Migrant Modernism: Postwar London and the West Indian Novel

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. The term Windrush derives from the name of the ship, the SS Empire Windrush , that brought Caribbean immigrants to England in 1948. 2. West Indian, though based on Christopher Columbus’s erroneous geography, is the term most often used in the postwar years to refer to people from the Englishspeaking Caribbean (and it still, in the University of the West Indies and the supranational cricket team,has contemporary relevance).The preferred term is now Anglophone Caribbean, used in order both to distance the islands from Columbus-era European presumption and to distinguish among the language groups in the region. This book will employ both West Indian and Anglophone Caribbean in a more or less interchangeable way, largely for reasons of style and to avoid repetition, rather than with regard to any distinct semantic or political intent. Caribbean will also be employed in circumstances where the Anglophone context is either already obvious or unimportant. 3. Eysteinsson acknowledges that this malleability and contention are characteristic of all literary concepts but suggests that, since the modern is still so closely allied to our sense of the present, discussions of modernism appear to take on a particular sense of urgency or importance. 4. The institutional authority with which Levin (and later Beebe) speaks attests to the clear shift in the balance of power (political, economic, and not coincidentally academic) from Britain to the United States after World War II. 5. In his chapter on literature and painting, Spender in fact cites Levin’s essay, endorsing and employing his fellow critic’s characterizations of Eliot and Pablo Picasso. 6. Notwithstanding Laura Riding and Robert Graves’s 1928 A Survey of Modernist Poetry, the term modernism does not seem to have been employed with any consistency until well into the second half of the twentieth century.The Oxford 186 Notes to Pages 5–9 English Dictionary’s tracing of the term with reference to literature shows that it was only rarely employed without quotation marks until the late 1960s. 7. Critics such as Alison Donnell, Evelyn O’Callaghan, Leah Rosenberg, and Faith Smith, among others, have persuasively argued against uncritical acceptance of a romanticized Windrush myth of origins, suggesting that this has worked against a more inclusive understanding of Anglophone Caribbean literature and its roots. 8. Both Lamming (1957) and Naipaul (1961) won the W. Somerset Maugham Award during this period,while Mittelholzer (1952),Lamming (1955),and Selvon (1955, 1968) received Guggenheim Fellowships. The figure for novels published in the United Kingdom during this period is taken from Ramchand’s “Year by Year Bibliography” in The West Indian Novel and Its Background. 9. See Miller’s Late Modernism and Esty’s A Shrinking Island. 10. Mao and Walkowitz provide an excellent and wide-ranging bibliography of scholars engaged in this kind of work (“New Modernist Studies”). Numerous later works in the same vein but published after their article appeared could be cited, but those that include Caribbean-specific subject matter include Matthew Hart’s Nations of Nothing But Poetry and Anita Patterson’s Race, American Literature, and Transnational Modernisms. 11. Critics of postmodernist and postcolonial literatures, emerging into prominence at around the same time, also invested time distinguishing their critical practices from each other. See Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” and Linda Hutcheon’s “‘Circling the Downspout of Empire’: Post-Colonialism and Postmodernism” for influential examples of this debate. 12. Other prominent examples of this early antipathy can be found in Kumkum Sangari’s “The Politics of the Possible” and in the entry for modernism in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin’s Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. 13. See also Howard J. Booth and Nigel Rigby’s Modernism and Empire and Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses’s Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, –; both collections are explicitly aimed at counteracting the straightforward association of modernism with imperialism. 14. Neil Lazarus is another critic who has fruitfully examined the connections between modernist and postcolonial literature. See, e.g., “The Politics of Postcolonial Modernism.” 15. See Bourdieu’s The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field for Bourdieu’s most thorough accounting of this phenomenon in literature. David Swartz’s Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu provides an astute, readable overview of Bourdieu’s cultural theory, to which my own thinking is indebted. 16. See Joe Cleary’s “The World Literary System: Atlas and Epitaph” and Christopher Prendergast’s...