Commonwealth of Letters Modernist Literature & Culture Kevin J. H. Dettmar & Mark Wollaeger, Series Editors Consuming Traditions Unseasonable Youth Elizabeth Outka Jed Esty Machine Age Comedy World Views Michael North Jon Hegglund Th e Art of Scandal Americanizing Britain Sean Latham Genevieve Abravanel Th e Hypothetical Mandarin Modernism and the New Spain Eric Hayot Gayle Rogers Nations of Nothing But Poetry At the Violet Hour Matthew Hart Sarah Cole Modernism & Copyright Fictions of Autonomy Paul K. Saint-Amour Andrew Goldstone Accented America Th e Great American Songbooks Joshua L. Miller T. Austin Graham Criminal Ingenuity Without Copyrights Ellen Levy Robert Spoo Modernism’s Mythic Pose Th e Degenerate Muse Carrie J. Preston Robin Schulze Pragmatic Modernism Commonwealth of Letters Lisa Schoenbach Peter J. Kalliney Commonwealth of Letters British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics Peter J. Kalliney 3 3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offi ces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Th ailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 © Oxford University Press 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kalliney, Peter J., 1971– Commonwealth of letters : British literary culture and the emergence of postcolonial aesthetics / Peter J. Kalliney. pages cm. — (Modernist Literature & Culture ; 20) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–997797–0 (hardcover : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978–0–19–997798–7 (ebook) 1. Postcolonialism in literature. 2. Modernism (Literature) 3. Commonwealth literature (English)—History and criticism. 4. Literature—Philosophy. I. Title. PN56.P555K35 2013 809´.93358—dc23 2012050992 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Contents Series Editors’ Foreword vii Acknowledgments xi 1. Modernist Networks and Late Colonial Intellectuals 1 2. Race and Modernist Anthologies: Nancy Cunard, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Ezra Pound 38 3. F or Continuity: FR Leavis, Kamau Brathwaite, and Ngũgĩ wa Th iong’o 75 4. Metropolitan Modernism and Its West Indian Interlocutors 116 5. D eveloping Fictions: Amos Tutuola at Faber and Faber 146 6. Metropolitan Publisher as Postcolonial Clearinghouse: Th e African Writers Series 178 7. Jean Rhys: Left Bank Modernist as Postcolonial Intellectual 218 C onclusion: Postcolonial Writing or Global Literature in English? 245 Notes 259 Bibliography 287 Index 307 This page intentionally left blank Series Editors’ Foreword All of us, in our personal and professional lives, rely more than we care to admit on placeholders of some kind or another. Received ideas, aft er all, make it possible to advance without repeatedly reinventing the wheel. Most students of modern- ism, for instance, are probably pretty confi dent that F. R. Leavis was a reactionary whose emphasis on close reading eliminated politics from literary analysis, just as students of postcolonial literature are likely comfortable in the belief that politi- cally engaged postcolonial writers were profoundly hostile to high modernism’s doctrine of aesthetic autonomy. Sure, a lot of Caribbean poets might have been drawn to T. S. Eliot, but the attraction lay only in the modernity of his idiom, which in the hands of Kamau Brathwaite or Derek Walcott could be turned, hav- ing been rendered politically subversive through the alchemy of minority con- sciousness, against the metropolitan master. And then a powerful revisionary account comes along to reveal the partiality (in every sense) of what we thought we knew. Such is Peter Kalliney’s Commonwealth of Letters. Dominant narratives are rarely completely wrong or they wouldn’t have taken hold in the fi rst place; but if you think you understand what Leavis “means” to the history of literary study, you probably don’t. Kalliney is more politic: with- out simply dismissing the partial understandings that have guided a great deal of scholarship, he draws on extensive archival work to off er a stunning new account of the role of racial competition and collaboration during the hinge period between metropolitan modernism and postcolonial literature. Th e broader argument is this: professional networks established by interwar modernists in London welcomed and encouraged the eff orts of colonial émigrés in the midcentury as a way to rejuvenate a literary culture increasingly stigmatized as vii viii SERIES EDITORS’ FOREWORD lifeless by metropolitan commentators in the post-World War II wake of modern- ism. Th is outward turn can be considered a dialectical companion to the inward turn toward Englishness described by Jed Esty in A Shrinking Island. Émigré writers had their own reasons not only for collaborating with what remained of the London avant-garde but also for adopting some of the key tenets of metropolitan modernism: the desire to gain access to London’s cultural institu- tions, such as the BBC, went hand in hand, Kalliney argues, with an investment in aesthetic autonomy. Indeed, in Kalliney’s words, “black Atlantic writers were the twentieth century’s most eloquent and committed defenders of aesthetic auton- omy.” Why? “Nonwhite, non-metropolitan writers were drawn to the conception that cultural institutions could be exempt from the systems of racial and political hierarchy operative elsewhere.” Eliot’s theory that a genuine work of art rises above the mundane biographical particularities of its creator thus held great appeal for colonial writers, “who hoped their art would transcend the kind of racial barriers that exasperated African American writers working in the U.S.” Th us if London’s midcentury modernists, like late imperial adventurers seeking vitality at the periphery of “civilization,” sought an infusion of aesthetic energy from colonial émigrés, late colonial and early postcolonial intellectuals had at least as much to gain by adapting high modernist discourse to their own needs. One can imagine a triumphalist version of this narrative in which modernism is shown to be more important and infl uential than disrespectful postmodern- ists and postcolonial critics have been willing to admit; but Kalliney’s approach is admirably balanced in the way it restores a sense of the collaborative professional networks that placed late colonial and early postcolonial writers on an equal foot- ing in 1950s London. Metropolitan snobbery, cultural imperialism, and racism, Kalliney acknowledges, were all important features of postwar British literary cul- ture, but Commonwealth of Letters shift s the emphasis toward the strategic use colonial writers could make of the London literary scene and the equally strategic use the literary establishment could make of exciting new writers in its struggle to compete with New York and Paris for cultural capital (hence the nod to Pascale Casanova in Kalliney’s title). Sadly, this space of collaboration did not last. Kalliney argues that we should look at postwar literary culture in the Anglophone world—especially in London— as a brief moment when exchanges, collaborations, and partnerships were possible between the aging generation of modernist gatekeepers and a new generation of colonial and decolonizing writers and intellectuals. By the 1970s, the discourse of comparison by which white and black writers were judged against one another as writers, regardless of political diff erences, gave way to the more polarized scene we SERIES EDITORS’ FOREWORD ix know today, with modernists typically on one side, postcolonial writers and critics on the other. Kalliney provides a fresh way to grasp the fi elds together. To return to Kalliney’s surprising and entirely persuasive account of Leavis: we are reminded that even as Leavis rightly considered himself a dissident in relation to dominant forms of literary study, his insurgency aimed to make the English Department assert its rightful place at the heart of the University. Connecting Leavis’s ambivalence with later eff orts by Kamau Brathwaite and Ngũgĩ wa Th iong’o to reform the literary curriculum, Kalliney points out that “this particu- lar form of minority discourse—in which the misunderstood, uncompromising intellectual fashions himself as both scourge and savior of the university and the discipline—would be one of the major bequests from Leavis to postcolonial theory by way of the great tradition.” Th e legacy of Leavis’s ambivalence, one could say, was structural. Commonwealth of Letters ranges widely over postwar Anglophone literature, off ering bold revisionary accounts and incisive close readings of major work by Ngũgĩ, Brathwaite, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Nancy Cunard, Amos Tutuola, Jean Rhys, V. S. Naipaul, George Lamming, Sam Selvon, and Wilson Harris. Drawing on the unpublished correspondence of many of these authors and providing a new institutional history of the emergence of postcolonial aesthet- ics, Kalliney challenges students of modernism and postcolonial studies to rethink longstanding assumptions that have shaped their fi elds, and perhaps to rediscover a collaborative ethos that can all too easily dissolve amid the competitive crosscur- rents of our profession. —Mark Wollaeger and Kevin J. H. Dettmar