Pentecostal Modernism: Lovecraft, Los Angeles, and World-Systems Culture by Stephen Shapiro and Philip Barnard (review)

Shapiro (who teaches English and comparative literary studies at the University of Warwick) and Barnard (Professor of English at the University of Kansas) have worked collaboratively for a long time, with six of their book publications so far directed to making available scholarly editions of the works of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century American novelist Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810), but beyond that another half a dozen volumes each (monographs, edited books, and translations) on a broad range of literary and related topics. The book under review draws from this prior work, but builds and extends particularly Shapiro’s argument in his The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-System (2009), that suggested a literary studies methodology for analyzing cultural and social production – in this case: of early American novels – across different regions (worlds) and against dynamic economic backdrops (systems). If Brockden’s novels opened up for Shapiro modes of understanding the fading of “old world” (European/continental) supremacy and its displacement with the emerging American economic system, then Pentecostal Modernism explores the middles spaces between the core and peripheral sites of (American) cultural production during what he and Barnard call the “boom period” between the “Long Depression” (1873–96) and the “Great Depression” (1926–40).

The theoretical frame at work is foregrounded by part A on “Methods,” wherein our duo explicate both (in chapter one) what they mean by their world-systems approach (the dialogue partners here being New Left theorist Raymond Williams, sociologist of globalization Immanuel Wallerstein, and French philosopher Michel Foucault) and particularly (in the second chapter) their conceptualization of modernity not according to standard and conventional matrices but via deployment of the Trotskyean – from the Russian and Marxist political theorist, Ivan Trotsky – model of “combined and uneven development” through which semiperipheral dynamics can be more clearly identified betwixt-and-between core and peripheral sites. If modernist formulations are carried largely via binary parameters – for instance religious and secular, urban and rural, or cosmopolitan and agrarian, public and private, or intelligible and subconscious – then identification and exploration of such semiperipheral realities opens up analytical possibilities otherwise foreclosed. This first part of the book is densely argued but patient persistence with this material is essential for proper initiation into the trajectory of argumentation that follows.

Part B, “Modernisms,” includes two main chapters, the third on Pentecostalism that is longer than all of part A and by itself constitutes almost forty percent of the book, and the next, half the length of its immediate predecessor, on American horror novelist H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937). The thesis of the former is that Azusa Street in Los Angeles, the site of the Pentecostal revival starting there in 1906, is a semiperipheral location, situated within the heart of the modern world (Los Angeles in the early part of the twentieth century) yet also carried by numerous marginal currents, especially those navigated by ethnically marginalized and migrant populations, and that speaking in tongues, the classic Pentecostal phenomenon, ought to be recognized as semiperipheral speech – here drawing from the work of American academic, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst Thomas Szasz, especially his articulation of this pentecostal manifestation as protolanguage – that provides a window into the realities situated between the privileged (white) upper-middle class promise of the American “boom” and the disempowered (non-white) lower class realities in the urban fringes. Glossolalia, the technical term for such Pentecostal tongues-speech, therefore should be comprehended not locutionarily but pragmatically and performatively. Since tongues speaking communicates not symbolically and semantically but affectively and emotively, it registers semiperipheral ruptures: the voices and perspectives of those groups of especially non-white persons who are part of the emergence of the modern world but have nevertheless been denied many of its benefits. The point of this chapter is at least twofold: first that analyses of modernism have arbitrarily excluded such glossolalic utterances from...