How the West Was One: American Modernism's Song of Itself

Still [Aziz] couldn't quite fit in Afghans at Mau, and, finding he was in a corner, made his horse rear again until he remembered that he had, or ought to have, a mother-land. Then he shouted: "India shall be a nation! No foreigners of any sort! Hindu and Moslem and Sikh and all shall be one! Hurrah for India! Hurrah! Hurrah!"

India a nation! What an apotheosis! Last comer to the drab nineteenth-century sisterhood! Waddling in at this hour of the world to take her seat! She whose only peer was the Holy Roman Empire, she shall rank with Guatemala and Belgium perhaps!—E. M. Forster, A Passage to India

Few critics find common ground between E. M. Forster's realist prose and the writings of H.D., whose early poetry helped set the standard for imagism. Yet both authors share a preoccupation with other places, other nations, and especially othered colonies as a source of commentary on their own ambivalent allegiance to their homelands. My epigraph, taken from the final paragraphs of Forster's A Passage to India (1924), raises questions not only about the problematic relationship between postcolonial states and national identity but also about the slippery, tentative concept of nation itself. Here the state is subject to a dual interpellation, called into being at once by its citizens and by the international community of states to which it belongs. Within this community, the definition of nationhood is purely relational: only those states successful at negotiating rank among the "sisterhood" achieve the same national authenticity as their imperial "peer[s]."¹ Thus, despite Dr. Aziz's devotion to the motherland, India is circumscribed by the gaze of the Western nations who expel her from their ranks. Imperial India is as dead as her fellow ancient empires, while the modern Indian nation will be insignificant, like her nonimperial and often nonwhite "sisters"—both those who succumbed to colonial oppression and those who lost in their bid for imperial control.

Although Forster's text may be ironic in its condemnation of modern India, its critique of the possibility for decolonization seems quite clear. Forster scolds the nation-hungry modern citizen who would trade a rich, ancient empire for a belated and abortive development into a contemporary state. Embedded in this critique of the nationalist potential of colonized states, however, lies more than a confirmation of European cultural hegemony and further demarcation of the gap between colonizer and colonized. The modern preoccupation with sisterhood and rank suggests a complicity between narratives of the colonial as other and the process of symbolizing modern nationhood itself. Such a structure connects and subsumes all nations within it. There could be no majestic British empire, for example, without the Guatemalas who look up to her and the Belgiums who can only be looked up to so far. Indeed, in the early twentieth century, when the nation-state became what Benedict Anderson has called "the overwhelming norm,"² the international status of each nation, and even the identity of its citizens, came to depend upon the presence of other, lesser, subjugated nations to serve as foils to its modern sovereignty.

This essay will examine the role of American modernism generally and H.D. in particular in writing that sovereignty for the United States. This issue has been taken up from other angles by critics, like Susan Hegeman, who view Americanism as part of the content of international modernism and place "the American social context of industrialization and mass culture into the foreground of the international debates about the modernist experiment."³ Yet such studies fail to account fully for the role of the international affinities of Americans, leaving Hegeman to ask: "[I]f the modernity of the American scene was such a crucial inspirational source of modernism, why did all those American expatriates go to Paris?"⁴ My argument offers a gloss on Hegeman's question, not by...