Modernism and Race ed. by Len Platt (review)

A comprehensive approach to the questions of race in modernism is overdue. Yet, how does one begin to address and characterize the many disparate formulations of race that we see in the New Negro Renaissance, global pan-Africanism, and black diasporic literatures; writing by and about Roma and Jewish peoples; and provocations on the topic of “Asiatic” types in East/West debates in Russia? And where does Irish literature fit into these conversations? This final query has been approached by Joyceans for several decades now, but Modernism and Race, edited by Len Platt, maps it with new geographical and critical coordinates alike. And as Platt’s introduction shows, one must traverse the histories of disciplines and fields such as racial science (or pseudo-science), psychology, anthropology, and colonial economics in order to account for the conjunction of modernism and race through the lens of contemporary modernist studies.

In this volume, one finds the topic of race employed as a frame for reading James Joyce comparatively alongside both familiar figures, like T. S. Eliot and Ford Madox Ford, and less common ones, including Zora Neale Hurston and Claude McKay. Finnegans Wake figures prominently in two chapters. In the first, “‘Tis optophone which ontophanes’: Race, the Modern and Irish Revivalism,” Kaori Nagai draws a surprising and persuasive connection between Joyce and E. E. Fournier d’Albe, a scientist, cultural propagandist, and “chief architect of the Pan-Celtic movement” (58). Fournier’s career straddles the antagonism between the nationalism of the Gaelic League and the internationalism of Pan-Celticism, and Nagai explicates his modernist project to regenerate Ireland by bridging this chasm. In a paradigmatic endeavor, Fournier learned Irish, High-Scottish, Manx, Welsh, and Breton, then “compiled an Anglo-Celtic dictionary … in which the translations of English words into these five Celtic languages are given in parallel columns” (65). Nagai shows that his work intersects with Joyce’s in his distinction between “prose” language, which conveys information, and “poetry,” the language of aesthetics. This becomes clear when Fournier’s interests turned to Esperanto, which, Nagai notes, shares with the Wake the quality of being an “assault on English as colonising ‘prose’” and the desire to disrupt the grammar and English that made itself universal by force (69).

The more curious and fascinating historical-technological-audio/linguistic nexus that Nagai elaborates lies in another element of Fournier’s career. In 1913, he invented the optophone—”a machine which translates printed matter into music, allowing the blind to read by ear”—and envisioned that each of its musical notes represented a Celtic nation divided by geography and history from its brethren (59). This machine makes its appearance in the Wake in the line “‘[t]is optophone which ontophanes’” (FW 13.16); as Nagai explains, the phrase weds vision and music in a Joycean manner by combining sight and sound with ta onta (Greek for “things that exist”) and phanein (“to show, appear”). As it did for Joyce, “[t]he theme of blindness, to be remedied by ear or speech, permeates the fields of interest which Fournier traversed”; indeed, Esperanto, Nagai notes, was devised by an eye doctor (70). The ways in which both the optophone and the Wake force the reader to “resort to other senses” in order to decipher what looks like Babelian language tie together Nagai’s astute linkages and readings (72).

Finn Fordham’s contribution to Modernism and Race, “‘Until Hanandhunigan’s extermination’: Joyce, China and Racialised World Histories,” places the drafting of the Wake in the context of the wave of grand accounts of universal history that appeared around and after the Great War, including those by Oswald Spengler, H. G. Wells, and D. H. Lawrence. These “global narratives,” Fordham argues, situate the history of China and the Far East in particular ways that Joyce both adopts and revises through his readings of Giambattista Vico and G. W. F. Hegel (173). We see this first in Joyce’s use of a “hybrid language of Melanesian pidgin, built in part...