Literary Primitivism by Ben Etherington (review)

For several decades of scholarship, primitivism has typically been cast as a problematically necessary moment in the development of European modernism. As Ben Etherington outlines in his much-needed reappraisal, recent critics have tended to view primitivism as largely constituted by a Western gaze that conjures up racializing images of supposed savage simplicity in order to proceed to full abstraction, an appropriative, “othering” stage in the development of twentieth-century western art and literary practices. But, as chapter one of Literary Primitivism convincingly argues, this poststructuralist position relies on its own reified categories in order to proceed with its critique of reification. This line of thinking places “the West”—counterpart to “the Other”—simultaneously as the center of primitivist artistic production and as oppressive agent. Insisting instead on capitalism as a world-system, and drawing on a range of Marxist theoretical paradigms, Etherington’s study not only robustly counters that primitivism was “an aesthetic mode taken up across its span,” but also that “artists from colonized peripheral societies” produced the most “intensely primitivist” works (xi–xii). His major examples here are Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Claude McKay. But his focus is by no means restricted to these figures, for Literary Primitivism moves across a wide range of materials and forms to build a sophisticated argument for primitivism as “an aesthetic project” categorized by “a peculiar form of spiritual rebellion immanent to the imperialist apotheosis of European colonialism” (25). This argument is unpacked across six chapters, the first three largely historical in focus, and the latter three engaged with detailed, theoretically informed close readings of literary works (Etherington’s own term is “slow readings”).

As elaborated in chapter two, Literary Primitivism contends that primitivism emerged as an aesthetic response to imperialism considered in V. I. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg’s, and others’ precise terms as the point at which finance capital came to dominate global trade and thus increased pressure for continued economic growth drove colonial powers to policies of monopolization and further expansion. Primitivism emerged when a “window of opportunity” opened up—“a sudden and vertiginous realization that all humans were about to be drawn irretrievably into this world-system but when the remnants of alternate realities yet appeared to have life” (11). For Etherington, primitivism should thus not only be considered an aesthetic project, but also a decidedly utopian one. Central to this argument is his observation that primitivism in its strong sense should not be considered as an approach to a putative primitive object (what he calls “philo-primitivism”), but rather as an urgent series of dialectical mediations of near-lost pasts toward a series of possible futures through a stress on the immediate, which he names “emphatic primitivism [. . .] the urgent desire to become primitive, a condition whose fulfillment would require no less than an exit from the capitalist world-system” (33).

Chapter three considers primitivism as négritude, a term coined by Aimé Césaire in 1934, and foreshadowed by the Légitime défense manifesto, produced by a group of francophone students in Paris in 1932. Here Etherington finds an important resource in Ernst Bloch’s concepts of “objective” and “subjective” nonsynchronicity. These two terms are vital for Literary Primitivism for they name a central dialectic of primitivist literary production, the former referring to the “discontent of the individual who feels out of step with the times,” and the latter “to the remnant objects and social practices that persist beyond their strict necessity within the present political economy” (33–34). Etherington mobilizes this dialectic as he moves through Carl Einstein’s “On Primitive Art” (1919), T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922) to the Légitime défense manifesto, Aimé Césaire’s coining of the term, and Suzanne Césaire’s essay “A Civilization’s Discontent” (1942). Through readings of D. H. Lawrence, Langston Hughes, and Jacques Roumain, chapter four goes on to outline a constitutive paradox of literary primitivism—that descriptive realism can only end up by ossifying the primitive...