How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms by Marc Caplan (review)

Every so often in the field of comparative literature a work comes along that is truly comparative. Marc Caplan's How Strange the Change is such a book. Caplan does a great service to the field of modernism studies and to the literatures under comparison: pan-African modernism and Yiddish fiction. How Strange the Change is about writers from "minor literatures" who encounter modernity. Borrowing the useful concept of a "minor literature" from Deleuze and Guattari, Caplan levies a strong critique of what he calls their "monologic humanism." The broad and malleable concept of Enlightenment is a protagonist in each of the stories Caplan tells. Yet aside from a few references to James Joyce (a marginal figure in his own right), the book resists synchronic comparison to a canon of European modernism. In this sense, Caplan's book also critiques past studies of modern literature and the periphery, such as Chana Kronfeld's On the Margins of Modernism (1995) as well as studies of the Jewish relationship to the canon like Ruth Wisse's Modern Jewish Canon (2000), which, as Caplan puts it, "articulate the peripherality of Jews in relation to the experience of Western modernity." (249)

In three sections (each comprised of two chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion), Caplan examines three stages in the development of modern literature from the margins. His case studies are works by a handful of nineteenth century Yiddish writers, including Reb Nakhman of Breslov, Yisroel Aksenfeld, Isaak Meyer Dik, Y. Y. Linetsky, and S. Y. Abramovitsh (better known as Mendele Moykher Sforim), and twentieth century pan-African writers, including Amos Tutuola, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Camara Laye, Ahmadou Karouma, and Wole Soyinka.

Section one introduces two innovators who use folklore and fables to respond to modernity (as manifested in European Enlightenment or the colonial project), Reb Nakhman (1772-1810) and the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola (1920-1997): "never again in the subsequent history of African and Yiddish writing will two writers single-handedly represent so fully the challenges facing the creation of modern literature from these cultures." (71) Tutuola was, economically and politically, an urban intellectual but not a member of the elite—a Gramscian organic intellectual. Nakhman, an early Hasidic leader, was similarly an intellectual of his own design. Caplan stresses the "radical inconclusiveness" of Tutuola's and Nakhman's folk-inspired narratives.

Section two finds "intellectuals writing about intellectuals." Here Caplan compares two urban and diaspora literary phenomena: the Haskole, the nineteenth century Jewish Enlightenment movement, and Negritude, a movement in France in the 1930s among black intellectuals from the Caribbean and West Africa. Both groups were modernizers who nonetheless maintained a distinct culture, a duality Caplan considers "characteristic of 'minor' cultures generally." (84) Caplan observes a changing poetics that accompanies the transition toward intellectual polemics. Whereas the fantastic writers treated in the previous section treat metaphors literally, the polemical writer "depends on the transparency of his or her metaphors, the symmetry of allegory." (79) Language and mimicry become important tools in the hands of the maskilim and Negritude writers. Caplan inspects devices such as Daytshmerism, the introduction of German terms into Yiddish, under the lens of Fanon's notion of "imitation" of a dominant culture. In Negritude, translation facilitates literary artifice. Kane, for example, writes about non-francophone Africans in French without referencing the African language in question.

Section three considers responses to failed ideologies—that is to say, frustration with former distinctions between the old and the new. Readings of S.Y. Abramovitsh's Yiddish fiction alongside the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka and the Ivoirian writer Ahmadou Kourouma allow for a comparison of the "awakening" of the post-independence writers of Africa to the Yiddish writers of the 1870s who were "dismantling...a previous decade's ideological convictions." (161) An additional point of historical comparison in this final section lies in the writers' critique of empire: as Yiddish literature in...