Modernist Cultures. DOI: /mod

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1 did end up talking to himself [...] even as he continued to seek (and believed, often misguidedly, that he was engaged with) conversational partners (303). The Poundian speed-machine was moving so fast that it effectively closed its epistolary circuit, the global post-bag becoming increasingly a means of impatient self-address. Peter Nicholls New York University DOI: /mod Notes 1. On Poundian bravado, see my Bravura or Bravado? Reading Ezra Pound s Cantos, in Modernism and Masculinity, ed. by Natalya Lusty and Julian Murphet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp Pound s dealings with the white segregationist John Kaspar provide repeated instances. See Alec Marsh, John Kaspar and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). 2. Tim Redman, Review of Ira Nadel s Ezra Pound: A Literary Life, Modernism/modernity, 13.1 (2006), Charles Olson, Charles Olson and Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeths, ed.by Catherine Seelye (1975; New York: Paragon House, 1991), p. 97. Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (New York: Colombia University Press, 2010). 472pp. ISBN: Susan Stanford Friedman s Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time is an ambitious, expansive undertaking. Challenging the Eurocentric notion that modernity is an invention of the West and that modernism is, by extension, an inherently European movement that has belated expressions appearing in pockets around the world, Planetary Modernisms instead argues that modernity emerges in numerous iterations through the longue durée of history (4). Modernism, as Friedman defines the term, is the aesthetic domain of modernity, not a single aesthetic period, a movement, or a style (4). Destabilizing the concepts of modernism and modernity that implicitly privilege Western metanarratives, Friedman finds multiple and recurrent modernities (185) throughout world history. In doing so, she locates several examples of modernities that developed before1500 and contends that there are new modernities still emerging today. Employing scalar thinking (96) critical manoeuvering between the large scale of epochs and the small scale of close readings, or the movement between zoom in, zoom out (96) Friedman views the Tang-Song Empires 146

2 Book Reviews ( CE) and the Mongol Empire (1206-c. 1400) as instances of pre-1500 modernities. Accompanying this argument, Friedman also reads the Tang poet Du Fu ( ) and the northern Indian poet Kabir (c ), who wrote at the rise of the ruler Tamerlane following the fracturing of the Mongol Empire, as examples of pre modernists. This substantial book is in dialogue with and also magnifies significant elements of modernist studies in the twenty-first century. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz s now well-known article The New Modernist Studies identifies the transnational turn (738) as one particularly important expansion (738) of the field. 1 Friedman s aversion to nominal (55) definitions of modernism (which offer a set of fixed characteristics) and her interest in relational (55) definitions is commensurate with Paul Saint-Amour s observation that there is a movement away from definitions of modernism in favor of uses, models, questions, temperaments, and possible typologies in the field today (and indeed, Saint-Amour includes Friedman s articles in his examples substantiating this claim). 2 By developing a methodology for reading from a planetary perspective, Friedman attempts to eschew definitions and offers models of what a new relational modernist scholarly practice might look like. (It should be noted, however, that Friedman includes a caveat: It is true that no definition can be purely relational (327).) This critical gesture pushes the field far past its usual temporal zone. Although there have been attempts within modernist studies to broaden its scope from the narrowly delineated high modernist time period of the 1920s, there is still a widely accepted core period of about 1890 to 1945, as Mao and Walkowitz note. 3 Friedman s work offers us a practice that has the potential to disrupt the core periodization of modernism. It asks us to read in multidimensional ways. Identifying and explicating four critical methodologies for engaging a praxis of reading modernism planetarily (11), Friedman proposes a model listed as Re-vision, Recovery, Circulation, Collage (76). Re-vision here is the act of looking again, of defamiliarizing the familiar (76) and reading the traces of other modernisms and modernities in the more traditional archive of high modernism. It makes a claim that a transcontinental spatiality as well as longue durée needs to be reread in the modernisms of the West (76). Recovery, then, is the act of digging, creating an archaeology of new archives other modernities outside of the familiar Western ones and thus other forms of creative expressivities (76). Next, circulation is the archive of mobility, calling for the act of seeing 147

3 linkages, networks, conjectures, creolizations, intertextualities, travels, and transplantations connecting modernisms from different parts of the planet (77). And collage is the archive of radical juxtaposition, the scholar s act of paratactic cutting and pasting [...] collage is a nonhierarchical act of comparison, a joining that illuminates both commensurabilities and incommensurabilities (77). These dynamic critical practices allow conversations to occur across times and between modernisms. In her sixth chapter, Circulating Modernisms, Friedman uses this schema to create collages (218) that feature paired readings (218). Juxtaposing Joseph Conrad s Heart of Darkness (1899) with Tayeb Salih s Season of Migration to the North (1966), E.M. Forster s A Passage to India (1924) with Arundhati Roy s The God of Small Things (1997), and Virginia Woolf s A Room of One s Own (1929) with the writings of Rabindranath Tagore ( ) and Swarnakumari Devi (1855/ ), Friedman traces the way in which concerns, tropes, and topologies of twentieth-century modernisms circulate and come in contact with other modernisms. Drawing on Jahan Ramazani, Planetary Modernisms argues that modernist cultures are in dynamic interplay with other modernist cultures both temporally and spatially. 4 The following chapter, Diasporic Modernism, continues to focus on movement, circulation, and migration, exploring the forms of cultural hybridity that diasporic modernism can take (300). Here Friedman reads the themes of displacement, exile, and return in Aimé Césaire s Cahier d un retour au pays natal/ Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939), and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha s Dictée (1982). The main motifs of circulation, networks, linkages and contact stream their way through the text. The fourth chapter, which is inspired by Raymond Williams Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976), examines figurations (143) of modernity through the exploration of keywords (143). Friedman posits Multiple / Rupture : Conjecture : Vortex / Speed : Acceleration : Velocity / Network : System / Circulation : Route : Contact / Divergence : Discrepance : Fissure / Utopia : Dystopia : Heterotopia (146) as constitutive terms that, when combined, propose a relational concept of modernity (146). Through the exposition of these terms, Friedman asks for a fundamental rethinking of modernity that posits it as a geohistorical condition that is multiple, contradictory, interconnected, polycentric, and recurrent for millennia and across the globe (4). Calling for an epistemological shift in scholarly thinking, Planetary Modernisms finds modernities in recurrent instances of transformational rupture and 148

4 Book Reviews rapid change across the full spectrum of political, economic, cultural, technological, demographic, and military arenas of interlocking societies and civilizations (ix). The text explores this interlocking, networked, and polycentric phenomenon, and the ways in which empire plays a role in establishing these interlinkages, through a study of a ceramic modernism (199) the development and circulation of the cobalt blue glaze (c. 750), from the city of Basara of the Arab-Islamic Empire. Friedman explains how this glaze was reborn in the famous blue-and white porcelain of Ming Dynasy China ( ), [...it] made its way back to Europe during the Qing Dynasty ( ), eventually inspiring the blue-and-white Delft pottery of the Netherlands, Portugal s azulejo tiles, and the blue-willowon-white of eighteenth-century England (203). Here Friedman offers a case study that demonstrates the dynamic relations between cultures and epochs. Because of the scale and ambition of the project, there are some challenging aspects to this text, as Friedman is aware. Positioned as an effort in speculation (311), Planetary Modernisms returns to the central problem of manageability and meaning throughout its chapters: in short, if multiple modernities can be located throughout the longue durée of history, how can the terms modernism and modernity be prevented from being so diffuse that they become meaningless? The keywords from the fourth chapter should, in theory at least, mitigate such total diffusion, but then another challenge arises. The figurations employed relationally authorize a reading of multiple modernities and, by proxy, a multiplicity of modernisms; however, the terms though which these phenomena are understood are already familiar to any scholar who works on the core period of or even the long twentieth century. Few scholars of modernism would look at Friedman s list of keywords and question their relevance to the study of modernism; the radical gesture here is to expand the timeframe, but not necessarily the terms of the discourse itself. An interesting exercise would be to extend the hermeneutic that Friedman begins, in order to ask such questions as what keywords could be added to our understanding of modernism and modernity given an expanded periodization, or how might a study of various temporal modernisms and modernities come into tension with, refute, or redefine the keywords Friedman has identified? J. Ashley Foster Haverford College DOI: /mod

5 Notes 1. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, The New Modernist Studies, PMLA, (2008), For more on this turn, see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Eric Hayot, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel quel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003); Laura Doyle and Laura Winkel, eds., Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005); Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Jessica Berman, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics and Transnational Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), Gayle Rogers, Modernism and the New Spain: Britain, Cosmopolitan Europe, and Literary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Mark Wollanger and Matt Eatough, eds., Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Peter J. Kalliney, Modernism in a Global Context (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). 2. Paul Saint-Amour, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015), p Mao and Walkowitz, p JahanRamazani,ATransnational Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p Patrick McGuinness, Poetry and Radical Politics in Fin de Siècle France: From Anarchism to Action Française (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 289pp. ISBN Writing at the fin de siècle, literary critic and future Dreyfusard Léon Blum commented on the strong sense of generational solidarity among his peers, most of whom were members of the avant-garde. But belonging to the same generation, or even to the avant-garde, as Blum noted, and Patrick McGuinness demonstrates in his magisterial work, Poetry and Radical Politics in Fin de Siècle France: From Anarchism to Action Française, did not necessarily mean common political ideals, or even common aesthetics, but rather similar ways of looking at literary, cultural, and political questions. As the author states, his goal is to explore the relationship between poetry and poetic theory in the late nineteenth century and the culture of radical politics in its broadest sense: ideas, theories, actions, and discourses (7). This focus is striking, since many literary scholars have concentrated on the hermetic nature of Symbolist poetry, leaving instead the work of making connections between the Symbolists and the politics of their time to historians. Moreover, McGuinness s illustration that the language of poetry its critical, polemical, theoretical language is inflected by the language of politics, and that the least political-seeming poetry and poetic debates reflect many of the preoccupations, uncertainties, and prejudices 150