Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics by Peter J. Kalliney (review)

Literary historians tend to divide twentieth-century literature into two segments: the modernist period that lasts into the 1950s and the postmodernist period that begins in the 1960s. Postcolonial literature supplements these eras by sitting outside of and apart from modernism and only tangentially relating to postmodernism. Postcolonial literature, the story goes, fully integrates itself into metropolitan literature in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to become the prevailing one-world concept of global Anglophone literature. Peter J. Kalliney’s Commonwealth of Letters suggests otherwise. In a major contribution to rethinking the relation of metropolitan modernist and late colonial and postcolonial literature, Kalliney examines London’s post-World War II cultural institutions of publishing, broadcasting, and cultural canonization. In presenting an impressive array of archival evidence, he argues that though the prewar institutions of modernism had worked to consolidate imperialism and empire, they changed their tactics in the postwar era by collaborating with late colonial writers, especially those who deployed modernist aesthetics in their writing. The result of which, Kalliney states, was to enhance London’s prestige as a cultural center even after Britain was stripped of most of its colonies. Rather than seeing the rise of global Anglophone literature as occurring in the last decades of the twentieth century, Kalliney demonstrates that it was modernism with its emphasis on aesthetic autonomy that paved the way for global Anglophone literature.

In saying this, Kalliney is not claiming that the institutions of modernism simply appropriated postcolonial writing. Rather, in a finely historicized account, modernism emerges in the 1950s as a collaborative endeavor between metropolitan elites and late colonial intellectuals partial to both modernist aesthetics and anti-imperialist politics. Kalliney begins his study with the iconic 1942 BBC photograph featuring modernists T. S. Eliot, George Orwell, and William Empson intermixed with colonial writers and cultural workers Una Marson, Mulk Raj Anand, M. J. Tambimuttu, Narayana Menon, and others. The overseas programs of the BBC, of course, were designed to foster colonial loyalty to empire, and its elite cultural programming, Kalliney notes, was intended to smooth over political differences. An important element of this highbrow impartiality was the inclusion of colonial artists in BBC programming. This scene, and others like it, is often read as an image of modernist artists’ condescending patronage toward colonial parvenus. But Kalliney documents the need felt by modernist cultural workers to combat modernism’s highbrow image as effete and apolitical. Late colonial and postcolonial writers brought a sense of urgency and political effectiveness paradoxically to the very disinterested nature of autonomous aesthetics.

Moving from Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis to C. L. R. James, Kalliney finds surprising affinities between British elites and late colonial and postcolonial writers. Rereading Arnold as a precursor of modernist aesthetics, Kalliney argues that Arnold not only believed in the high cultural ideal of disinterestedness, but, given his ethnic typecasting of British subjects as either Hebraic or Hellenic, he also imagined “high culture as a product of racial frisson, the unpredictable result of ethnic competition and cooperation” (15). In particular, it is the minority or alien artist, as later depicted by Leavis, who is in the best position to produce disinterested intellectual work. Moving forward to James’s Beyond a Boundary, which posits the sport of cricket as an aesthetic practice, Kalliney provocatively suggests that we should turn James’s observations of cricket on its head, asking “what would it mean if art—if intellectual work more generally—could be described as an intricate form of play, an expressive practice with highly developed rules governing the spirit of the competition?” (22). Art in this guise becomes a competitive spectacle in which sporting personalities represent their constituency to the world at large while also performing according to the autonomous rules of artistic practice. Kalliney formulates a delicate balance between aesthetics and politics. Here, in late empire, disinterested aesthetics “infused with the logic of racial competition” can...