Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: white zombies, black Jacobins
- 1 White zombies in the state machinery
- 2 Set in authority: white rulers and white settlers
- 3 Soldiers and traitors: Rebecca West, the world wars and the state subject
- 4 White turkeys, white weddings: the state and the south
- 5 Modernist (pre)occupations: Haiti, primitivism and anti-colonial nationalism
- Afterword: myths, monsters, modernization, modernism
- Notes
- Index
Afterword: myths, monsters, modernization, modernism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: white zombies, black Jacobins
- 1 White zombies in the state machinery
- 2 Set in authority: white rulers and white settlers
- 3 Soldiers and traitors: Rebecca West, the world wars and the state subject
- 4 White turkeys, white weddings: the state and the south
- 5 Modernist (pre)occupations: Haiti, primitivism and anti-colonial nationalism
- Afterword: myths, monsters, modernization, modernism
- Notes
- Index
Summary
My goal in writing this book has been to discuss the politics of modernism in a way that acknowledges the radical change postcolonial thought and other studies of subaltern agency have wrought in our accounts of modernization.
The question of modernism's politics has been raised, of course, in the context of the contemporary politics of its individual practitioners (Were they fascist sympathizers? Were they suffragettes? Did they support or oppose Empire?) and in the debates over whether particular literary techniques are “conservative/elitist” or “liberatory/egalitarian.” Similarly, discussions about race and empire in modernism often debate whether the modernist use of material depicting non-Western or non-white people, as in primitivism or various strains of dialect or regionalist modernism, is racist, imperialist or appropriative or whether it is the case that modernists were radically open to Otherness and difference. I argue that the politics of modernism lie not in alignment with left or right but rather in modernism's conceptions of the political subject of history. Modernism is one account of modernization; rewriting the ideological implications and material histories of modernization should make a difference to modernist studies' account of modernism. What postcolonial studies has “done” to cultural histories of modernization is, first, to show that the West's others were not passively modernized but active participants in worldwide modernization, and, second, to show that “the West's” interactions with its colonized others were relevant not merely to those particular moments and locations but to global political and cultural development.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006