Race, American Literature, and Transnational Modernisms (review)

As its title implies with admirable compression, Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms brings together three related strands within a new comparatist trend, now coming to the fore in literary studies in various forms. First would be the “transatlantic” emphasis in American literary and cultural studies, as practiced by scholars like Paul Giles, aimed at exploding mononational, often exceptionalist constructions of American literature, in order to reinscribe that literature within broader and more complex networks of exchange, hybridity, and interference. Second is the revival of interest in modernism as not only an “international” phenomenon, but one which in addition to being transnational and translingual, is continually obsessed with the crossings of those very borders; like much of the best work in this area, Patterson’s book devotes significant attention to translation. Third, in line with the pathbreaking recent work of Jahan Ramazani on transnational and translocal poetics, Patterson strives to resist the dangers of institutional compartmentalization by mapping out new heuristic contexts for works customarily categorized as postcolonial, African-American, or African diasporic. Thus, Patterson’s desire to construct a “comparative American poetics” (1) takes “American” in the broadest sense, and her book encompasses not only T. S. Eliot and Langston Hughes, but also Caribbean writers Wilson Harris, Jacques Roumain, and Derek Walcott, as well as French writers with New World childhoods: the symbolist Jules Laforgue, born in Uruguay, and above all St.-John Perse, who grew up in the French overseas Département of Guadeloupe, which remains a part of France to this day. Constantly in the background of Patterson’s palimpsest, for very good reasons, are the two most exported, translated, and transnational American poets of the nineteenth century: Poe and Whitman. As Patterson stresses throughout, both are poets who trouble—albeit it very differently—ontopological interpretations of “American” culture and identity, as their preferred genealogies and cartographies are so often based on fissures, divisions, differences, and, to use Patterson’s key term, frontiers.

By way of this approach, Patterson does not so much tell new stories, as bring into contact stories whose relationship to each other has not been explored, or even observed. Eliot’s translations of Perse are well known, for example, as is Walcott’s sense of Perse’s importance to Caribbean poetics, despite the latter’s allegiance to a patrician French colonizing culture. But exploring both relationships within the same study brings Walcott and Eliot into a conjunction which allows the latter to be seen in a new light perhaps even more than the former; Eliot’s new world anxieties with regard to a mystified Metropole are heard in fascinating new ways. Patterson’s take on Laforgue is consonant, stressing him as at once a European and a “new world” poet of hybridity, in terms of how he is read by Eliot and Langston Hughes. For Patterson, the Laforgue of Eliot and Hughes is not only the sophisticated continental antidote to a naive and historically impoverished American cultural scene, but also a parallel figure whose ironic modes derive from a somewhat similar anxiety over provincialism and marginality, with all the attendant musings on the lability of identity this implies. In many ways, the high point of the book is Patterson’s fine analysis of the divergent aspects of Laforgue’s legacy in Eliot and Hughes, as brought to the fore through an extremely subtle investigation of Hughes’ “A Black Pierrot” in which she powerfully demonstrates the importance of Hughes’ mobilization of “blackness as metaphor,” which, as she notes, never appears in Laforgue at all (103).

Unfortunately, not all of Patterson’s close readings are this successful. Too often in this book, slight intertextual echoes are made to carry a weight they can’t bear without significant additional bolstering, and relatively minor textual elements are given what can seem undue importance. This is particularly problematic in the chapter “Hybridity and the New World: Laforgue, Eliot and the Whitmanian Poetics of the Frontier,” in which Whitman’s use of “Amerindian...