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
3 - Soldiers and traitors: Rebecca West, the world wars and the state subject
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
When, in 1936, General Emilio Mola announced that he would capture Madrid because he had four columns outside the city and a fifth column within, the world pounced on the phrase with the eagerness of a man who has been groping for an important word. … In the 20th Century treason became a vocation, whose modern form was specifically the treason of ideas.
Time, December 8, 1947Modernist fictions of identity and subjectivity are often taken as indexing the newly fluid, indeterminate and performative elements of gender, racial and class identities generated by social phenomena such as metropolitan life, consumerist ideology, celebrity and expatriation. Critics often describe a distinctive modernist sense of identity as being without a fixed and authentic core. Modernist writers develop an interest in masquerade, illegibility, personae, artifice, proliferation of surfaces and perspectives, and so on. Against this, I argue that the historical period of modernism is not one in which identities proliferate, but one in which they become increasingly bureaucratically fixed.
The unfixing of identity itself should not be considered specific to the modernist period, or to modernist literature. The nineteenth-century novel, with which modernism's supposedly new sense of modern identity is often contrasted, abounds with changed names, adoptions, faked deaths, and the discovery of blood relations in strangers. While the point of these fictions may seem to be to return people to their proper places, it is nonetheless significant that the possibility of leaving those places lingers.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006