In the past decade, there have been a number of excellent studies that have discussed the connections between British modernism and Anglophone postcolonial literature. The two books that serve as the focus of this review represent further examples of this trend. In one case the methodology is interdisciplinary, in the other these connections are in fact the central emphasis.
As its subtitle suggests, Peter Kalliney’s Commonwealth of Letters reassesses the relationship between British metropolitan writers and their late colonial and early postcolonial counterparts. As the main title suggests, Pascale Casanova receives a subtle nod in this reassessment. Kalliney argues that between 1930 and 1970, a “commonwealth of letters” centered on London operated largely according to its own internal dynamics rather than shifting in step with exterior political and economic events. For Kalliney, this is most directly manifest by the fact that British modernists and late colonial writers treated one another as collaborators and competitors in a professional contest and not, as many postcolonial readings of the period would have it, as members of opposing camps. The 1950s are the central focus of his account. As he notes, while the surviving interwar modernists and a younger, postwar generation of metropolitan writers (most prominently, the Angry Young Men and the Movement) viewed each other skeptically, Eliot, Spender, and their compatriots saw considerable promise in a number of writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia—writers who, likewise, appeared more positively disposed to the literature and literary values of the modernists. In this context, British modernists and writers from the colonies maintained relatively collegial relations, crossing paths on university campuses and in the studios of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and commenting favorably on one another’s work in public and private. “If colonials were treated as second-class imperial subjects in most contexts,” Kalliney argues, “the literary world was one of the few areas in which racial discrimination and political subordination were not necessarily the orders of the day” (12). As he puts it in the closing pages of his account, “mid-century writers of whatever provenance tended to see other writers as fellow professionals first and foremost, and as political antagonists only after that” (258).
Kalliney’s argument about the autonomy of the world of literature will undoubtedly strike many readers as overly rosy, though, in a sense, it simply expands upon the general sentiment that the immediate postwar period—particularly the ten years between the docking of the SS Empire Windrush and the violence in Nottingham and Notting Hill in 1958—represented a relatively hopeful moment in the history of race relations in Britain, especially in comparison with the decades that followed. In such circumstances, it is possible to envision a somewhat autonomous “commonwealth of letters” taking hold, though one could certainly debate the scope, depth, and duration of its animating spirit. Nonetheless, Kalliney admirably supports his position with archival research, interviews, and succinct close readings of a variety of primary texts and critical works. In part because of his emphasis on cross-racial collaboration, his most persuasive claims tend to involve institutions that came to facilitate contact between British writers and writers from elsewhere. Chapters that trace the role of the BBC in the rise of West Indian literature, the internal deliberations of Faber and Faber in their work with Amos Tutuola, and the history of Heinemann’s African Writers Series stand out in particular. Other highlights include a thought-provoking reading of Beyond a Boundary (a reading that has a central role in his presentation of literature as a game or contest) and an even-handed assessment of the rediscovery and reinvention of Jean Rhys as a postcolonial writer. Commonwealth of Letters certainly deserves to be read alongside related works on the rise of postcolonial literature such as Gail Low’s Publishing the Postcolonial and Graham Huggan’s Postcolonial Exotic, while it will also appeal to those who have read The World Republic of Letters and James English’s The Economy of Prestige with interest.
Jon Hegglund’s World Views; Metageographies of Modernist Fiction offers a very different mapping of British modernism and Anglophone postcolonial literature, one that specifically highlights their entanglement with the conceptualization of space in physical and political terms. World Views tracks modern British and postcolonial writing in relation to developments within the field of geography since the rise of so-called “new geography.” It presents geography and its relationship to literature as dynamic rather than static, underscoring the often arbitrary and contradictory claims of geography and highlighting the work of literature in exposing these problematic concepts. World Views offers an especially strong argument as to why postcolonial scholars should attend more closely to the history of geography. Hegglund points out that the effort to achieve political autonomy requires an engagement with not only particular spaces, but with “institutionalized forms of space”—abstract concepts such as the nation-state, the region, and the continent—of relevance far beyond a given locality. As he notes, the authority of these spaces rests upon a tenuous claim that writers from Conrad to Ghosh have repeatedly challenged: “these spaces are, in their very nature, premised on the idea that geography can yoke together the qualitative, affective realm of organic culture and the quantitative, administrative territory of the bureaucratic state” (19). Literary texts frequently expose the fallacies of “cartographic realism” in moments that involve what Hegglund (following Neil Smith) describes as “scale-bending”: the artful juxtaposition of local, subjective experiences of space with larger, abstract conceptions of space such as the nation or the continent. Hegglund unearths such moments in “metageographical literary texts” including Heart of Darkness, Ulysses, Journeys without Maps, Howards End, Wide Sargasso Sea, A Small Place, The Shadow Lines, and the text with which he introduces his argument, Sadaat Hassan Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh.” Beyond its analysis of these canonical works, though, World Views offers an argument and a set of portable concepts that are likely to be of use to many in postcolonial studies.
