Race and the Modernist Imagination by Urmila Seshagiri (review)

Modernist studies has been slow to pick up the gauntlet thrown down in the nineties by such books as Michael North’s The Dialect of Modernism and Laura Doyle’s Bordering on the Body. That is, until recently few scholars have treated race as a constitutive category of modernism or as a critical discourse central to modernist studies, the way they have long treated gender and sexuality. Joining books like Laura Winkiel’s Modernism, Race, and Manifestos and Anita Patterson’s Race, American Literature, and Transnational Modernisms, Urmila Seshagiri’s Race and the Modernist Imagination attempts to remedy that failure. In her interesting, cogent, and closely argued book, Seshagiri not only explores the racial thematics lurking within British modernism but, even more importantly, shows that race was a formative element, serving as an “engine” for the creation of new literary forms in the work of such writers as Oscar Wilde, Ford Madox Ford, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf.

To begin, Seshagiri argues for the centrality of race in the British modernist imagination. With a light, and often, elegant hand, she paints the picture of London at the turn of the twentieth century as a place “rife with social, scientific, and political discussions about race” in which a linear version of racial descent came increasing under scrutiny (7). Many modernist writers, she argues, reconceptualize nineteenth-century racial ideologies, developing for example, narratives in which a “character or author’s multiple racial identities produce multiple chronological, spatial and perceptual vantage points” (29). In other words, attention to race, Seshagiri claims, has a profound affect on the aesthetic imagination and participates in the formation of the modernist impulse to “make it new.”

Early sections of chapter 1 discuss the relation between race and modernism in Conrad and Wilde, making clear the continuity of racial decadence that connects The Portrait of Dorian Gray with Heart of Darkness. In perhaps the most original portion of the book, Seshagiri then turns her attention to Sax Rohmer’s immensely popular novels about Dr. Fu-Manchu. From The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (1913) on, these thirteen novels chronicling the evil doctor’s schemes for world domination challenged British assumptions about racial and imperial hierarchies and channeled anxieties about modernity into the question of race. According to Seshagiri, “In translating the conditions of Western modernity into a battle for racial dominance, Rohmer’s fictions give surprising expression to the cultural anxieties and dislocations that high modernist authors negotiate in better known or canonical texts” (55). The chapter is fascinating in its attention to the ways that the Fu-Manchu novels inscribe British fears of Western racial inadequacy in the face of a scientifically advancing East. Seshagiri is also compelling in her description of the London scene in which Dr. Fu-Manchu practices his flanerie, a place of divided populations where the Chinese are scrutinized and cordoned off from the Anglo-British, even as writers and artists display their fascination with primitivism and orientalism. But Dr. Fu-Manchu moves easily beyond the Chinese district, transgressing the racial geographies that delimit and constrain London’s immigrant populations, thus representing an infiltrating “yellow peril” that is all the more threatening because it attacks from within.

In her second chapter Seshagiri takes up four authors from four moments in the development of the avant-garde in London between 1910 and 1918. By delimiting this period and focusing our attention on the interconnections between literary experimentalism and racial discourses, she presents the “rich mutuality between the ruptures of race and the ruptures of avant-garde aesthetics” (77). Seshagiri discusses the fascination with non-Western cultures evident in the décor of the Cave of the Golden Calf, at the time one of London’s most adventurous nightclubs. Reading the paintings and murals by Jacob Epstein, Spencer Gore, Eric Gill and Wyndham Lewis and commenting on the programs of dance and performance, she demonstrates the extent to which claims about artistic rupture or renewal were grounded in primitivism. Next...