Modernism after Postcolonialism: Toward a Nonterritorial Comparative Literature by Mara De Gennaro (review)

The anxiety about the untamable "other" delegitimizing territorial boundaries of nation-states and culturally or racially bounded communities that propel the production of identities is perhaps the most tenacious affective register of the twenty-first century. The "anxious mastery" over the "other" that building walls, anti-immigration laws, and state-sponsored violence betray is put along a comparative axis with the anxiousness of the narrator losing control over the heterogeneity of the text in Mara de Gennaro's Modernism after Postcolonialism: Toward a Nonterritorial Comparative Literature (2020). An insurmountable abyss between the narratorial desire for complete control and the swelling boundaries of the text is the spectral foundation of literary modernism. However, modernism, which sprung out of the political and social changes that Europe underwent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, tends to coalesce into an idea of the human that is minimal and at its best defined only negatively, but one that is still constructed locally through its European contexts. Thus, modernist abstractions that tend to universalize the impossibility of a fixed identity must stand the test of criticisms that read a hegemonic function concealed in this universalization of absence. The most striking achievement of Modernism after Postcolonialism is an attempt to go past the self-aggrandizing polar movements of this debate. Instead of pitching claims against counterclaims, de Gennaro asks how we can refine our understanding of modernism in the wake of the achievements of postcolonialism.

The imperial anxiety for mastery over the strangeness of the world beyond its limit and the anxiousness of the narrator over an uncontrollable text find their common evocative moment in George Orwell's autobiographical essay, "Shooting an Elephant." De Gennaro draws from Ranajit Guha's reading of Orwell's essay to pitch the framing problematic of her book. Traversing effortlessly between Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Lacan, Guha asks: "Can we afford to leave anxiety out of the story of the empire?" De Gennaro's key intervention in this book can be summarized using the same syntax: 'can we afford to leave modernism out of the story of postcolonialism?' While the colonizers Guha discusses in his essay (Francis Yeats-Brown and George Orwell) sustain moments of uncertainty in the face of the definite ends of the Empire, modernism, for de Gennaro, sustains the uncertainty at the heart of a conceptual hold on the heterogeneity of the postcolonial world, its narratives, and the narratorial control over a story. At issue in these narratives of "anxious mastery," for Guha as for de Gennaro, is the "uncanny realization that he [Orwell] might not do what his position of mastery demands, that he might instead act in a way that would put him outside empire's conceptual confines" (2). Even though Orwell eventually shoots the unruly Elephant whose excess opened the space for the narrator's anxiety, however, the narrative itself, for de Gennaro, offers a wider possibility of apprehending a productive uncertainty in literary form. She writes, "…literary form can evoke alternative possibilities for thought and action even in texts that ostensibly deny their viability" (3).

Thus, the four chapters of Modernism after Postcolonialism structurally lay a special emphasis on the swelling excess of narrative possibilities that transcend the control of the narrator. Postcolonial texts, namely, J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999), Aimé Césaire's Cahier d′un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land) (1939), Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco (1992), and Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones (1992) are placed along a comparative axis with Gertrude Stein's "Melanctha" (1909), T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), E.M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924), and Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas (1938) respectively. The matrix for these comparisons is at once the most spirited and the most arguable strand of this study. Both these senses are made palpable by paying closer attention to the book's subtitle: "Toward a Nonterritorial Comparative Literature." By "nonterritorial," de Gennaro clarifies, she does not...