CIRCULATING MODERNISMS: Collages of Empire in Fictions of the Long Twentieth Century
Friedman, S.S. (2018). Planetary Modernisms : Provocations On Modernity Across Time Chapter 6: CIRCULATING MODERNISMS Collages of Empire in Fictions of the Long Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, pp.215–281.
Susan Stanford Friedman wrote the book Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time in 2015. She was a professor of English and Women’s Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison. The book portrays modernity as a “collection of diverse, overlapping, and recurring instances of transforming rupture and rapid change across the full spectrum of political, economic, social, and technological domains of intertwined societies and civilizations” (Friedman, 2018, p 10). Throughout the book, she talks about modernity and modernism in art, literature, music, geography, world history, cultural studies, postcolonial studies and gender studies. She uses ‘planetary’ to go beyond nation-states and even globalisation. Instead, she roots modernity as cosmic as well as to integrate ‘nonhuman modernities’ albeit to her focus solely being on human modernities in this book.
Chapter 6 which is titled CIRCULATING MODERNISMS: Collages of Empire in Fictions of the Long Twentieth Century will be reviewed. In this chapter, Friedman aims to address modernist fiction that were produced during the height of empire and how these works constructed race, class, gender etc and how these works interpret modernity. She writes that modernism in literature about empire still centres itself on the West. Throughout this chapter, she uses the collage method. Since collage is a modernist art style, she uses this method as it looks into “image of relations, similarities of situations or diverging directions, between what is us and what is other” (Friedman, 2018, p 217). These relations and diffusion of binaries in literature gives the texts ‘full agency’, like pieces in collage art.
She uses Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and Tayeb Salih’s Seasons of Migration to the North (1966). Seasons of Migration to the North is commonly referred to as a reversal of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. While both novels explore cultural hybridity, Orientalism, and cross-cultural interactions, both novels centre themselves on two very different ideas of modernity. The Heart of Darkness perpetuated ideas of the civilising mission and also perpetuates the binaries of civilised/savage through Conrad’s writings of the African ‘other’.On the other hand, Salih’s novel writes about a modernity where nation-states were concrete and how the hearts of darkness lie both in the North and the South.
Nevertheless, Conrad’s contribution is a crucial component of Salih’s, as these works entail a deeper understanding of how modernity is not simply propagated by the West, which in turn is emulated by the East. Rather, the relations between how Britain and Sudan are constructed through these texts for each site constructs common understandings of modernity like “the struggle between modernising and traditionalizing forces for which gendered and racialized others and the violence done to them exposes, indeed explodes, the cultural narratives of both rational progress and nostalgic tradition” (Friedman, 2018, p 237).
Friedman then discusses E.M. Forster’s A Passage Through India (1924) and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997). According to Friedman, both novels illustrate modernity’s “outward and inward journeys, as well as their engagement with ‘travelling and transnational modernity” (Friedman, 2018, p 238). While both novels examine the impact of British colonialism in India, they focus on the language of race and its relationship with nation and empire, as well as how gender, caste, and sexuality confront them (Friedman, 2018, p 238). Both novels handle the trope of ‘forbidden love’ in modernities that contrast each other while reflecting on deeper questions of empire and the nation.
The author concludes by examining Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929), focusing on her essay on Judith Shakespeare and the works of Swarnakumari Devi, sister of Rabindranath Tagore, to examine gender roles in literature during the colonial era. Woolf’s work has been criticised for only being accessible for women with a room of their own, which in itself is problematic. However, Swarnakumari draws on the debate discussed in the book of George Elliot and Shakespeare to challenge Woolf’s writing through her work Unfinished Song (1913) (Friedman,2018, p 265). Friedman writes that both Woolf and Devi’s works do not write of feminism as binaries but rather as circulating and polycentric ideas that do not simplify gender relations in the age of modernity.
Friedman writes that all of these works are not opposed to each other but represent differing modernities. By comparing all of these works, the binaries of the West and the Rest are blurred. She uses a polycentric approach to posit that the hearts of darkness exist in both Britain and Sudan as well as Britain and India. Modernity in each of these locations has been constructed through engagement with one another, despite the fact that they are two distinct places. This modernist perspective is also reflected in the way the authors see themselves.
She stresses the importance of not looking at literature in the binaries of colonial/postcolonial. There is so much to criticise about Conrad, Woolf and Forester’s writings. However, Friedman argues that their critiques of empire as Englishmen influence Salih, Roy and Devi’s writings into critiquing the impacts of empire on their own nations through the lens of gender and caste, which was an ignored narrative in colonial writings. The text could be improved by perhaps using more subaltern texts like Draupaudi by Mahasweta Dewi which would be interesting to see. Nonetheless, this chapter beautifully calls for both Western and non-Western literature to not stand as justapoxing one another rather as an ‘image of relations’.
This essay was for a Master’s module: Postcolonialisms which was assessed by Dr Gaik Cheng Khoo
