version of a progressivist narrative. James reconstructs history, showing how revolutionary ideas are sutured and recontextualized within the colonial “periphery.” He demonstrates the need to work both within the interstices of global structures of modernity and local, regional, and national cultures in a manner that borrows from each, moving restlessly between them, and articulating the possibilities of radical democratic practice. James’s recasting of the Haitian Revolution opens the region to a confrontation between imperial metropole and colony, a complex negotiation that avoids the pitfalls of anarchy, on the one hand, and authoritarian dictatorship, on the other. The radical breaks he tracks – documented through proclamations, letters, manifestos (discussed in Chapter 1) and physical and verbal enactments of liberty – are carefully enfolded within multiple layers of history that belie a simple rupture and a narrative of progress. They are, instead, unpredictably formed by ordinary people who fashion for themselves an alternative modernism through a dialectic of agency and constraint. T H E C E´ S A I R E S ’ R E T U R N

I conclude by considering briefly the anticolonial manifestos and poetry of Suzanne and Aime´ Ce´saire. I do this in order to show how within a hybrid poetic idiom – one that combines manifesto, poetry, and 90

James, ibid., 362.

91

James, ibid., 406.


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prose – the occluded history and experience of the African diaspora might further decenter modernism. As with James’s writing, the Ce´saires’ poetic reveals the racial and geographical limits of Woolf’s liberal vision. Though the Ce´saires wrote against the Francophone empire, their writings were immediately translated into English. In both French and English, they helped to foster a poetic and political revolution in the Caribbean and African world. Suzanne Roussy Ce´saire met Aime´ Ce´saire while they were students in Paris. Both associated with the circle that wrote for the single-issue (1934) pan-African journal L’E´tudiant noir. (Aime´ contributed an essay to the journal.) They married in 1937 and returned to Martinique in 1939 to teach at the Lyceé Victor Schoelcher. In 1941, the Ce´saires, along with Rene´ Menil (who signed the 1932 Paris-based pan-African manifesto Le´gitime de´fense), founded the cultural review Tropiques. It was issued quarterly and read primarily by students in Martinique. There, the Ce´saires developed “a Negritude [a Francophone pan-Africanist poetics and a literary, cultural, and intellectual movement] inflected with surrealism – . . . steeped in Hegelian dialectics and Freudian psychoanalysis and equally committed to human freedom.”92 While Negritude shared with surrealism an investment in the primitive (as being outside of Western forms of rationality, alienation, and barbarism on a world scale), both the Ce´saires (to different extents) grappled with the metaphysics of race and nation that this investment implied. In reading their work, I demonstrate how literary manifestos became a vehicle for anticolonial aesthetic and political practice that repeat history with a difference: their event-nature exceeds conventional representations of race and colonialism and unworks instrumental language, including an ahistorical notion of race. The linear temporality of modernity is challenged, and an alternative modernism of the “periphery” emerges through a reconception of the racial past. Suzanne and Aime´ Ce´saire’s anticolonial poetic confronts the contradictions of race and modernity. In response to racial objectification, for example, their manifestos redeploy the literalism inscribed on their bodies through reference to a history of colonial suffering. Political struggle is positively envisioned as an unleashing of heterogeneity rather than its suppression or exclusion. This unleashing is accomplished by turning colonial violence into a performative self-fashioning, and 92

T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Negritude Women (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 1, 83.

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translating that experience to the West in order to expose its hypocrisy and barbarism. Suzanne Ce´saire promises in her manifesto “Surrealism and Us,” published in Tropiques in 1943, that “our surrealism will enable us to finally transcend the sordid antinomies of the present: whites/ blacks, Europeans/Africans, civilized/savages – at last rediscovering the magic power of the mahoulis, drawn directly from living sources.”93 Magic re-enchants and heals the world made violent and corrupt through the binaries of Western racialist thinking. It, much as the Haitian slaves’ “primitive” ritual at midnight in James’s play, evokes the possibility of an untimely event whereby the present is rendered open to a transformation of conventional representations. Moreover, the unifying power of myth is drawn from the indigenous practices of the AfroCaribbean in order to contest metaphysics of race and nationalism. Going beyond primitivist Afrocentrism articulated in Aime´ Ce´saire’s Notebook (to which I turn next), Suzanne Ce´saire’s Negritude “set[s] in motion the idea of plurality of Martinican origins as a result of historical processes, a Negritude that would definitely offer intellectual sustenance to the hybridizing theories of Antillanite´ and Creolite´.”94 (I discuss Creolite´ in the Epilogue.) Such binaries linger at times in Aime´ Ce´saire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, from which his 1942 manifesto is drawn. In the Notebook, Negritude refers sometimes to a “unique race” that is solely of African origin.95 The middle passage, the experience of slavery, and “negridom” are foundational for articulating a resistant Caribbean identity. At other times, however, Negritude is a Jew-man / a kaffir-man / a Hindu-from-Calcutta man / a man-from-Harlemwho-does-not-vote / the starvation-man, the insult-man, the torture-man, one could grab him at any time, beat him up, kill him – yes, kill him too – without having to account to anyone, without having to apologize to anyone.96

Ce´saire rethinks humanism by inserting what remains outside the scope of European history – its disavowed brutality and racial exclusions – in order to render its abstract categories into a species of transformative praxis. The list-making series of historically particular, discontinuous positions 93 94 95 96

Suzanne Ce´saire, “Surrealism and Us,” Tropiques, 8–9 (1943), reprinted in Mary Ann Caws, Manifesto: A Century of Isms (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 489–92, here 492. Sharpley-Whiting, Negritude Women, 83. Aime´ Ce´saire, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land / Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 1995), 117. Aime´ Ce´saire, ibid., 85.


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join together in a disparate but “universal thirst” for emancipation and dignity. Further adapting a paratactic strategy to contest the abstract theories of racial science, Ce´saire’s “In the Guise of a Literary Manifesto” (published in Tropiques in 1942), as its title suggests, reveals the lie – the guise – of literary manifestos’ universalist presumptions. It challenges the history of racial myths that are presented as self-evident “facts” of racial difference. The manifesto asks: Who and what are we? What a fine question! / Haters. Builders. Traitors. Voodoo priests. Especially. For we want all the devils / Yesterday’s, today’s / The iron-collared, the ones with a hoe / Indicted, prohibited, escaped like slaves / not to forget the ones from the slave ship . . . / So we’re singing.97

Mimicking the role of science in investigating the question of race, Ce´saire compiles an overdetermined series of answers that renders the question suspect. Like the avant-garde collage form through which Bu¨rger (see Chapter 1) theorizes the event, the fragmented, overlapping overdetermination of race in the quotation above presents an “untimeliness,” an excess in relation to conventional representations of what “race” means. Ce´saire’s “we” calls into question the Manichean racial identities that structure modernity. With the words “So we’re singing,” Ce´saire selfreflexively comments on his poetic that renders Afro-Caribbean and black diasporic experience plural, remembered, and in contemporaneous conflict with metropolitan centers of modernity. In this poetic dialogue, Ce´saire uses quintessentially modernist devices such as defamiliarization of objects and formulations of subjectivity as abject and grotesque. He recontextualizes and revitalizes these techniques through the political and historical exigencies of the so-called periphery of modernity – its early proletarianization as plantation labor and import/ export economies. The “essential truths” of the black diaspora become a vital process of remembering a lost history, the abyss of the middle passage. Occupying that middle space, Ce´saire’s Notebook articulates a gap between two incommensurable positions: the modern and the savage. The poem drags that savage other (back) into the modern frame: “I and only I / take tongue with the ultimate anguish.”98 This line articulates a Du Boisian double consciousness. It belatedly resutures that subject split as it returns to itself through the looking-glass. In a double movement, it 97 98

Aime´ Ce´saire, “In the Guise of a Literary Manifesto,” Tropiques (1942), reprinted in Caws, Manifesto, 484–5. Aime´ Ce´saire, Notebook of a Return, 101.

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occupies Western metropolitan, colonial, and plantation sites simultaneously and yet differently: “Take tongue” (prends langue) deforms and steals the French language. It articulates the uneven development experienced by racial subjects on the “periphery” of modernity, at once enslaved and modern. The phrase insists on the speaker’s corporeality and the horrific history of that embodiment. It literally refers to the punishment of cutting out a slave’s tongue, and, as poetic utterance, it indicates the spatial disjunction and time-lag that accompanies the act of speaking as a black man. The Ce´saires’ avant-garde techniques seek to mobilize the nationalpopular in a way quite different from futurism and vorticism, or even the British women’s suffrage movement. Suzanne Ce´saire writes in “Surrealism and Us” that: “Our surrealism will supply this rising people with a punch from its very depths.”99 And, as proclaimed in the Notebook, as a people, the black diaspora will “recover our value as metal, our cutting edge of steel, our unprecedented communions.”100 From the “periphery,” then, the black avant-garde gains its cutting edge from the populace and their shared history of suffering. Their very distance from “centers” of modernity allows access to re-enchantment, communal history, and the defamiliarizing practices and objects unique to their location. The Notebook reconfigures Eurocentric understandings of modernity, and, importantly, gives voice to occluded histories of modernity experienced on the colonial “periphery”. Aime´ Ce´saire cannily deploys the racial contradictions of Enlightenment discourse against the aims of the imperial metropolis. He infuses colonial subjects with their dramatic history at the forefront, rather than the prehistory, of modernity as a crucial component of global production and trade. In his treatment, colonized subjects in the Caribbean are akin to what C. L. R. James calls a modern proletariat.101 In writing history from the perspective of colonized subjects, Ce´saire deconstructs the exclusionary presumptions of Enlightenment philosophy while preserving the communitarian ethos of anticolonial nation-building and transnational solidarities. Finally, the manifesto’s violent rhetoric of exclusion is recast as the strength of a people to have survived the violence of modernity. They “recover [their] value as metal,” which is reconceived as the political will to build an inclusive, pluralist political community, “our cutting edge of steel.” 99 101

Suzanne Ce´saire, “Surrealism and Us,” 492. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins, 392.

100

Ce´saire, ibid.


231

The future strength of a people to have survived exemplifies the future anterior that structures an alternative modernism based on the occluded history of black experience. Such a history reveals the racial limits of Woolf’s vision of England. Her Society of Outsiders affirms England as the center and source of modernity. In addition, the Society of Outsiders is dependent upon institutions of power, money, and interest even while it rejects them (a fact that Woolf is quick to affirm). The Society’s literary activity opens political institutions to democratic forms of participation without contesting their universality that is supported by Europe’s economic dominance. In this, Woolf advances political modernity (democratic debate and literary freedoms) without addressing the economic modernity (liberalism’s “free” market trade) that supports those institutions and that depends upon and furthers money, power, and interest. The Ce´saires and James agree with Woolf’s emphasis on political modernity while also insisting on the uneven nature of economic modernity. They negotiate the geopolitical relations between European and colonized peoples and their differing experiences of modernity. Their alternative modernism insists on the centrality of black history and experience to the development and transformation of modernity. This negotiation is ongoing and will conclude my study, as I address the contemporary legacy of the anticolonial manifesto and its confrontation of the racial ground of modernism.

EPILOGUE

Manifestos: then and now

“But the young black who . . . used to kneel in worship before the headlights on explorer’s cars is now driving a taxi in Paris and New Jean Epstein1 York. We had best not lag behind this black.”

The manifestos and other texts I have examined in this book convey a particularly modernist sensibility: they yearn for the time of the new, an elsewhere, that will deliver freedom and authenticity. Manifesto writers, in particular, sought to transform modernity so that it would overcome ignorance, servitude, and injustice. But such modernist longings as expressed via the manifesto have always been compromised. While the manifesto is the form par excellence of modernist rupture (with its singular break from the past that relies upon a cutting-edge understanding of “the new”), it was already ironized and questioned by modernists themselves, as my readings of Virginia Woolf, C. L. R. James, Zora Neale Hurston, Rebecca West, Mina Loy, F. T. Marinetti, and Wyndham Lewis attest. The manifesto has never been a complete break with the past, though its speech acts – “we declare,” “we reject” – would seem through the forceful agency of their words to sever it completely from the past in order to usher in a revolutionary new world. Instead, the manifesto and other texts both break from the past and reconfigure (re-cite) what has preceded it.2 1 2

Jean Epstein, “L’Objectif lui-meˆme,” Ećrits sur le cine´ma, 1921–1953 (Paris: E´ditions Seghers, 1974), vol. I, 125–8, here 127. In contemporary manifestos, this self-consciousness regarding the impossibility of a simple rupture comes to the foreground, even among political manifestos that aim to change the world, now! The recent Zapatistas’ Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona, June 2005, and the third “Black Manifesto, 2005” (representing a broad British-based coalition against racism), work actively to build a movement, pass legislation, and “deliver Equality in our Lifetime” (www.blink.org.uk/bm/, accessed July 30, 2007). Their time-frame – “in our Lifetime” – acknowledges the complexities that make urgent change a long-term, recursive project and not necessarily a singular revolutionary break, as in “the third” – not first – Black Manifesto. The Zapatista manifesto, as another example of this revolutionary reiteration, rejects the Communist Manifesto’s Hegelian narrative of progressive unfolding and focuses instead on the ethics of collective organizing. In its “sixth” declaration, it promises to “forge new relationships of mutual respect and support with persons and organizations

232

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233

This belatedness creates a fold in time, a future anterior, in which revolutionary transformation is projected as a future aspiration of accomplishment. But this belatedness assumes different roles depending upon the position of the writer: in the imperial metropolis, the writer frequently assumes an anxious defensiveness that seeks to ward off these belated qualities (the impure, the heterogeneous, the racialized other); on the “periphery,” writers often hold a “postmodern” – avant la lettre – embrace of being both modern and outside (before and after) the modern. When persons from across the color line write manifestos, they register this belated temporality through racial irony. Racial irony – a form of Du Boisian double consciousness – arises from what Doris Sommer calls “the historical incommensurability that arose from colonization and the color line.”3 This ironic doubleness is the self-consciousness of being at once both inside and outside a culture. As the modernist manifesto travels across time and space, it necessarily changes. Manifestos written from the colonized “peripheries” articulate a different location and practice of the new from those of the metropolitan modernists. Metropolitan modernists, I have argued, cast the modernity of their work against the foil of racially primitive subjects believed to be outside history. Writers from the periphery, in turn, often condemn European thought as outmoded. Europeans become those who lag behind postcolonial cosmopolitan subjects, as my epigraph suggests. In The Wretched of the Earth, for example, Frantz Fanon designates Europe as “static,” a stagnant body from whose narcissistic logic of the unchanging same the revolutionary colonial subject should “flee.” “No,” he says, “we do not want to catch up with anyone.”4 Instead, “we must invent and we must make discoveries” but rather than seek to measure up to European expectations, “we must seek response elsewhere than in Europe.”5 And only in looking away from Europe will “humanity . . . advance a step further.”6 The “new man” arises in the Third World, creates “new concepts,” and “start[s] a new history,” one that remembers Europe’s despotism in the colonial world but is not limited by it.7

3 4 5

who are resisting and struggling against neoliberalism and for humanity,” and to “listen” and “talk directly with, without intermediaries or mediation, the simple and humble of the Mexican people” (www.eco.utexas.edu/~hmcleave/SixthDeclaration.html, accessed July 30, 2007). Doris Sommer, “A Vindication of Double Consciousness,” in A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, ed. Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 174. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 314. 7 Fanon, ibid., 315. 6 Fanon, ibid. Fanon, ibid., 315–16.

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Fanon, like his teacher, Aime´ Ce´saire, still flees his impure Caribbean Creole background in search of a Third World purity that he finds in Africa. But subsequent postcolonial manifestos figure their relations to the modernist “elsewhere” differently. I conclude with the manifesto “In Praise of Creoleness,” written by Martinican linguist Jean Bernabe´ and novelists Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphae¨l Confiant. The Creole manifesto rejects an “elsewhere” of primitive purity and insists instead upon an ethical practice of creative “newness” from within the constraints of modernity itself. It also demonstrates the ongoing and necessary role of manifestos from the colonized world in the development of new aesthetic forms that articulate differential relations with modernity. So long as modernity continues to spread and change through crisis and uneven development, manifestos will visibly and provocatively challenge how to think about a people’s relations to it. As the Creole manifesto writers reject an African (and all too primitivist) elsewhere, they take special aim at Aime´ Ce´saire. They charge that he is still entwined with the Manichean racial structure devised by Europe. Ce´saire, they claim, took up the surrealist re-evaluation of Africa (which I discussed in Chapter 5) and “blew to pieces” ethnocentrism.8 Yet Ce´saire remained hostile to Creoleness, preferring instead, as did the surrealists, the romantic otherness of Africa. Both Europeanness and Africanness, the Creole manifesto writers hold, are external to the realities of the Caribbean: “Assimilation, through its pomps and works of Europe, tried unrelentingly to portray our lives with the colors of Elsewhere.”9 While Ce´saire’s Negritude “opened to us the path for the actuality of a Caribbeanness,” he did not sufficiently reject the European perspective in which persons of the African diaspora are reduced to the essentialist category of African.10 If the modernist “elsewhere” was located on the colonial “periphery”, on the edges of time in the African jungle, the Creole manifesto writers locate this “elsewhere” in the interstices of Caribbean history and culture, within modernity itself. In so doing, they open modernity to the heterogeneity of the colonial periphery: the uneven terrain of the “backward” elsewhere and the future-seeking modern bound together in a mutually constitutive duality. As the modern is redefined as uneven and impure, the manifesto writers refashion Creole identity in a manner that also relinquishes any claims to 8 9

Jean Bernabe´, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphae¨l Confiant, “In Praise of Creoleness,” Callaloo, 13 (1990), 886–909, here 888. Bernabe´, et al., ibid., 888. 10 Bernabe´, et al., ibid.

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purity and instead becomes defined through the effects of an ethical practice. The manifesto writers proclaim Creole to be an “attitude” that is performative. They appeal to anyone “of ideas,” in any discipline (thus appealing to an intellectual class), who “conceives our space” (a jumbled array of “archipelago,” “foothills of firm land,” and “continental immensities”), and who seeks “more fertile thought” and “more precise expression.”11 “Position[ed]” within this terrain of creative multiplicity and local specificity, Creoleness is enacted, re-cited, and renovated in every expressive instance. Creoleness is repeated with a difference. Its aesthetic expression both maintains a Creole identity and “elucidate[s] it at the same time, opening thus for us the routes of the world and of freedom.”12 The act of creativity produces an elsewhere as an imaginative and ethical space within the modern. Creoleness as a performative and expressive act forges an alternative modernity that is neither utopian nor despised and disavowed. This creative and ethical space depends upon intercultural histories of the Caribbean. The Creole manifesto insists on remembering these histories in order to generate a transformed/transforming aesthetics and politics. This collective remembrance focuses on a literary aesthetic that is open-ended and historically accumulative. The writers “declare [them]selves Creoles,” which they define as “the interactional or transactional aggregate of Caribbean, European, African, Asian, and Levantine cultural elements, united on the same soil by the yoke of history.”13 They then transform this yoke of history into a creative freedom articulated from within modernity. The history of the Caribbean is refashioned as the fertile terrain of an unevenly experienced and developed modernity, a force that leaves static and provincial Europe behind, or at least to the side. Diasporic subjects now become the exemplars of “a new humanity”: For three centuries the islands and parts of continents affected by this phenomenon proved to be the real forges of a new humanity, where languages, races, religions, customs, ways of being from all over the world were brutally uprooted and transplanted in an environment where they had to reinvent life. Our Creoleness was, therefore, born from this extraordinary “migan,” wrongly and hastily reduced to its mere linguistic aspects, or to a single element of its composition.14

Creoleness becomes a state of questioning and of complex ambiguities. It is reinvented over the course of three centuries of mixing “languages, races, religions, customs, [and] ways of being from all over the world.” Its 11 14

Bernabe´, et al., ibid., 886. Bernabe´, et al., ibid., 891–2.

12

Bernabe´, et al., ibid.

13

Bernabe´, et al., ibid., 891.

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modernity resembles discourses of postmodernity and globalization except for its insistence on survival and resistance, the memory of being “brutally uprooted and transplanted,” and the trenchant “nonintegration” of Creole oral tradition.15 The manifesto emphasizes “a break, a gap, a deep ravine” between oral traditions and “the Great Time of Culture, dressed in the colors of progress, of civilization, of development” that is the presumed universality of European modernity.16 This modernist negativity seeks a counter to global modernity from within the fallen world of Creoleness and does not seek to distance itself from that world. This alternative modernism forms a “system of countervalues, a counterculture.”17 Modernity joins together center and periphery, but this “system of countervalues” or “counterculture” that is anchored in a remembrance of the Caribbean past insists on difference within that unity. Creoleness is “the world diffracted but recomposed,” a maelstrom of signifieds in a single signifier.18 This rich but antagonistic culture allows for a multiplicity of responses and engagements, an ongoing conversation that constantly reinvents itself. Creoleness embraces the complexity of the world “diffracted but recomposed” and posits itself as a new universal of difference, one that draws from the entire world, as indicated in their neologism: diversality.19 Most of all, it is “a suggestive explosion demanding to be aesthetically organized.”20 The yoke of history gathers competing and differing cultures to foster a creative confrontation or “explosion” that, as a structure of feeling, recombines the subjective and the social to produce emergent aesthetic and social forms. Its event-nature is evident as it exceeds conventional representations and produces an undoing of knowledge and meaning that opens the present to a re-envisioning of collective aesthetic and political forms. This structure of feeling animates the Creole manifesto writers’ call to write the new Creole novel. In this endeavor, they hope to articulate an alternative literary modernism that can multiply a singular understanding of both modernism and modernity. For instance, the Creole writers pose the following question: “How can we think of the Caribbean novel without being enriched with all approaches to the novel of all the peoples of the world?”21 The history of the novel, as a form of modern world literature, must be engaged with in order to write from a Caribbean perspective. And yet, when the modern is confronted and represented in 15 18 21

Bernabe´, et al., ibid., 895. Bernabe´, et al., ibid., 892. Bernabe´, et al., ibid., 898.

16 19

17 Bernabe´, et al., ibid. Bernabe´, et al., ibid. Bernabe´, et al., ibid., 903. 20 Bernabe´, et al., ibid., 892.

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the Caribbean novel, it looks vastly different from its Northern metropolitan sister: “How can we consider an artistic expression which, efficient inside the nation, might turn out anachronistic or out-of-date outside the nation?”22 The Creole manifesto writers offer unquestioned acceptance for their belated location within these progressive narratives, while, on the one hand, being “lucid about our neocolonized flaws” and, on the other, oxygenating our “suffocations” through a “positive vision.”23 They place the modernist aesthetic they find within their own country in proximate and uneven relation to the most “advanced” aesthetics and ideas available anywhere. This juxtaposition is not hierarchized as “advanced” versus “backward,” but instead serves to mutually enrich various modernisms around the world in order to consider modernity from simultaneous perspectives. Creole writers remember “our country, in its difficulties, in its problems, in its pettiest realities, and yet consider the bubblings where literary modernity is leading the world.”24 Literary modernity, even at this late hour, continues to errupt, even explode, in nations struggling with various aspects of industrial, economic, political, and social modernity. Such struggles are laden with historical legacies, continuing problems, and opportunities. Literary modernity places the focus of meaning formation on its audience and their democratic and creative potentialities in order to build a nation and a world that may more inclusively represent its people. I have argued that the manifesto combines a break with the past with the creative repetition and difference of performativity and the event. In so doing, the manifesto continues to usher in the new while also looking backwards and sideways. The unevenness of such interventions into modernity resists formula and instead allows for open-ended surprises, a becoming new that is also a reconsideration of the past. 22


23


24


Index

Abastado, Claude 20 Acton, Harold 158 Actresses’ Franchise League (AFL) 70 Aldington, Richard 132, 163 Ali, Duse´ Mohamed 3, 35, 162 The Ethiopian Times and Orient Review 162 The New Age 3, 14 ‘‘‘White Women and Coloured Men’: The Other Side of the Picture’’ 35 Althusser, Louis 17, 25 Anderson, Benedict 50 Apollinaire, Guillaume 92, 133 ‘‘L’antitradition futuriste’’ 133 Artaud, Antonin 99, 121 avant-garde history of 84 5 performativity 125 Badiou, Alain 12 Manifesto for Philosophy 12 Baker, H. Barton 72 History of the London Stage 72 Baudelaire, Charles 92 6, 187 8 Beerbohm, Max 71 Bell, Gordon O. 172; see also Cunard, Nancy, ‘‘The Negro in Barbardos’’ Benjamin, Walter 8, 10, 30, 46, 159 60, 165 8, 170, 175 6, 183, 187, 190 historical materialism 8 9, 159 ‘‘homogeneous, empty time’’ 46, 50; see also nationalism, spectacle ‘‘Surrealism’’ 97, 179 ‘‘Unpacking My Library’’ 160, 165 6 Berghaus, Gu¨nter 92, 100 Berman, Marshall 14 15, 19 Bernabe´, Jean 234 ‘‘In Praise of Creoleness’’ 6, 220, 234 Bernhardt, Sarah 69, 140 Bhabha, Homi K. 9, 10, 17 34, 52 historicism 8

‘‘‘Race,’ Time and the Revision of Modernity’’ 10 time-lag of modernity 10, 17, 100, 143, 194 5, 213, 230, 233 Blackwell Publishing 1, 12 Blast 3, 121, 123, 130 2, 152 Blum, Cinzia 99 Boccioni, Umberto 95, 107, 110 11 Futurist Painting and Sculpture (1914) 95 Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto (1910) 95 Boehmer, Elleke 37 Boer War 32, 48 Bradbury, Malcolm and McFarlane, James 1 Bradshaw, David 209 Brennan, Timothy 3 4, 33 4 Brown, Wendy 18 Bu¨rger, Peter 1, 13, 229 burlesque 69 performance of 78 80 time-lag of 80; see also Bhabha, Homi K. tradition of 71 3 Butler, Josephine 61 cabaret Cabaret Theatre Club 125, 126, 130 Cave of the Golden Calf 125, 126 as heterotopia 123, 127, 128 9, 132, 133, 138, 146, 147 8; see also race history of 122 3, 128, 129 and racial spectacle 122, 141, 150 1, 187 Carson, Sir Edward 31 Casanova, Pascale 34 Caws, Mary Ann 31 Manifesto: A Century of Isms 5 Ce´saire, Aime´ 20, 84, 153, 190, 193, 212, 220, 226 30, 234 7 ‘‘In the Guise of a Literary Manifesto’’ 229 Notebook of a Return to My Native Land 20, 212, 228 30

238

Index Ce´saire, Aime´ and Suzanne Roussy 204, 210, 230, 231 Tropiques 227 8, 229 Ce´saire, Suzanne Roussy 153, 190, 193, 212, 226 8, 230 ‘‘Surrealism and Us’’ 212, 228, 230 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 16 Chamoiseau, Patrick 234; see also Jean Bernabe´ Clark, T. J. 73 Comentale, Edward 1, 124, 134, 137 Communist Third International (Comintern) 158, 171 Confiant, Raphae¨l 234; see also Jean Bernabe´ Crevel, Rene´ 163, 177, 186 7, 189; see also Cunard, Nancy ‘‘The Negress in the Brothel’’ Cuddy-Keane, Melba 196 7 Cunard, Nancy 3, 40, 153, 157 60, 183 4, 201, 202, 209, 218 ‘‘Black Man and White Ladyship: An Anniversary’’ 166 7 ‘‘Circular’’ 176 ‘‘Harlem Reviewed’’ 166 Negro 3, 40, 157, 167 8, 169 70, 171, 180 9, 202 ‘‘Characteristics of Negro Expression’’ 180 9 ‘‘Communism and the Negro’’ 180 ‘‘The Congo Manifesto’’ 181 2 ‘‘Flashes from Georgia Chain Gangs’’ 180 ‘‘Murderous Humanitarianism’’ 177 80 ‘‘The Negress in the Brothel’’ 186 7 ‘‘The Negro in Barbados’’ 172 ‘‘Preface’’ 175 Daily Mail 70, 93 Derrida, Jacques 10, 17, 19 Specters of Marx 17 Despard, Charlotte 48 Dessalines 29, 219, 220 3 Doane, Mary Anne 62 Dodge, Mabel Luhan 112, 116 Doyle, Laura 193, 204 5 Du Bois, W. E. B. 36, 39 40, 157, 162, 163, 170, 171, 172, 215, 229, 233 The Crisis 162 Dark Princess 36 ‘‘London Manifesto’’ 39, 157, 215 The Negro 162 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau 112 13 East London Suffrage Federation (ELSF) 65 Edwards, Brent Hayes 25, 161, 171, 183, 184 Edwards, Paul 126

239

Eliot, T. S. 32, 74 The Waste Land 1 English Revolution 23 4, 105 Epstein, Jean 41, 232 ‘‘L’Objectif lui-meˆme’’ 232 Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds 76 event definition of 7 8, 11, 13 14, 229 and heterotopia 128; see also cabaret of interpretation 76, 96, 163, 220 manifesto as 9 10, 132, 227 of maternity 113, 117 as strategic tactic of disruption 106, 176, 183, 184, 195, 208 Fanon, Frantz 9, 10, 12, 24, 217, 233 The Wretched of the Earth 12, 233 Felski, Rita 56 Fischer, Sibylle 10 Ford, Ford Madox 92, 132 Ford, James W. 171, 180; see also Cunard, Nancy ‘‘Communism and the Negro’’ Forster, E. M. 32, 210 Foucault, Michel 5, 7, 128 9, 130, 179 The Order of Things 129 French Revolution 21 2, 26, 27, 61, 105, 214, 225 Garvey, Marcus 41, 162, 170 The Black Man 41, 162 Negro World 162 Gentile, Emilio 85, 88, 100 Gilman, Sander 140 Gilroy, Paul 22, 91, 189 Glenn, Susan A. 69 Graver, David 147 Green, Barbara 57 Habermas, Ju¨rgen 21 Hadley, Elaine 61 Haitian Revolution 9 10, 22, 24, 26, 27, 28, 30, 105, 212, 217, 218, 224, 226 Hall, Stuart 25 Hamilton, Cicely 70 Pageant of Great Women 70 Hamlet 18 Hanchard, Michael 52, 179 Hegel, G. W. F. 16 heterotopias; see cabaret historicism 7 8; see also Bhabha, Homi K. Hobson, J. A. 63 Howells, William Dean 72 Hughes, Langston 157, 163, 179 ‘‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain’’ 157

240

Index

Hurston, Zora Neale 163, 185 6, 187 9, 232; see also Cunard, Nancy ‘‘Characteristics of Negro Expression’’ Hutchinson, George 173 Ibsen, Henrik 70 International African Friends of Abyssinia 218 International African Service Bureau (IASB) 37, 218 International Peace Campaign 208 ‘‘War and Writers’’ 208 9 Jacobs, Karen 192 James, C. L. R. 3, 9 10, 21 2, 26 30, 37, 84, 153, 190, 193, 201, 204, 210, 211, 230, 231, 232 Beyond a Boundary 193, 212 The Black Jacobins 3, 21, 26 30, 212 13, 217, 218, 223 4, 226 The Case for West Indian Self-Government 201, 211, 213 14, 215, 217 The Life of Captain Cipriani 214 ‘‘Toussaint Louverture’’ 212, 213, 216 26 Jameson, Fredric 147 Jaure`s, Jean 21 Histoire socialiste de la Re´volution francaise 21 Joyce, James 32, 123, 134 Ulysses 1 Kaplan, Caren 175 Kenyatta, Jomo 163, 171, 218 The Keys; see Moody, Harold Kibangu, Simon 182 Laclau, Ernesto 25 Lazarus, Neil 177 League Against Colonial Oppression 170 1 League of Coloured Peoples (LCP) 37, 40, 157, 218 League of Nations 171, 191, 208, 210, 214, 215, 218 L’E´tudiant noir 227 Levenson, Michael 1 Lewis, Wyndham, 35, 36, 92, 121 2, 123 38, 139, 144, 158, 198, 199, 232 The Caliph’s Design: Architects, Where is Your Vortex? 137 8 The Enemy 36 Enemy of the Stars 128, 131, 144 52 Kermesse 126 Paleface 36 ‘‘Physics of the Not-Self’’ 148 Rude Assignment 144 The Self Condemned 152 Time and Western Man 123 4, 127 ‘‘War Crowds’’ 139 Linton, Elizabeth Lynn 56

Lionnet, François and Shih, Shu-mei 194 Lista, Giovanni 92 7 Lloyd, Marie 74 Locke, Alain 161 The New Negro 161, 177, 184 Longman Anthology of British Literature 5 Longman Anthology of World Literature 5 Louverture, Toussaint 22, 26 30, 38, 171, 219 20, 222 4 Loy, Mina 83 4, 112 20, 198, 232 ‘‘The Effectual Marriage’’ 119 ‘‘Feminist Manifesto’’ 112 13, 115 17, 198 ‘‘Lions’ Jaws’’ 114, 115 ‘‘Parturition’’ 117 19 Songs to Johannes 113 14, 115 Lukaćs, Georg 73 Narrate or Describe? 73 Lyon, Janet 5, 21, 23 McKay, Claude 37, 164 Spring in New Hampshire 37 MacKenzie, John 63 Maine, Sir Henry 16 manifesto as archive 5, 206 community formation in 2 3 definition of 1, 197 and democratic praxis 201, 202 3, 206 as event; see event history of 11 12 interpretations of 1 2 and language of rupture 20, 221, 232 performativity of 13, 46, 235 and race 19 20, 22 shortcomings of 195, 197 200 Marcus, Jane 173 Marinetti, F. T. 83 6, 87 90, 91 4, 96 102, 103 12, 121, 126, 130, 131, 132, 199, 232 ‘‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’’ 88, 88 90, 91, 96, 97, 101 2, 106 ‘‘Futurist London’’ 106 ‘‘Futurist Speech to the English’’ 105 ‘‘Geometric and Mechanical Splendor and the Numerical Sensibility’’ 99, 108 Markfarka the Futurist 88, 90 1, 113 ‘‘Suffragettes and India Docks’’ 106, 109, 111 ‘‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature’’ 99, 102 ‘‘The Variety Theater’’ 93 4, 96 8, 103 4, 105, 107 words-in-freedom 98 9, 103 4, 106 11, 117 Marson, Una 40 Marx, Karl 17, 18 19, 24 Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich 14 16, 17 18, 105, 132 3, 179, 198

Index Communist Manifesto 14 16, 17 18, 25, 35, 57, 132 3, 179, 181, 214 Mason, Theodore 183 Mayhall, Laura Nym 49 melodrama history of 61 2 and nationalism 63 4 Menil, Rene´ 227 Le´gitime de´fense 227 modernism activity of 15 alternative modernisms 8 9, 132, 159, 183, 195, 213, 216, 220, 221, 226, 227, 231, 235 7; see also race competing definitions of 4 and geopolitics of race and colonial relations 158 and historicism 7 8 interpretations of 3 transnational modernism 194 Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents 5 modernity black 158, 159, 184 5, 185 6, 212, 221 categories of 9 and colonization 16 17 definition of 15 racial unconsciousness of 77, 216; see also race time-lag of 182 3, 192; see also Bhabha, Homi K. uneven development of 25, 212, 219, 223, 224, 234 Montefiore, Dora 48 Moody, Harold 157, 218; see also League of Coloured Peoples ‘‘Color in England’’ 157 The Keys 162, 218 Moretti, Franco 136 Morrisson, Mark 1, 145 music hall 62 3 and race 92 3 Nardal, Paulette 157 ‘‘L’E´veil de la conscience de race chez les e´tudiants noirs’’ 157 National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (NAACP) 172 nationalism 50 1 and colonialism 91 Negritude 227, 228, 234 5 Nielsen, Aldon 184 5, 217 Nietzsche, Friedrich 121, 127, 148 North, Michael 164, 186 Norton Anthology of African American Literature 161

241

Ong, Aihwa 6 7 Padmore, George 163, 171, 218 Pan-African Congress 170 Pankhurst, Christabel 45, 48, 52 4, 56, 65, 67 The Great Scourge and How to End It 52 3 ‘‘What Militancy Means’’ 54 Pankhurst, Emmeline 48, 67 Pankhurst, Sylvia 37, 48, 51 2, 60, 65 6, 218 ‘‘The Potato-pickers’’ 51 The Workers’ Dreadnought 37 Perloff, Marjorie 33, 95 6 Pethick-Lawrence, Emmeline 48 Pethick-Lawrence, Frederick 48 Platt, William 210 Poggi, Christine 110 11 Pound, Ezra 35, 121, 163, 172 Pridmore-Brown, Michele 204 Puchner, Martin 5, 18, 34, 84 5, 145 6, 160 race and and and and

communism 173 5 Enlightenment philosophy 22 eugenics 54 5, 113, 116 17, 205 gender exclusions in modernity 52 4, 83, 88, 141, 142, 194, 215 and heterotopia 130, 133 and intersubjectivity 117 19 and manifestos; see manifesto and myth of modernity 121 2, 125, 136 7, 229 and nationalism; see nationalism and nativism 123, 125, 134 6 objectification of 99 100 as occluded in modernity 23, 45, 209 11, 212, 230 and primitivism 34, 127, 159, 162, 172 3, 179, 227 as product of culture and class 47, 86 7 racial time 52 and sexuality 59 60, 168 as spectacle; see cabaret as time-lag of modernity; see Bhabha, Homi K. and violence 87 Richards, Thomas 57 Robeson, Paul 167, 218 Robins, Elizabeth 46, 58, 67, 76 7, 222 The Convert 46, 64, 67 70, 74 6, 80 1, 220 Votes for Women! 46, 69 71 Robinson, Cedric 30 Rollyson, Carl 140 Sadoul, Georges 164, 175 Said, Edward 29, 32 Culture and Imperialism 32

242

Index

Schnapp, Jeffrey 90, 91, 98 Shakespeare, William 18 Shaw, George Bernard 37 Shreiber, Maeera 115, 117 Sitwell, Edith 37 Sitwell, Osbert 126 7 Great Morning! 126 Somigli, Luca 5 Legitimizing the Artist 5 Sommer, Doris 233 4 Sorel, Georges 86 7, 105 Soupault, Philippe 82, 93 spectacle 59 60; see also melodrama Spivak, John L. 180; see also Cunard, Nancy ‘‘Flashes from Georgia Chain Gangs’’ Stallybras, Peter 19 Stein, Gertrude 124, 132 Stirner, Max 145 Stocking, George 47 Stoler, Ann 130 Strindberg, Frida 125, 126 7 Suleri, Sara 138 Summerfield, Penny 62 3 surrealism 160, 169 70, 178 80, 227; see also Cunard, Nancy ‘‘Murderous Humanitarianism’’ ‘‘First Appraisal of the Colonial Exhibition’’ 181 ‘‘The Truth about the Colonies’’ 178 Surrin, Kenneth 212 13, 217 Tacitus 23 Germania 23 Tagore, Rabindranath 37 Tickner, Lisa 64 Tietjins, Eunice (E. T.) 132 Tzara, Tristan 102 Unruh, Vicky 6 vorticists 121 2, 123

Walker, David 38 Appeal in Four Articles 38 Walrond, Eric 40 ‘‘The Negro in London’’ 41 Webb, Beatrice 55 West African Student Union (WASU) 37 West, Rebecca 3, 58 60, 92, 108, 116, 130, 132, 138 44, 150 1, 232 ‘‘Christmas Shopping: The Psychology of Regent Street’’ 59 ‘‘Indissoluble Matrimony’’ 138 44 Williams, Raymond 32 3 Williams, William Carlos 163, 172 Winslow, Barbara 65 Wollaeger, Mark 193 Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) 47 9, 50, 51, 56, 64, 81, 113, 208 ‘‘The Battle Cry’’ 49 50, 50 1 The Outragettes 66 7 Votes for Women 48, 49, 51 ‘‘Votes for Women, New Movement MANIFESTO’’ 57 Woolf, Leonard 201, 210 Woolf, Virginia 32, 153, 190, 191 2, 215 16, 219, 221 2, 225, 227, 231, 232 Between the Acts 191 3, 204, 212 ‘‘Character in Fiction’’ 196 7 ‘‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’’ 196 scrapbooks 206 11 Three Guineas 14, 193 4, 195, 197 201, 202 6, 207, 208 11 Wordsworth, William 12 ‘‘Preface to the Lyrical Ballads’’ 12 Young, Robert Alexander 38 9 ‘‘The Ethiopian Manifesto’’ 38 Young, Robert J. C. 7, 142 Yu´dice, George 3, 33 4, 105 Ziarek, Krzysztof 13 14, 101 3 Zˇizˇek, Slavoj 204

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The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (Race and American Culture)

True Religion (Blackwell Manifestos)

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Phenomenal Shakespeare (Blackwell Manifestos)

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Architectures: Modernism and After

Modernism, Narrative and Humanism

Modernism and the Ordinary

Modernism, Feminism, and Jewishness

Modernism and Nihilism

Modernism and Mildred Walker

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Modernism and Eugenics

Ruskin and Modernism

What Cinema Is! (Blackwell Manifestos)

Rescuing the Bible (Blackwell Manifestos)

The Social Life of Poetry: Appalachia, Race, and Radical Modernism (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)

Modernism and World War II

Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel

Disciplining Modernism

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German Cities and Bourgeois Modernism

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Modernism, Race and Manifestos

The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Blackwell Manifestos)

The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (Race and American Culture)

True Religion (Blackwell Manifestos)

True Religion (Blackwell Manifestos)

Phenomenal Shakespeare (Blackwell Manifestos)

Islam and Modernism

Architectures: Modernism and After

Modernism, Narrative and Humanism

Modernism and the Ordinary

Modernism, Feminism, and Jewishness

Modernism and Nihilism

Modernism and Mildred Walker

Modernism and Popular Music

Modernism and Style

Modernism and Eugenics

Ruskin and Modernism

What Cinema Is! (Blackwell Manifestos)

Rescuing the Bible (Blackwell Manifestos)

The Social Life of Poetry: Appalachia, Race, and Radical Modernism (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)

Modernism and World War II

Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel

Disciplining Modernism

'Race' and Sport: Critical Race Theory

German Cities and Bourgeois Modernism

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American Modernism and Depression Documentary

Modernism and the Celtic Revival

Modernism, Satire and the Novel

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