Pacific Rim Modernisms (review)

Modernism has, from the beginning, been a decidedly transnational phenomenon. Nearly all of the most canonical figures—Pound, Eliot, Stein, and others—were paragons of dislocation and expatriation, constantly on the move, reading, writing, and traveling across borders. Pacific Rim Modernisms, a new collection edited by Mary Ann Gillies, Helen Sword, and Steven Yao, underscores that transnationalism, stretches it even, forcing us to reexamine traditional notions of international literary discourse and—perhaps more provocatively—the politics of accepting a phrase like “Modernism has, from the beginning . . . ” The volume’s title already indicates its polemic: “modernism” can no longer be a singular category, something we discuss confidently as having exhibited certain qualities in “the” beginning. Or as Steven Yao argues in the introduction to the volume, the goal is to “leave behind methods that seek to fix our conception of ‘modernism’ as a stable and unified notion, a view that tends to reproduce established hierarchies of cultural value in which, not surprisingly, the West occupies a dominant and originary position, whether as source or teleological endpoint of different ideas and processes” (16). To this end, the essays in Pacific Rim Modernisms offer a number of new, though not always consistent, perspectives on the varieties of modernism engaged with that geographic and discursive construct known as the “Pacific Rim.”

The first section, “Riffs on a Rim,” with essays by Steven Yao and David Palumbo-Liu, provides historical and theoretical context for the collection. Yao offers a useful breakdown of the “critical geographies” of scholarship on the modernist “Orient,” charting the discursive terrain from initial, largely positivist descriptions of the Euro-American modernist fascination with Asia (Wai Lim Yip, John Nolde, Hugh Kenner, etc.) to the influence of Edward Said’s 1978 Orientalism on modernist studies (Robert Casillo, Jean Michel Rabaté, Eric Cheyfitz, etc.) and more recent investigations on the dynamic processes of reciprocal cultural flows (Yao’s own work, that of Yunte Huang, Eric Hayot, and, even more comparatively, Xiaomei Chen, Lydia Liu, Shu-mei Shih, and Andrew Jones). It is into this final category that Yao hopes to situate the collective contribution of Pacific Rim Modernisms, such that “both ‘modernism’ and the ‘Orient’ emerge as thoroughly fluid and variable in both definition and function” (13). As both Palumbo-Liu and Rob Wilson imply in their contributions, however, these highly international and unstable notions of “modernism” emerge rather curiously from the optics of a postmodern critical terrain. In fact, as Palumbo-Liu points out, the very notion of the Pacific Rim as a “rim” emerges in its most powerful discursive form by way of “the contemporary grid of late capitalist consortia (NAFTA, APEC)” (35). To speak of a series of “Pacific Rim modernisms,” in other words, already complicates one historical construct by way of another—reinserting a late capitalist notion back into an earlier twentieth-century moment of international literary experience so as to pluralize and reanimate certain channels of communication and influence.

The effects of that complication are often stunning. Contributions by Christopher Bush on the broader significance of japonisme on French aesthetics, Eric Hayot on the modernist studies tendency to bifurcate philosophical questions and cultural particularities (illustrated by way of a brilliant reading of Bertrand Russell’s experience in China), and Mary Ann Gillies on Emily Carr’s and Katherine Mansfield’s encounters with modernist primitivism are all outstanding in their ability to articulate the depth of cultural liminality present in traditional modernist figures. Jessica Pressman’s fascinating essay titled “Pacific Rim Digital Modernism” demonstrates just how complicated notions of “modernism” can become when contemporary Internet artists engage directly with the high modernist legacy of aesthetic “difficulty” and self-referentiality. Many of these contributions are, of course, connected to more extensive scholarly projects attempting to reconceptualize both the spatial and temporal boundaries of traditional modernism, making Pacific Rim Modernisms a vivid snapshot of a particular, highly transnational moment in modernist studies.

There are some interesting weaknesses in the volume as well...