Nicholas Brown - Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth-Century Literature

Utopian Generations

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Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon

of Twentieth-Century Literature

BY NICHOLAS BROWN

Guru English: South Asian Religion in Cosmopolitan Contexts

BY SRINIVAS ARAVAMUDAN

Utopian Generations:

THE POLITICAL HORIZON OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE

NICHOLAS BROWN

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2005 by Princeton University Press

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Brown, Nicholas, 1971

Utopian generations : the political horizon of twentieth-century literature / Nicholas Brown.

p. cm.(Translation/transnation)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN: 978-1-40082-683-4

1. English literature20th centuryHistory and criticism. 2. Politics and literatureGreat Britain

History20th century. 3. Politics and literatureAfricaHistory20th century. 4. African

literature20th centuryHistory and criticism. 5. Literature, ComparativeEnglish and African.

6. Literature, ComparativeAfrican and English. 7. Modernism (Literature)Great Britain.

8. Modernism (Literature)Africa. 9. Politics in literature. 10. Utopias in literature. I. Title. II Series.

PR478.P64B76 2006

820.9'358dc22 2005043926

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data is available

This book has been composed in Minion and Gill Sans

Printed on acid free paper

pup.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

FOR NORMA

IN MEMORIAM

C O N T E N T S

Modernism and African literatureIn defense of totalityThe

eidaesthetic itineraryThe modernist sublimeThe African prise

de paroleAll theory is postcolonial theoryTotality, allegory,

and historyUtopian generations

Ulysses, history, and formUlysses and the modernist sublime

Eumaeus: the sublimity of the banal and the banality of the sublime

Ithaca: the becoming-meaning of information and the becoming

information of meaning

Ambiguous Adventure and ModernismAmbiguous Adventure, authenticity,

and deathHeidegger as ethnophilosopherTempels's Bantu and

Heideggers GreeksReification and the work of the colonizedThe

privatization of utopia

Why Ford Madox Fords novels can only be read onceConrad, Ford,

and literary impressionismThe Good Soldier: absolute nostalgia

Parades End: absolute and conventional nostalgia

The Achebe-eventAchebe and the image of AfricaYeats, Eliot, and Achebe: the poetics of disasterArrow of God as general allegoryThe image of Africa revisitedArrow of God as total allegory

Wyndham Lewis, fascism, and the critique of liberalismTheChildermass and revolution: the embodied dichThe Childermass and reaction: imperialism and the strong personalityThe reaction in revolution and the revolution in reaction

The Trial of Dedan Kimathi and the ambivalence of Mau MauKamiriithu, the Kenyan theater apparatus, and the neocolonial stateA Gerao da Utopia, I Will Marry When I Want, and national tragedyA new generation of utopia: the multitude and musical form

The eidaesthetic itinerary continuedbossapsbossaThe aesthetic ideology of bossa novaFour options for cultural production on the semiperiphery1964 and the end of modernismTropiclia, or bread and circuses?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks for their more than generous guidance and support are due to Michael Hardt, Fred Jameson, Frank Lentricchia, and Valentin Mudimbe; Jamie Daniel, Madhu Dubey, Judy Gardiner, John Huntington, Lansine Kaba, Walter Michaels, Beth Richie, and Mary Beth Rose; Maria Elisa Cevasco; Ndinzi Masa-gara, Marjorie Perloff, and Sylvia Wynter; Alberto Moreiras; Neil Larsen and Ato Quayson; and the late Priscilla Lane. Throughout the writing of this book I have benefited greatly from my conversations with Kristin Bergen, Tim Choy, Jeremy Hermann, and Imre Szeman. The comments of those, known to me or anonymous, who read the manuscript and offered advice were invaluable in putting this book into its final formwhich would not have been possible without the help of Kat McLellan, Mary Murrell, Linda Vavra, and Hanne Winarsky.My incalculable debts to Anna and to Lis and Steve and Nora are almost beyond mention; not so my debt to Eleazar Delgado and the staff at the Jumping Bean, who never kicked me off my table by the window. Parts of this book are printed with the permission of Research in African Literatures, the New Centennial Review, and South Atlantic Quarterly. This book was completed at the Institute for the Human-ities at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Utopian Generations

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Whoever hasnt yet arrived at the clear realization that there might be a greatness existing entirely outside his own sphere and for which he might have absolutely no feeling; whoever hasnt at least felt obscure intimations concerning the approximate location of this greatness in the geography of the human spirit: that person either has no genius in his own sphere, or else he hasnt been educated yet to the niveau of the classic.

Friedrich Schlegel, Critical Fragment 36

Modernism and African Literature

This book argues for establishing the interpretive horizon of twentieth-century literature at capitalisms internal limit. In the classical Marxian conception this limit is the rift between capital and labor, but this rift knows many displacements, the most important of which is the division of the globe between wealthy nations and a much larger and poorer economic periphery. The literary texts primarily considered here come from each side of this divide: British modernism between the world wars, and African literature during the period of the national independence struggles. The following pages will insist that neither of these two literatureseach produced in a period of extraordinary political possibilitycan be understood on its own; rather, the full meaning of each only emerges in relation to the other and to the rift, both internal and external, which they each try in different ways to represent.

But what does British modernism have to do with African literature? Provisional answers are not hard to come by. First, the prestige accorded modernist literary texts by colonial-style education at mid-century cannot be overestimated. The relationship to modernism of the African literature that emerged with the great national independence movements (a relationship not only to modernism proper but also to the entire new-critical canon, itself an enlarged and domesticated modernism then in full hegemonic bloom) is deeply ambivalent. The critical edge of the great modernisms presents a model, while their institutional weight as the vanguard of European culture presents both an obstacle and a formidable spur to new and sometimes aggressively oppositional literary production. One need only think here of the well-known kinship between