Modernist Resistance to the Surveillance State

Bridget Chalk’s Modernism and Mobility: The Passport and Cosmopolitan Experience (2014) is the first book-length study in the field of literary passport studies. Asserting that scholarship on exile and modern literature has generally ignored the travel constraints imposed on the traveler in the modern period, Chalk seeks to check the easy acceptance of cosmopolitan modernism by drawing attention to the bureaucratic apparatuses neglected in this discourse. Blending biographical criticism with close readings of texts and correspondence, Chalk argues that modernist writers resist the narrow juridical narrative of individual identity imposed by the passport system by reinserting agency into the process of identification. The book’s primary subjects are modernist writers D.H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, Claude McKay, Jean Rhys, and Christopher Isherwood; Chalk’s nuanced close readings of their interwar writing opens up compelling new interpretations of the texts she has chosen, with implications beyond them.