Commonwealth of Letters complicates the
traditional understanding of the relationship between
elite, aging modernists like T.S. Eliot and the
generation of colonial poets and novelists from Africa
and the Caribbean— Kamau Brathwaite, Ngugi wa Thiong'o,
Jean Rhys, and others-who rose to prominence after World
War Two. Rather than a mostly one-sided relationship of
exploitation, Kalliney emphasizes how both groups
depended on-and thrived off-one another. The modernists,
dispirited by the turn to a kind of bland, welfare-state
realism in literature and the rise of commercial mass
culture, sought rejuvenation and kindred spirits amongst
a group of émigré writers from the Caribbean and Africa
who had been educated in the literary curriculum
exported to the colonies in the years before 1945. For
their part, the postcolonial writers, ambitious for
literary success and already skeptical of the trend
toward corruption and philistinism among their
compatriot anticolonial politicians, sought the access
to cultural capital and the comforting embrace of
literature provided by metropolitan modernists. As a
result, modernist networks became defined by the
exchange between metropolitan and colonial writers. In
several chapters, Kalliney provides compelling analyses
of colonial writers in postwar cultural institutions,
such as the BBC, literary anthologies, and high profile
English publishers such as Faber & Faber and
Heinemann, developer of the African Writers Series.
Throughout, Kalliney acknowledges the elements of
cultural imperialism, and paternalism involved in these
relationships; however, he broadens our perspective on
postcolonial writers by emphasizing the strategic ways
they manipulated these elite modernist networks to
advance their own cultural agendas.Transatlantic
Modernism and the Emergence of Postcolonial Literature
is a study of midcentury literary institutions integral
to modernism and postcolonial writing. Several
organizations central to interwar modernism, such as the
BBC, influential publishers, and university English
departments, became important sites in the emergence of
postcolonial literature after the war. How did some of
modernism's leading figures of the 1930s, such as T.S.
Eliot, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender, come to
admire late colonial and early postcolonial literature
in the 1950s? Similarly, why did late colonial and early
postcolonial writers—including Chinua Achebe, Kamau
Brathwaite, Claude McKay, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o—actively
seek alliances with metropolitan intellectuals? Peter
Kalliney's original archival work on modernist cultural
institutions demonstrates that this disparate group of
intellectuals had strong professional incentives to
treat one another more as fellow literary professionals,
and less as political or cultural antagonists.
Surprisingly, metropolitan intellectuals and
their late colonial counterparts leaned heavily on
modernist theories of aesthetic autonomy to facilitate
their collaborative ventures. For white, metropolitan
writers, T.S. Eliot's notion of impersonality could help
recruit new audiences and conspirators from colonized
regions of the world. For black, colonial writers,
aesthetic autonomy could be used to imagine a literary
sphere uniquely resistant to the forms of racial
prejudice endemic to the colonial system. This strategic
collaboration did not last forever, but it left a
lasting imprint on the ultimate disposition of modernism
and the evolution of postcolonial literature.
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