Race and the Modernist Imagination

Modernist studies has been slow to pick up the gauntlet thrown down in the nineties by such books as Michael North's The Dialect of Modernism and Laura Doyle's Bordering on the Body. That is, until recently few scholars have treated race as a constitutive category of modernism or as a critical discourse central to modernist studies, the way they have long treated gender and sexuality. Joining books like Laura Winkiel's Modernism, Race, and Manifestos and Anita Patterson's Race, American Literature, and Transnational Modernisms, Urmila Seshagiri's Race and the Modernist Imagination attempts to remedy that failure. In her interesting, cogent, and closely argued book, Seshagiri not only explores the racial thematics lurking within British modernism but, even more importantly, shows that race was a formative element, serving as an “engine” for the creation of new literary forms in the work of such writers as Oscar Wilde, Ford Madox Ford, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf.To begin, Seshagiri argues for the centrality of race in the British modernist imagination. With a light, and often, elegant hand, she paints the picture of London at the turn of the twentieth century as a place “rife with social, scientific, and political discussions about race” in which a linear version of racial descent came increasing under scrutiny (7). Many modernist writers, she argues, reconceptualize nineteenth-century racial ideologies, developing for example, narratives in which a “character or author's multiple racial identities produce multiple chronological, spatial and perceptual vantage points” (29). In other words, attention to race, Seshagiri claims, has a profound affect on the aesthetic imagination and participates in the formation of the modernist impulse to “make it new.”Early sections of chapter 1 discuss the relation between race and modernism in Conrad and Wilde, making clear the continuity of racial decadence that connects The Portrait of Dorian Gray with Heart of Darkness. In perhaps the most original portion of the book, Seshagiri then turns her attention to Sax Rohmer's immensely popular novels about Dr. Fu-Manchu. From The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (1913) on, these thirteen novels chronicling the evil doctor's schemes for world domination challenged British assumptions about racial and imperial hierarchies and channeled anxieties about modernity into the question of race. According to Seshagiri, “In translating the conditions of Western modernity into a battle for racial dominance, Rohmer's fictions give surprising expression to the cultural anxieties and dislocations that high modernist authors negotiate in better known or canonical texts” (55). The chapter is fascinating in its attention to the ways that the Fu-Manchu novels inscribe British fears of Western racial inadequacy in the face of a scientifically advancing East. Seshagiri is also compelling in her description of the London scene in which Dr. Fu-Manchu practices his flanerie, a place of divided populations where the Chinese are scrutinized and cordoned off from the Anglo-British, even as writers and artists display their fascination with primitivism and orientalism. But Dr. Fu-Manchu moves easily beyond the Chinese district, transgressing the racial geographies that delimit and constrain London's immigrant populations, thus representing an infiltrating “yellow peril” that is all the more threatening because it attacks from within.In her second chapter Seshagiri takes up four authors from four moments in the development of the avant-garde in London between 1910 and 1918. By delimiting this period and focusing our attention on the interconnections between literary experimentalism and racial discourses, she presents the “rich mutuality between the ruptures of race and the ruptures of avant-garde aesthetics” (77). Seshagiri discusses the fascination with non-Western cultures evident in the décor of the Cave of the Golden Calf, at the time one of London's most adventurous nightclubs. Reading the paintings and murals by Jacob Epstein, Spencer Gore, Eric Gill and Wyndham Lewis and commenting on the programs of dance and performance, she demonstrates the extent to which claims about artistic rupture or renewal were grounded in primitivism. Next, Seshagiri offers a fascinating look at “Indissolable Matrimony,” one of Rebecca West's little known stories, which appeared in Lewis's journal BLAST. Its violent chronicle of the failure of an interracial marriage exemplifies the racial matrix that undergirds vorticist notions of “energy.” Yet by painting the (black) wife as intelligent and autonomous, West also “reorders vorticism's cultural hegemonies” (97).One of the book's most powerful sections interrogates the African presence in Katherine Mansfield's short story, “Je Ne Parle Pas Français.” Instead of following the usual impulse to read Mansfield's work within New Zealand contexts, Seshagiri explores the imbrication of sexual and racial taboos through this story about a Parisian writer's memory of his sexual initiation with an African laundress. In a text that both performs and thematizes the creation of avant-garde forms, this memory becomes linked both to the protagonist's emergence as a writer and the story's avant-garde aesthetics. Through her brief appearance in the text, the laundress actively inaugurates the writer's social, artistic and moral development, thus also provoking his modernism. Like the primitivist figures in many of the other cultural texts Seshagiri explores, the African laundress in “Je Ne Parle Pas Français” stands not only for the ground against which the avant-garde defines itself but also for the transgressive energy that makes possible its emergence.Race and the Modernist Imagination ends with a bravura analysis of racial aesthetics in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and Orlando, which Seshagiri explores by way of letters and journals that Woolf and Vita Sackville-West wrote during their travels to Constantinople. (An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Modern Fiction Studies in 2004.) Seshagiri argues that ideas of race and the Orient shape Woolf's writing across many genres. Indeed, Constantinople appears as an aesthetic model even in A Room of One's Own (1989). Rather than read race through Woolf's anti-imperialist politics, which, as Seshagiri points out, “forms only one of several racially-based strands in her work” (143), the chapter teases out the subtlety of the many ways, from reference to Lily Briscoe's Chinese eyes in To the Lighthouse to the description of the Turkish landscape in Orlando, that Woolf draws on race to build both her modernist aesthetics and her politics. The chapter ranges widely, moving deftly between close reading and cultural analysis, adding immeasurably to our understanding of Woolf and race.The many strengths of this fine book will make it required reading for those interested in the racial matrix of mid-twentieth-century British modernism. Yet one wishes that Seshagiri had been a bit more expansive in her scope. By restricting herself to metropolitan British modernism in the period from 1890 to 1930, Seshagiri avoids grappling with a host of issues raised by English language writers working outside of London and in tension with canonical modernism. (Readers might turn to Winkiel and Patterson for a more transnational focus.) The racial contexts addressed by the book are also fairly limited and addressed only through the work of white writers. What might the argument look like if a Caribbean, African, or Indian writer of color had been included? In her conclusion Seshagiri makes a strong case for her focus on London, but the book would have been more powerful if it had grappled with a broader array of texts and contexts—even within its English-language focus. Finally, one wonders at the persistence of a somewhat restrictive definition of modernism in this book, revolving around the notion of “rupture.” By foregrounding the capacity of racial ideas to help “make it new,” Seshagiri sidesteps many of the ways in which modernism's aesthetics perpetuate deeply entrenched British discourses of race. Yet, in the end, in its finely honed and subtle readings, Race and the Modernist Imagination adds much to our understanding of race as a constitutive force in the development of British modernism and to the ongoing critical discourse about the role of race within modernist studies

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