Modernism and Mobility. The Passport and Cosmopolitan Experience by Bridget T. Chalk (review)

Bridget T. Chalk's Modernism and Mobility: The Passport and Cosmopolitan Experience is a study of modernist writers on the move, travelling as members of the international republic of letters yet having to negotiate the movement restrictions of the new international passport regime that emerged during the First World War. For Chalk, what is at stake in this conflict between mobility and movement control is the identity of the traveler. The passport as an instrument of governmental control not only aims at policing suspicious or undesirable form of mobility; it also aims to render identities stable and legible within a fixed categorical framework designed for the purposes of registration and surveillance. This identificatory function of the passport, the author argues, drawing on Judith Butler and others, is associated with the linear modes of narration typical of the nineteenth-century novel. Accordingly, the formal experiments of modernist authors can be seen, among other things, as a means of countering the biopolitical attempts to assign fixed identities to all individuals. The passport has an interpellative function in the sense that it prescribes an identity that the bearer is called upon to internalize, yet it thereby also becomes a target for strategies of resistance and subversion which, in modernist fiction, come in both formal and thematic varieties. Chalk's nuanced and insightful discussion of this duality forms the core of a book that successfully uncovers "the cultural impact of the passport in modernist narrative" (7).

The author's opening reflections situate the project within the field of Modernism Studies, particularly highlighting how it aligns with recent critical work on the transnational and cosmopolitan aspects of modernist literature. Before concluding with a theoretical discussion of the passport in the light of the relationship between narration and national identity, Chalk also offers a historical account of the interwar passport system which details both the wider political ambitions and the bureaucratic technologies used to carry them out.

This impressively argued introduction is followed by five case studies, each discussing the works of a single author. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on two representatives of British-American High Modernism: D.H. Lawrence and Gertrude Stein. Lawrence's writings from the early 1920s are presented as attempts to develop alternatives to the rigid forms of identification associated both with the modern state and the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman. Stein's "autobiographical" writings likewise challenge the passport's documentation of identity while at the same time entering into competition with it by proposing alternative ways of classifying identities. In Chapters 3 and 4, Chalk turns her attention to two writers with marginalized, colonial identities: Claude McKay and Jean Rhys. While McKay's Banjo (1929) serves as the prime example of a modernist novel that "emphasizes the complicity of linear narrative with dominant bureaucratic discourses of identity" (93), Rhys' fictional and autobiographical writings are discussed as explorations of how the fluid identity of the migrant is managed by means of the passport. Finally, in Chapter 5, the author reads Christopher Isherwood's writings from his Berlin years as responses to an experience of claustrophobic confinement with fixed identity categories, which is attributed to heteronormative social norms as well as to the rise of Nazism.

Each of these densely argued and analytically nuanced case studies steer an even course in terms of methodology. Grounding her discussion firmly in the history of the interwar passport system, Chalk draws out the wider political, philosophical and critical implications of this system, yet never allows the passport to become a simple metaphor or theoretical abstraction. Further, each case study oscillates between fictional and autobiographical materials, yet while the author insists on a link between life and works, she carefully avoids the suggestion that the former adequately explains the latter. In this way, the book is able to use the passport motif to open up original new perspectives on the authors under consideration while also intervening effectively in current debates around transnational and mobile modernisms.

A complex...