Commonwealth of Letters complicates the traditional understanding
of the relationship between elite, aging modernists like T.S. Eliot
and the generation of colonial poets and novelists from Africa and
the Caribbean- Kamau Brathwaite, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Jean Rhys, and
others-who rose to prominence after World War Two. Rather than a
mostly one-sided relationship of exploitation, Kalliney emphasizes
how both groups depended on-and thrived off-one another. The
modernists, dispirited by the turn to a kind of bland,
welfare-state realism in literature and the rise of commercial mass
culture, sought rejuvenation and kindred spirits amongst a group of
emigre writers from the Caribbean and Africa who had been educated
in the literary curriculum exported to the colonies in the years
before 1945. For their part, the postcolonial writers, ambitious
for literary success and already skeptical of the trend toward
corruption and philistinism among their compatriot anticolonial
politicians, sought the access to cultural capital and the
comforting embrace of literature provided by metropolitan
modernists. As a result, modernist networks became defined by the
exchange between metropolitan and colonial writers. In several
chapters, Kalliney provides compelling analyses of colonial writers
in postwar cultural institutions, such as the BBC, literary
anthologies, and high profile English publishers such as Faber
& Faber and Heinemann, developer of the African Writers Series.
Throughout, Kalliney acknowledges the elements of cultural
imperialism, and paternalism involved in these relationships;
however, he broadens our perspective on postcolonial writers by
emphasizing the strategic ways they manipulated these elite
modernist networks to advance their own cultural
agendas.Transatlantic Modernism and the Emergence of Postcolonial
Literature is a study of midcentury literary institutions integral
to modernism and postcolonial writing. Several organizations
central to interwar modernism, such as the BBC, influential
publishers, and university English departments, became important
sites in the emergence of postcolonial literature after the war.
How did some of modernism's leading figures of the 1930s, such as
T.S. Eliot, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender, come to admire
late colonial and early postcolonial literature in the 1950s?
Similarly, why did late colonial and early postcolonial
writers-including Chinua Achebe, Kamau Brathwaite, Claude McKay,
and Ngugi wa Thiong'o-actively seek alliances with metropolitan
intellectuals? Peter Kalliney's original archival work on modernist
cultural institutions demonstrates that this disparate group of
intellectuals had strong professional incentives to treat one
another more as fellow literary professionals, and less as
political or cultural antagonists. Surprisingly, metropolitan
intellectuals and their late colonial counterparts leaned heavily
on modernist theories of aesthetic autonomy to facilitate their
collaborative ventures. For white, metropolitan writers, T.S.
Eliot's notion of impersonality could help recruit new audiences
and conspirators from colonized regions of the world. For black,
colonial writers, aesthetic autonomy could be used to imagine a
literary sphere uniquely resistant to the forms of racial prejudice
endemic to the colonial system. This strategic collaboration did
not last forever, but it left a lasting imprint on the ultimate
disposition of modernism and the evolution of postcolonial
literature.
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