Modernism, Race and Manifestos (review)

Laura Winkiel’s Modernism, Race and Manifestos reaches beyond Janet Lyon’s foundational Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (1999) and Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity, coedited by Winkiel with Laura Doyle (2005). Whereas the earlier studies focused on the manifesto’s relevance to avant-garde movements, Winkiel argues in this work for an understanding of the event nature of manifestos: by forcefully inserting themselves into Walter Benjamin’s Jetztzeit (now-time), they rupture the flow of “homogenous empty time.” In seeking to restore “modernism to a conflictual terrain occupied by colonial writers, flooded by militant women’s movement literature, and fragmented by the avantgarde,” Winkiel challenges any “singular notion of modernism, whether defined by periodization, location, or form” (4).

Winkiel argues that a singularizing narrative of modernism that favors canonized European and American texts systematically excludes racial difference. The manifesto’s power to disrupt this singularization is central to Winkiel’s theory. The “discontinuous temporality of the manifesto,” she explains:

provides the methodological focal point for demonstrating that modernist texts: (1) open the present moment to temporal reconceptualizations of history and historical agency; (2) stage alternative cosmopolitan and transnational communities through the structure of feeling of racial belonging; and (3) move across spatial and temporal boundaries in ways that reflect nonsynchronous but contemporaneous positionalities within modernity and express a range of alternative modernisms.

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The temporality of the manifesto forms the basis of Winkiel’s textual readings, which she divides into two parts to underscore her remapping of center and periphery.

The first part of the book, “Cosmopolitan London, 1906–1914,” examines overlaps between militant women’s suffrage movements in England, various anticolonial movements, and the manifestos of Futurism and Vorticism. Winkiel focuses on the “event nature” of suffragette melodramas and burlesques as manifestos, arguing that they stage the continuity and stability of hierarchies that reify a singular notion of modernity, while their satirical nature breaches and overturns this continuity. She then compares this function of British suffragette drama to the theatrics of F. T. Marinetti’s “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” (1909), which parodies state documents and thereby “stalls rather than furthers a singular narrative of modernity” (83). Winkiel addresses the relationship between the avant-garde and race through her comparison of Wyndham Lewis’s manifestos, his play Enemy of the Stars, and Rebecca West’s short story “Indissoluble Matrimony,” all of which appeared in the magazine Blast (1914). What Winkiel terms a “heterotopic juxtaposition” in Blast opens up space for alternative accounts of modernity to penetrate the singular modernity she sets out to deconstruct (144).

The second part, “Transnational Modernisms, 1934–1938,” transforms the notion of the periphery as an object of the progress-oriented Eurocentric narrative of modernity to support her overarching claim that colonial writers “are attuned to the blind spots of modernity” (26). Winkiel begins this section by reading Nancy Cunard’s anthology Negro (1934) “as a disparate collection of historical ephemera, . . . fragments of an African and African-diasporic past” (160). Quoting Benjamin to describe Negro as a “booklike creation from a fringe area,” she argues that Negro disrupts the temporality that places blackness in a prehistorical time without progress by short-circuiting the distinction between old and new. Winkiel argues that Negro achieves this rupture, illuminating the role of racial hierarchies in the conception of modernity itself. Winkiel concludes this section by comparing Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941) and a variety of manifestos by C. L. R. James and Suzanne and Aimé Césaire. Here Winkiel offers her final example of how applying a “heterotopic juxtapostion” of central and peripheral texts draws out the racial undertones occluded in canonized modernist texts of the metropolis. By reading Woolf’s novels “across color lines” in comparison with “transnational” texts such as the works of the Césaires, Winkiel argues that Woolf’s “gender critique of English institutions . . . allows for a critique of the racial grounds of modernism” (193).

Winkiel amply supports her theoretical approaches to context and geography with a wealth of archival sources...