Disseminating the Break: The Poetics of Catastrophic Modernity

In his influential work, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness, Paul Gilroy described the "conflict over modernity," which must be reckoned with in any account of 20^th century black expressive culture. More than simply the consciousness of novelty and the pace of urban change, Gilroy argued that black intellectuals' conceptions of modernity "were founded on the catastrophic rupture of the middle passage" and "punctuated by the processes of acculturation and terror that followed that catastrophe" (197). History's linear passage is upended by the "concentrated intensity" of slavery, Gilroy argued, compelling black people to confront in the 19^th century "dilemmas and difficulties which would only become the substance of everyday life in Europe a century later" (221). Twentieth century African American artists, then, experience their modernity as uncanny in the Freudian sense of unheimlich, simultaneously familiar and utterly strange, a dreadful reminder of a "compulsion to repeat" that is both psychic and social.

Walter Kalaidjian's The Edge of Modernism: American Poetry and the Traumatic Past and Aldon Lynn Nielsen's Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation are each indebted to Gilroy; they share his sense that modernity is founded in catastrophe and that this rupture results in a unique temporal situation. Both books light upon the persistence of the future anterior—imagining the future in terms of what will have been—in post-War American poetics, and both read it as catastrophic modernity's potentially salutary aftershock, a point of departure from history as what Kalaidjian calls a "totalizing regime of the same" (10). Kalaidjian and Nielsen examine and value poetry that, in confounding "realist" narrative and lyric modes of representation, opens up transformative possibility in the surface of language and in the cultural identities and political agencies that are found there. From different theoretical perspectives, both books explore the modernist the "dissemination of the break" as it edges into our contemporary moment (Nielsen xv).

The Edge of Modernism is a fascinating effort to, in Kalaidjian's terms, "effect a certain rapprochement between historicity and the literary" (2). Kalaidjian has been working in this vein since his first book, The Languages of Liberation: The Social Text in Contemporary American Poetry (1989), a Frankfurt School-inflected critique of the post-War lyric subject's institutional underpinnings and a celebration of resistance across a range of poetic genres and careers. The book was a work of social poetics avant la lettre, a sweeping yet detailed analysis of the intersection of poetic form and social force, in this case the juncture of the mainstream publishing market, New Critical formalism, and Cold War state planning. Languages of Liberation laid the ground for work that merged a rigorous analysis of poetry's linguistic structures with a reading of its cultural and institutional contexts, work by such critics as Alan Golding, Jed Rasula, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Barrett Watten, as well as a host of younger scholars. The Edge of Modernism covers some common ground, returning with renewed vehemence and fresh material to expose the New Critics' right-wing political allegiances. It also continues the work of recovering the "revisionary modernism" repressed by the New Critical canon—a subject of Kalaidjian's second book, American Culture Between the Wars (1993).

As a work of social poetics, The Edge of Modernism is exemplary. Kalaidjian's is a method of enlivened collage: the chapter on the "ghosting" of left modernist Edwin Rolfe interweaves readings of Rolfe's collectivist poetics with troubling, utterly persuasive documentation of the New Critical/Agrarian campaign to reinstate Southern "squirearchy" and its complicity with violent institutionalized racism. The chapter entitled "Harlem Dancers and the Middle Passage" joins Gilroy in opposing unitary, Afrocentric readings of the idea of "heritage" in the Harlem Renaissance with an argument for Harlem as what Pierre Nora calls a "lieu de memoire"—a "mutant...