notes toward a dialectical method: modernities, modernisms, and the crossings of empire

Notes Toward a Dialectical Method: Modernities,Modernisms, and the Crossings of Empire

Laura Doyle*University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Abstract

The last few decades of postcolonial, national, and transnational studies make it possible to dofuller justice to the layered histories that have shaped literature’s circulation. Recent historicalwork on the medieval period through the 18th century establishes that both inter-imperial jockey-ing and anti-colonial resistance have shaped literature as it travels. Historians’ accounts of theseinterconnected histories enable us to construct a transnational ‘histoire croisee’ with a highly dia-lectical accent. Building on this scholarship, this essay first of all foregrounds the interactive co-production of modern empires, including Ottoman and European empires. It then surveys someof the complex histories of cultural transmission by which Ottoman, Asian, and African cultureshave formed ‘the West’ at its cultural foundations, whether through modeling ‘public sphere’spaces, such as coffeehouses or western philosophers’ study of Asian ideals of ‘organic’ estheticform and political ethics. The essay then closes with a brief consideration of global modernismsin the light of this long history, highlighting new scholarship that moves toward the dialecticalmethodology conceptualized here.

When Frantz Fanon remarked that ‘Europe is literally a creation of the third world’, hewas thinking of the colonization of people and resources that created a wealthy, dominat-ing Europe (102). Yet recent literary and historical studies clarify the degree to whichAnglo-European literatures may also be the ‘creation’ of other worlds. It is not only thattheir material production is supported by colonial wealth, nor only that their forms areshaped by a colonialist imagination. What we have yet to fathom is the depth at whichthe apparently ‘native’ esthetic forms of Anglo-European cultures originate elsewhere,carrying their own travelling histories that predate European contact. Literary conventionsand plots brought by Anglo-Europeans to their colonies might actually in some cases bereturning to those places, to uncannily powerful effect. These are the as-yet untold returnsof literary history.

In this essay, I suggest that the last few decades of postcolonial, national, and transnationalstudies make it possible to fathom these submerged circulations – or, in other words, to dofuller justice to the layered histories and multiple, imperial modernities that have shaped lit-erature. By concentrating not only on the ways that, as Arjun Appadurai points out, ‘Local-ity itself is a historical product’, but also that histories are highly interactive across locale, wecan productively retool our methods for understanding literary migrations and traditions(13). Focusing on what Michael Werner and Benedicte Zimmerman call ‘histoire croisee’,or crossed histories, a global approach to literary studies can freshly plumb the depths atwhich literature arises within a world of encounters, often within a matrix of empires, andenacts a carefully negotiated, dialectical engagement there. This cross-imperial negotiationmay be one of literature’s most potent world-making functions.

Two kinds of historical work, in particular, give us the means for thinking in morepointedly dialectical terms in literature, empire, and circulation. The first is the blossoming,

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in Anglo-European languages, of non-Eurocentric history about a range of world regionsand from the ancient to the modern periods (such histories have, of course, been written inother languages). This research can enhance Anglo-European-language readers’ understand-ing of contingent, co-formed, interlaced modernities, or ‘civilizations’, with rich implica-tions for literature. Second, histories of anti-colonial rebellion, especially when understoodin conjunction with full-scale revolutions, can likewise lead to a more dialectical under-standing of history and literature (by dialectical here I intend no teleological implication buton the contrary aim to highlight the utterly contingent, interactive, and volatile mode bywhich histories and literatures come into being, in which each player or text engages withthe others, issuing in their mutual, if disavowed co-production). Within the frameworkafforded by these histories, scholars and students can become more fully educated about themulti-sided battles and uneven yet mutual powers of production shaping literature as it trav-els, including in a world where anti-colonial resistance is a fundamental, formative element.We can create for global studies in literature a ‘histoire croisee’ with a highly dialecticalaccent that takes full account of the force of empires.

The timely launch and open-ended form of the Global Circulation Project can stimu-late this research. Toward that end, and building on recent scholarship, this essay will firstof all foreground the interactive co-production of imperial modernities, noting their con-temporaneity and their jealous jockeying, and thus challenging the old, often self-servinghistorical notion of one empire replacing another, with the ‘latest’ empire cast as themodern or divinely chosen one. This section will also highlight the ‘vertical’ negotiationsand destabilizations that arise within empires from ‘below’ – including active rebellionagainst colonization – and which in turn affect relations between empires. Highlightingselect histories and historians to which literary scholars might pay more heed, this sam-pling will provide only a speculative sketch of the possibilities, simply to indicate thatthese histories beckon us to think more interactively about cultural and literary histories.

In a second section, the essay will survey some of the long and complex histories ofcultural transmission which shape and are shaped by these jockeying imperial politics.Again drawing on recent scholarship, this discussion will focus on texts and ideas thathave moved from east to west since the medieval period, revealing the degree to which‘western modernity’ has its foundations in eastern modernities, and suggesting that thewest’s competition with eastern empires succeeded in part because of learning culled fromArab and Asian civic, philosophical, religious, scientific, and intellectual traditions. Thissection thus also highlights the deeply layered or ‘loded’ character of literary genres thathave travelled east (and every other which way), as is increasingly analyzed by scholars ofcomparative, transnational, and world literature.1 I suggest that this political ‘lodedness’partly explains the cultural weight and force of these texts.

Finally, the essay briefly considers global modernisms in the light of both this historyand the dialectical methodology it points toward. New developments in the field of mod-ernist studies are beginning to do justice to these complex, global circulations of culture.I will survey emergent work (without any claim to comprehensiveness) and considersome of the implications for our understanding of the relation between modernist andpostcolonial literature.

Beyond Rise and Fall: Dialectical Modernities, Contested Empires

I roughly concur with those who argue that historically and hermeneutically the appro-priate counterpoint to the Eurocentric model of one modernity is an alternative accountof multiple modernities.2 Although much of the Anglophone scholarship on modernity

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has focused on Anglo-European modernity since the 16th century, scholars of multiplemodernities have reminded westerners that western modernity has been preceded byother modernities and that it is contemporaneous with competing modernities. If wedefine modernities simply as ambitious, centuries-long modernization projects propelledby dramatic developments in technology, literacy, international travel and trade, andusually accompanied by a sense of historical world destiny and a vision of expansionistaggression, other modernities have certainly preceded and accompanied western moder-nity. Of course westerners themselves have pointed to Greek and Roman empires as thesources for their own modernity, including secular learning, technology, and the valuesof freedom; and Greeks and Romans would have pointed to the Egyptian sources andprecedents for their civilizations. Once unlinked from the present, ‘modernity’ mayvalidly be thought of as a near-synonym for or, perhaps more precisely, the dominantepoch of what used to be called a civilization. Thus, we could speak of the period ofAztec modernity or Roman modernity operating in specific world regions. To apply theterm modernity to earlier societies has the virtue of reminding inhabitants of currentmodernities – east and west – that we are not so very different from these previousambitious civilizations, even if current technologies and institutions have borrowed fromand superceded those of past cultures.

This registering of other modernities is crucial, yet the aim of any account of multiplemodernities should not be merely to pluralize, supplement, or seek comprehensiveness inour picture of modernities. Rather, the further importance of retaining modernities as aframe of reference lies in the historical and dialectical understanding encouraged by suchan approach. That is, the long historical framework of modernities potentially illuminatesthe volatile and fundamental dynamics that, over centuries, constitute the ‘circulation’ ofpeople, traditions, and objects. And this long view can also clarify the degree to whichmodernities are often organized and motivated by the will to empire, whether forreligion or wealth, or more typically, both.

That is, empire has played a central role in the competitive growth of modernities.On the one hand, of course, empires do not alone generate or determine all culturalor economic structures. For one thing, to use Fernand Braudel’s terms, the circuits ofworld-economies do not map neatly onto the territories of what he calls world-civiliza-tions or what I would call imperial modernities. Braudel notes that in the 15th and16th centuries the Mediterranean region was an economic center but not an imperialcenter: ‘although divided politically, culturally and indeed socially [the Mediterranean]can effectively be said to have had a certain economic unity’ (Civilization III, 22). Andlikewise, he remarks that although ‘Islam and Christendom faced each other along anorth-south divide between the Levant and the western Mediterranean’, it is simulta-neously the case that ‘merchant vessels sailed across it everyday’ and thus, he concludes,‘such activity ignored the frontiers of empires’ (Civilization III, 22). In this wayde-emphasizing imperial formations, Braudel studies the Mediterranean as a key site inthe world-economy of the period, a site of convergence for the trade routes of manycultures and empires.

Yet Braudel misses important elements of the picture in thus giving short shrift to theorganizing force of empire and in this case the Ottoman Empire in particular, which didof course exercise Mediterranean dominance in the service of its territorial empire, anddid exact tribute in this period from other empires, such as the Spanish and the Safavid.Braudel’s work has been immensely important in opening up the many interconnectedways that world-economies have emerged in fits, starts, and swerves to create the materialconditions of human lives; and Immanuel Wallerstein has usefully built on this work to

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conceptualize a model of world-system economies moving along axial lines from tradeand capital centers to semi-peripheries and peripheries mined for resources and labor. Yettheir work is enriched by further direct attention to the structuring force of empire andof resistance to empire within these economies, as postcolonial historians and theoristshave shown. Such attention does indeed bring into clearer view what Braudel calls the‘different conjunctural rhythms affecting the economy, political life, demography andindeed collective attitudes’ of a society, including ‘the different schools of art or literature’(III, 71).

To foster further discussion along these lines, in this section I foreground two ways inwhich attention not to empire, singular, but to jockeying empires, plural, enables a moredialectical account of ‘conjunctural rhythms’, and in this form deserves to be a centralpart of our understandings of literary and other kinds of circulation in world-economies.First, moving away from the standard view – in which Anglo-European empires arise in(roughly) the 16th century from the ashes of empires past – we can pay more attentionto the contemporaneity of empires and their particular modernities, including consider-ation of both the dynamics of what Gerald MacLean has called ‘imperial envy’ and theaccretion of generations of vexed cultural exchange among empires (Looking 20–3). Andsecond, we can take fuller account of the effects of military and political resistance toempire, at least in the last few centuries and possibly earlier – as expressed in the manysmaller and larger battles by which the invaded and the enslaved have, despite their fewerresources, unsettled, transformed, and constituted the imperial order of things.

For, despite the familiar rhetoric of rise and fall, empires with their various projects ofmodernization have not existed simply sequentially. They have overlapped with eachother, battled each other, and borrowed from each other, deeply shaping each otherthrough processes of transculturation. Europe is an effect and in a sense so is every impe-rial ‘modernity’, but until recently Eurocentric historiography has obscured this fact.Recent histories can enable us to think more intentionally about these co-formations byrevealing how empires have developed in volatile relation to each other and in theprocess have co-produced modernity, or have co-produced linked modernities.

In Explorations in Connected History, Sanjay Subrahmanyam points the way to thismethod. He draws on multiple archives in multiple languages to track the complexmutual effects of political and military maneuvers among Ottoman, European, Safavid,and Mughal empires in the 16th century. For instance, Subrahmanyam traces how Portu-guese machinations (including perhaps, as one contemporary Arab chronicler interpretedit, the murder of the Gujarat Sultan in 1537) partly enabled the inroads of Mughals innorthern India (13). The Portuguese then entered into territorial and trade agreementswith the southward-expanding Mughal empire, even while developing a myth of fierceMughal omniverousness to play off against their own purportedly more honorable prac-tices. In subsequent years, to the chagrin of Mughal leaders, the Portuguese negotiatedfor additional territory in return for the safe haven they could provide for Mughalpilgrimages to Mecca, and this in turn led the Mughals to keep their eyes open to otherimperial alliances that might bypass or undercut the Portuguese.

Given these relations, ripple-effects moved through this and other regions when theSpanish Hapsburgs subdued and annexed Portugal in 1580–81, as Subrahmanyam traces.This event, which historians have considered a turning point in the European balance ofpower, not only affected relations within Europe and between the Mughals and Europe.It also re-aligned relations between the Europeans and the Ottomans, for the annexationdrained the Hapsburg Empire’s military resources and led to their increased readiness tocompromise in treaties with the Ottoman empire (Subrahmanyam 46–50). The Ottomans



themselves had entered a period of consolidation rather than expansion for a variety ofreasons, including a recent assassination of the Grand Vizier and unsuccessful territorialwars with the Iranian Safavids, and perhaps also because of the entry of new gold fromAmerica, which had destabilized Ottoman monetary systems while quickly enriching theSpanish and Portuguese.

Yet meanwhile the Hapsburgs themselves faced new pressures from the northernregions of Europe, especially from its Protestant countries. The English and the Dutchwere creating their own new wealth in American colonization projects – in part with thehelp of musket and cannon technologies learned from eastern empires – even as they alsocultivated new trade relations with the Ottomans, in Britain’s case leading to the found-ing of the Levant Company in 1581. Ironically, the Netherlands and England had turnedwest in the face of Ottoman and southern European control of the Mediterranean, andyet in turn, leveraged by their Atlantic wealth, they re-calibrated relations with thosegrand and far-reaching empires, and eventually challenged them. Among other contin-gencies, their larger, more powerful ships, built for Atlantic crossings, entered theMediterranean and, as Braudel observes, changed the balance of sea power there, furtherunsettling Ottoman dominance (Mediterranean 607).

Even in such a simplified sketch we can glimpse the mutually produced, highly contin-gent, and interactive nature of contemporaneous imperial histories, with their unanticipatedand sometimes ironic effects. Thus, it makes sense to speak not of a singular ‘rise’ ofAnglo-European empire, nor strictly of the wealth created by world-economies in whichAnglo-Europeans newly participated, but rather of a contemporaneous, competitivebuilding of empires. Imperial modernities are, it seems, fundamentally co-constituted bythese exchanges – a point too seldom considered. Keeping this view in mind, we canbetter analyze the ways that the continual jockeying, the strategic re-aligning, and themyth-making about the ‘bad’ empire provides both the prompt and the medium fortravelling ideologies, texts, battles, and technologies.

And within such an unfolding among empires there is another kind of dialectic, oneon which, again, recent historiography allows us to get a firmer handle. The multilat-eral account of imperial interactions and instabilities sketched above would beincomplete without a ‘vertical’ account, so to speak, of the disruptions of empire fromwithin and ‘below’. This is the dialectic driven by political struggles within whatArturo Escobar and Walter Mignolo have called modernity ⁄ coloniality, by which theymean to highlight that ‘There is no modernity without coloniality, because colonialityis constitutive of modernity’.3 This phrase helpfully distills the insights of Fanon andmany others. It names a world order in which modern powers have become modernpowers by draining the resources and energies of the ‘periphery’ for use within theimperial center, and which creates, as Fanon had put it, ‘a world cut in two’ (38). Tocapture this condition, Escobar and Mignolo urge us to place the two terms togetherin slashed relation – and to speak always of modernity ⁄ coloniality because the two arecontingent and interdependent (I have chosen to reverse the pairing and speak in termsof coloniality ⁄modernity so as to undercut the presumption of modernity’s autonomyor precedence even further).

Just as histories of multiple and vying empires clarify their interactive co-formations,recent histories of revolution and resistance allow us to see the contestations shapingcoloniality ⁄ modernity and, in turn, directing the circulations of literature. The many slaverevolts and indigenous-led battles in the Americas, rebellions in Ireland and India, andCaribbean maroon movements are all being more fully documented in a flood of recenthistories that build on such pioneering works as Rudrangshu Mukherjee 2002’s Awadh in



Revolt, 1857–58 and Robin Blackburn’s The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery (significantlyexpanding on much earlier work by C.L.R James and Herbert Aptheker). 4 Takentogether these studies reveal that the slash punctuating coloniality ⁄modernity signifies notonly a division but also a volatile site of conflict, of pitched battle, militarily and intersub-jectively. The historical record of violent insurgence – as well as the literary record ofdaily negotiations and subversions as narrated, for example, in escaped slaves’ memoirs –establish that colonialism and anti-colonialism are born together, in locked and oftendeadly embrace.

The ripple effects of anti-colonial rebellions are not merely what Michael Hardt andAntonio Negri (following Deleuze and Guittari) call rhizomatic in Empire; they do notsimply skitter outward (299). They are pointedly, often violently interactive, enacting areturn-pressure whose part in creating the first world is rightly called dialectical. TheHaitian Revolution, in particular, made manifest the very real possibility that a colonialregime could be overthrown and another order erected in its place, especially given thatit was shadowed by the contemporaneous 1798 Irish Rebellion. As showcased in suchcollections as David Geggus’s The Impact of the Haitian Revolution and Doris Garraway’sTree of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, Atlanticworld historians have traced the widespread interactive effects of the Haitian Revolution,the shivers and reactions that it sent back and forth through the sensitive, shifting net-work of Atlantic economies and alliances – and back and forth across colonial ⁄modernformations. As abolitionist Thomas Clarkson noted as early as 1792 and as recent researchhas confirmed, the trade, labor, marriage, and immigration policies of colonizing nationswere continually adjusted and debated in the face of this potential for insurgentresistance.5

Thus, for instance, Franco-Caribbeans fleeing Haiti and emigrating to the U.S.encountered the shock of having their ‘property’ seized in the very nation they thoughtwould protect it: that is, in places such as Louisiana their slaves were jailed because theywere deemed a potential source of insurgency. The Haitian Revolution also engaged theBritish, who invaded the island after the French were expelled, hoping to gain thisvaluable territory. Meanwhile, from the other side of the slash, Irish rebels also tookadvantage of this volatile situation, enlisting French support for their own insurgency, thelarge-scale Irish Rebellion of 1798, which, although unsuccessful, took 3000 British lives.This anti-colonial ‘domino effect’ with its multiplying battles spawned a new anxiouspressure, expressed in new policies of surveillance and ever more brutal practices ofretribution as well as in literary texts, as Tim Watson has recently shown in his study ofBritish Caribbean literature of the Romantic period.

Hereafter, rebellions and uprisings in Anglo-European empires inevitably conjured theprospect of full revolution, such as in the case of the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion in India.These acts of organized war and widespread resistance projected the vision of a time aftercolonialism for both the colonized and the Anglo-European colonizers – beckoning theformer and creating in the latter what Anthony Maingot calls a ‘terrified consciousness’,whether suppressed or openly expressed (53). As Robin Blackburn notes, ‘Black rebels inCuba in 1812, in the United States in 1820, in Jamaica and Brazil in the 1920’s, foundinspiration in Haiti’ (257).

We might therefore speak not only of what Nelson Maldonado-Torres calls the colo-niality of being but also of a post ⁄ coloniality of being, avant la lettre, adding, however, aslash between post and colonial to indicate the lived gap between vision and reality forthe colonized, the discordance between a present colonial situation and an envisionedpostcolonial future proper.6 This post ⁄ coloniality is not yet a proper postcolonialism; it is a



socio-economic ontology lived on the slash. But a proper postcolonialism is its horizonof possibility. As a potent yet latent possibility, it undoubtedly contributes to what Sartrecalled the ‘nervous condition’ of the colonized, which the historical evidence suggestsextends to the colonizers, if only because they feel its vibrations unconsciously and livewith it apprehensively or defensively (20). This nervous post ⁄ coloniality would then alsoshape what Michel Foucault described as the microphysics of power – but here more dia-lectically conceived and generated specifically by the felt gap and unevenness within thecolonial ⁄modern world. As I have analyzed elsewhere in relation to Gothic and modernistfiction, this pressured post ⁄ coloniality avant la lettre constitutes a key mood of circulation,one that inflects many small encounters and literary formations, and also operates as alarge visionary force that interacts dialectically with the large visionary force of empire. 7

These pitched battles between competitive empires and across the volatile colo-nial ⁄ modern divide have driven, derailed, energized, and inspired the circulation of texts.In the course of their travels texts have often been mis-translated, excised, bowdlerized,rewritten, and deformed by the pressure of violence or screening medium of ideologiesof racism and Orientalism. Yet, as I review next, they have nonetheless in their reconfig-ured forms entered and taken hold at the very foundations of the translating cultures.

What is Europe? The Cultural Dialectic of Transmission

Indeed, recent scholarship suggests that traveling texts have constituted cultures and mod-ernities from the outside in, from east to west and every other which way. And textsmay carry traces of their turbulent or guarded passage, via embedded stories of theirdistorted manifestation in the new culture. Natalie Zemon Davis studies just such a situa-tion in her sensitive reading of the translations and texts of the 16th century scholarknown to Europe as Leo Africanus, a Muslim, born al-Hasan al-Wazzan, who wascaptured by Christians, served as translator of Arabic texts for Pope Leo X, and eventuallywrote transculturated histories of the Arab world in Latin. Translators’ texts such asal-Wazzan’s embody perhaps one, coded way that empires speak to empires, and thatcolonized and colonizers likewise address each other. In this section, I highlight scholar-ship that establishes the degree to which, through such travelers and texts, Anglo-Euro-pean modernities have been formed from the outside in, perhaps even to a degree thatevacuates any notion of a native, regional, or strictly ‘original’ modernity.

If we return to the medieval period, we glimpse more fully the depth at which Anglo-Europeans fashioned themselves out of materials learned from the near east, the south,and the far east. In her stunning yet relatively overlooked 1977 book, The Matter of Arabyin Medieval England, Dorothee Metlitzki takes the measure of that depth. Metlitzki notonly reminds readers about the pervasive Arab influence on Latin-speaking cultures dur-ing the era of Crusades – ‘on military technique, on vocabulary, on food, clothing, andornamentation’ (4). She also tracks the wide range of Arabic texts that traveled north toEngland, initially from Africa and later via territories in Spain and Sicily; and she closelyanalyzes the impact of these texts on Anglo-European cultures. Medievalists know thatMedieval Europeans originally learned much of their Aristotle from Arabic translations,and some medievalists note in passing that Arabic science had an effect on the medievalscholasticists. Yet Metlitzki makes clear that scholars such as the 12th century Adelard ofBath did not simply read ancient Greek texts translated into Arabic or with Arabic com-mentaries; they devoted themselves to the study of Arabic philosophy and science (whatAdelard called ‘Arabicorum studiorum sense’) to transmit, in Adelard’s words, ‘what hehas learnt from Arab teachers under the guidance of reason’ and thus to promote the



principles of science in their own cultures (qtd. in Metlitzki 49, 51). Not surprisinglythen, Adelard’s Quaestiones Naturales [ca. 1120] follows the form of an old Arabic treatise,arranged as a fragmentary meditation on eight questions about the natural world, one ofthe generic forms he carries into Latin from the Arabic.

The latter is just one small example of the larger pattern Metlitzki traces (and MariaMenocal would later elaborate): the development of key ideas and forms of westernthought under the influence of these sources, including ideas associated with ‘westernmodernity’ – although, writing in 1977, she does not highlight this last point as such. Forinstance, Adelard’s separation of spiritual study from secular study follows a distinctioncommonly made, as Metlitzki notes, in the ‘best traditions of Islamic scholarship’, a tradi-tion helpful to Adelard in the face of papal suspicion of scientific thought (51). Similarly,Arabic patterns of study and philosophical debate are detectable in other medieval texts,such as ‘The Owl and the Nightingale’ (ca. 1186–1216). Metlitzki establishes Arabic ante-cedents for the owl and the nightingale’s dialogue about astrology, God, and determinism,as well as about the relation between body and soul, including the religio-scientific viewthat the heart was the integrating organ. She reveals the literature to be saturated with the‘Arabian science that surrounds [it]’ (56). Metlitzki likewise establishes Arabic sources forkey literary forms, such as allegory and the genre of loosely linked didactic tales found inChaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Arab-Islamic philosophical, scientific, and literary forms thusfeed, Metzlinski concludes, ‘the Western reservoir that supplied vernacular writers’ (96).

More recent scholarship points to other kinds of deep relation between medieval impe-rial histories and literary genres. In Empire of Magic, Geraldine Heng has persuasivelyinterpreted romance as an attempt to manage the disturbing experience of defeat in theCrusades and the spread of Islamic and Arab culture into southern and eastern Europe. Inlight of Metlitzki’s work, we might furthermore ask: to what extent are the ‘containing’forms of romance actually derived from the eastern cultures they are meant to keep at adistance? In another important work, Periodization and Sovereignty, Kathleen Davisaddresses the false divide so often set up between feudal and modern, perpetuated (as sheshows) by thinkers as diverse as J.G.A. Pocock and Antonio Negri, and ramified intocorollary divisions between sacred and secular, hierarchy and democracy, static anddynamic – and of course east and west. Again in light of Metzliski’s scholarship, wemight furthermore notice the ways that these divisions have served to segregate thefoundational, Arab-Islamic past of the West’s intellectual and political formation from itscurrent ‘modern’ structures.

Nabil Matar’s Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 and Gerald MacLean’s several booksincluding his edited collection Re-Orienting the Renaissance extend this documentation ofArab-European intertexts into later periods.8 In Looking East, MacLean coins the term‘imperial envy’ to describe 16th and 17th century English attitudes toward the Ottomans(or ‘Saracens’) – an ambivalent mixture of desire to be like the Ottomans, harsh judgmentmotivated by jealousy and awe of them, and self-aggrandizement aiming to quell a senseof inferiority beside their empire (20–3). Thus, English people took up coffee drinking,adopted Turkish pipe-smoking, and donned silk vests and pantaloons, while many writerssimultaneously fashioned a premature imperial image of the British as noble, masculine,and forthright in contrast to Turkish decline, decadence, and deceitfulness.

At the same time, as Matar shows, in the eyes of some 17th century observers, theOttoman Empire offered a political and religious model. It was held up by Puritans andother religious dissenters as a proper religious state, one that allowed for liberty ofconscience and at the same time pursued a territorial expansion that supported religiousconversion. John Milton’s remark, quoted by Matar, that the Ottomans ‘enlarged their



empire as much by the study of liberal culture as by the force of arms’ not only indicatesthe British interest in the Ottomans as empire-builders; it also suggests that some Britishwriters understood the role of texts in that project (87 qtd. in Matar). In a similar vein,Daniel Goffman points out that the Italians had studied and imitated the diplomatic insti-tutions of the Ottoman empire, setting up embassies and information-gathering networkslike theirs and designating certain kinds of status for foreigners that also helped to stabilizeinter-Italian relations and inter-European practices and ultimately led to their moreeffective participation in world politics (61–74). In part under the tutelage of the Otto-mans, then, Europeans learned to speak the lingua franca and act the part of an emergingempire. These borrowings allowed them to engage competently with other empires and,over time, compete successfully with them. Ironically, this inter-imperial borrowing ofpractices all at once tightened imperial interconnections, propeled competitive imperialexpansions, and spawned further conflicts and enmities.

This effaced yet centuries-old and imperially charged history of Arab, Ottoman andAnglo-European cultural crossings can inform our appreciation of work on more recentliterary periods, for instance, new scholarship on the Arabian Nights and the so-calledoriental tale in the 18th century. The pervasive influence of the Arabian Nights on Anglo-European cultures has been documented by critics ranging from Muhsin Jassim Ali(Scheherazade in England 1981) and Ferial J. Ghazoul (Nocturnal Poetics 1996) to those con-tributing to recent collections such as Ulrich Marzolph’s The Arabian Nights in Transna-tional Perspective (2007). Ros Ballaster’s work on the oriental tale in her groundbreakingstudy Fabulous Orient: Fictions of the East in England, 1662–1785 leads her to conclude thatthe ‘realist occidental novel, like the western Enlightenment of which it was a part, wasalways already oriental’ (58).

I would add that formal imitations of the Arabian Nights and other eastern fictions takeon an additional layer of politically charged meaning when understood in the light of thelonger history of imperially framed translation and interaction. That history makes us sen-sitive to the ways that Anglo-European texts fuse the electricities of old and new imperialcircuits. Thus does the Anglo-Irish writer Charles Maturin’s Gothic novel, Melmoth theWanderer (1820), open with an allusion to the Arabian Nights and then borrow that text’sstructure of a framed narrative with life-and-death stakes, to tell tales of both Spanish-Indian and Irish-British colonial troubles. The novel expresses a strangely mixed ‘nervouscondition’: it taps eastern forms while linking them to Irish subaltern superstitions, andthus, under an apparently casual veneer, perhaps channels old insecurities regarding anAnglo-European Arab past into new insecurities prompted by the specter of an insurgentcontemporary post ⁄ coloniality, all while vaunting Anglo-European dominance.9

Similarly unsuspected layers and legacies come into view when we likewise pay closerattention to the foundational influence of Asian empires in the west. In his magisterialAsia in the Making of Europe, published in three volumes in the 1960s, Donald Fachs doc-uments the many large and small ways that the westward travels of Asian goods, arts, andideas precipitated the cultural formations we now call European. A small sample includesthe study of Asian painting by Leonardo Da Vinci, the practice of quarrying minerals forpottery learned from China, and the ‘flamboyant Gothic’ architectural style known inPortugal as Manueline (for King Manuel) with its echoes of Indian detail. More recently,in Oriental Enlightenment, J.J. Clarke concentrates on the eastern sources of western philo-sophical and religious thought. Beginning with Voltaire’s remark that ‘the West oweseverything’ to the East (qtd. in Clarke 3), Clarke works his way forward from theformative impact of Chinese philosophy on the work of Leibniz (who read and wroteextensively about Chinese philosophy, claiming it modeled a natural religion founded on



reason), to the Hindu and Buddhist sources of Schopenhauer’s thinking, to the influenceof Buddhism on Nietzsche. Attentive to problems of Orientalism and to the misreadingof eastern traditions, although not focused on them, Clarke’s survey broadly reframes theintellectual legaces so often cast as originally western.

Yet it is Yu Liu’s incisive Seeds of a Different Eden that establishes with breathtakingclarity the extent to which key ideas of the Enlightenment developed in many cases fromAnglo-European intellectuals’ tutelage at the knee of eastern culture – novelists, religiousscholars, garden cultivators, diplomats, and emperors. Liu argues that the rage for ‘chinoi-serie’ in the 18th century is too often reduced to mere orientalism, obscuring the degreeto which western modernity is an outgrowth of Asian ideas and models, including inpolitical ethics and the arts. She follows the ways that ‘a new English and continentalEuropean theory of beauty and art began with the transplantation of Chinese gardeningideas’ and eventually prompted groundbreaking, ‘modern’ styles of thought in the Earl ofShaftesbury, Joseph Addison, and Alexander Pope, and Immanuel Kant (1). Excavatingthe Chinese roots of, for example, the esthetic idea of organic form, a notion that inChina embraced elements of irregularity and freer, more ‘natural’ play among all parts,she shows its shaping influence on the georgic poetics of Pope, Thomson, and Grainger.Perhaps most importantly, her reading of the Earl of Shaftesbury in relation to his expo-sure to Chinese philosophy significantly rewrites the history of British political thought,showing its sources in Confucianism.

The essays in Adrian Hsia’s The Vision of China in the English Literature of the Seventeenthand Eighteenth Centuries further revise the story of English literary and political culture,with implications well beyond what its title denotes. The collection might be called‘Anglo-European debates and visions as created through Chinese sources’. With essays onChina as figure and model in anti-Walpole journalism, and on Defoe, Johnson, Gold-smith, and Percy, this volume brings into view a vigorous subtextual stream by whichChinese thought shapes British culture. As this scholarship makes clear, China was notsimply a tool in ‘native’ debates, nor only a fashionable reference in literary texts; beyondsuch ‘appropriations of’ China, these essays lead us to ask whether, without the imperialmodel of China and the eager, perhaps envious, and yet elided borrowing of its culturalforms, those texts and debates would have developed at all, or at least in the world-changing forms they did.

Such accounts of literary circulation between competitive, empire-building culturescan fundamentally re-circuit our claims for a texts’, or culture’s ‘modernity’. One smallinstance may suffice to make the point. In the 1997 collection Tradition and Modernity inArabic Literature, in an essay titled ‘Gibran’s Concept of Modernity’, Antoine Karam char-acterizes the modernity of the transnational Arabic- and English-language writer KahlilGibran in terms of his emphasis on organic form, tracing this ‘modern’ style in part to hisreading of English and American romantic writers. But Liu’s account of the Chinesesources of an esthetic of ‘organic form’ would require us to rethink this genealogy. WithLiu in mind, when Karam notes that Gibran ‘blends neo-Platonism with Emerson’sromanticism and Eastern mysticism’, we might pause over the distinctions, and wonderabout how distinct these three are (32). We might find ourselves tracing the ‘modernity’of Gibran to China as well as, perhaps, to Britain, the U.S., and Arabic culture.

Finally, all of this documentation of the Asian, Ottoman and Arab roots of Anglo-European cultures raises new questions about the much-championed public sphere oftenconsidered central to the so-called Anglo-European Enlightenment and its modernity. Astheorists since Jurgen Habermas have explored, the ‘Enlightenment’ public sphere issometimes surprisingly self-critical, and its intellectual classes sometimes genuinely speak



against their own, elite-supported interests. Yet the scholarship reviewed above pointstoward three possible yet overlooked sources of this public sphere’s emergence, which Iwill only mention here but which deserve further discussion.

First, there are the specific cultural practices and models derived from Arab, Ottomanand Asian cultures. These would include everything from the diplomatic embassiesdiscussed by Goffman, to the coffeehouses of the Ottoman world copied in England(overlooked by Habermas in his discussion of coffeehouses [32–43])10 to the organicunderstandings of ethics in the political world tracked by Liu and Clarke. Second, thereis the likelihood, as many writers notice in passing, that the self-conscious and criticalnature of the public sphere arose in apart from Anglo-Europeans’ increasingly commonencounters with the people and arts of very different, highly ‘advanced’ or ‘modern’ cul-tures, which were sometimes perceived as imperial and religious superiors. Here, it isinstructive to recall that Rene Descartes points directly to his experience of travel in hisformulation of the ‘method of doubt’ in his Discourse on Method, which leads him to con-clude, famously, that the only certainty is ‘I think, therefore I am’ (he records that, afterwitnessing a profound ‘diversity’ of opinions and beliefs in his travels, he ‘learned tobelieve nothing too certainly’ and to ‘listen to Reason’, which leads directly to hismethod and ultimately to his influential axiom [9, 29]). And third, the energy of critiquemay also have arisen in the face of the violent resistance and the insistent questions of thecolonized. 11 That is, we might ask when and how this public sphere is an expression ofthe metropole’s own ‘nervous condition’, both its decentered relation to home and itseffort to address or evade the pressure of post ⁄ coloniality. For certainly, the public knewabout and echoed the objections to these colonial ⁄ modern conditions –as CharlotteSussman makes clear in Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery,1713–1833, her study of consumer boycotts of colonial goods, and as also registered in18th- and 19th-century poetry, as when Robert Southey in his Poems Concerning the SlaveTrade bemoans those ‘who at your ease Sip the blood-sweetened beverage!’ or ErasmusDarwin famously warns that ‘HE WHO ALLOWS OPPRESSION SHARES THECRIME’.

What emerges when we take account, all at once, of these ‘connected histories’, touse Subrahmanyam’s phrase? Of the eastern sources of enlightenment ideals and socialpractices, the question-raising effects of travel, and the pressures of anti-colonial rebel-lions, not to mention the possible intuition among writers of deeply embedded layersof cultural transfusion? What then inspires this Habermasian public sphere? We mightask, on a theoretical level, is it a common culture, a felt difference of culture, orperhaps a destabilizing sense of the dialectical accretion and stirring interaction of civiccultures? In the end we might wonder, what is Anglo-European modernity? It is, Iwould provisionally say, an effect, a dialectical effect, whose ground is elsewhere – notin some original cradle of civilization, but in other dialectics including engagementswith other empires.

In short, taken together, this historical and cross-cultural scholarship reconstructs, fromthe ground up, our understanding of the global circulations and formations of literature.It not only de-centers Anglo-European culture by placing its history within a longer andwider perspective; it also heightens our sense of the co-production of cultures throughactively cultivated multi-lingualism and translation over millennia, within and against theforce of empires. If there is something we would call ‘westernization’ that has spread inthe last few centuries, then we would have to call the underlying historical formations ofthis westernness something like ‘ottomanization’ or ‘easternization’. But all of these namesare too simple, and indeed reflect the lingering influence of empires, their power to



direct our vocabulary, which thus divides the world into parts, especially binaries, andspeaks only of invasion, domination, and spheres of influence. The key point is ratherthat there are multiple empires jockeying all at once, not always calling themselvesempires, and also multiple movements of dissent, insurgency, and anti-coloniality, notalways with shared values or targets. All of these interact to shape the production, migra-tion, and styles of literature. A global literary history would ideally take account of theirdialectically formed conditions.

Global Modernisms

The history of contemporaneous empires did not of course end with the ‘rise’ ofAnglo-European empire around the globe. As we have seen, descriptions of history as asuccession of empires that ‘rise and fall’ are themselves politically interested. Therefore, aswe turn attention to more recent centuries, it is again necessary to recall the ongoinginteractivity of empires, plural. I will do so briefly here to establish a context for the newwork on modernisms – or what Laura Winkiel and I have called geomodernisms. Thisterm, which I will use occasionally here, aims to signal diverse modernisms’ geopoliticalorientations while also de-centering the lingering Eurocentrism of the term modernismand instead encompassing what Susan Stanford Freidman identifies as modernisms’‘polycentric’ global networks (433).

We should first recall that in the course of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, asAnglo-European empires expanded, so too did Chinese and Russian empires, withcontestations among all of them as well as with Safavids and Ottomans. And of course allof these empires continually suppressed uprisings in annexed lands and from dissentinggroups within both educated and peasant classes; that is, they operated within their ownversions of coloniality ⁄modernity, and sometimes with the help of their current inter-imperial allies. In short the jockeying continued apace, even as the larger empires shareda profoundly common interest: to maintain empire as the reigning earthly order.

A quick sketch will suffice to establish these dynamics. First, under Peter I (1672–1725) and in particular Catherine II (1762–1796), the Russian empire expanded itsfrontiers, forcing its way into Ottoman territories, and by the end of the 18th centuryextending its reach to the Black Sea. Although the Russian annexation of Ottoman terri-tories was in some periods a boon to western empires insofar as it gave them easier accessto eastern lands, the 18th-century European support of Russia’s imperial expansionwould, as we know, come back to haunt it. By the later 19th century, conflicting impe-rial interests led to war with Russia, most famously the Crimean War (1853–56), inwhich British and Europeans joined with Ottomans to prevent further Russian incursionswestward. Likewise, although the Chinese suffered devastating defeats at the hands of theBritish in the First and Second Opium Wars (1839–42, 1856–60), it is important toremember that the British invasions were prompted in part by the Qing Empire’s stran-glehold on the balance of trade (given its lack of interest in European commodities asagainst the high European demand for its silks, porcelain, and other goods). Then, too,although Britain won Hong Kong and access to ports and rivers at the close of thesewars, and managed to shift the trade balance, it did not ‘conquer’ the Qing empire,which collapsed only in the early 20th century under invasions from Japan and the SovietUnion – only to re-emerge at midcentury as a vast powerful state, a communist inheritorof imperial territories.

In the western hemisphere in the 19th century, other, less entrenched, but nonethelesssimilarly imperial maneuvers were also under way. In the middle of the 19th century,



newly independent states in South America such as Brazil and Argentina made imperialmoves against neighbors such as Paraguay and Uruguay, sometimes cooperating andsometimes competing. Within this hemisphere, of course, the U.S. increasingly exertedits influence in these and other imperial contests, opposing for instance the French effortto maintain its role in the first and second Mexican Empires.

By the later 19th century, both the jockeying wars and the anti-colonial resistance tothem dramatically intensified. This intensification, as I’ll shortly suggest (following EdwardSaid’s hint in Culture and Imperialism), precipitated the fractured texts of modernisms.12

We might recall that in the second half of the 19th century, the British alone engaged inhalf a dozen wars on several fronts, including the Crimean War (1853–56), the decade-long Anglo-Maori War (1860–72), the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–80), the ZuluWar (1878–81), the First Anglo-Boer War (1881), the Third Anglo-Burmese War(1885), and the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1901). The steady pressure of warsprompted the movement toward conscription and the increased financing of mobilizationplans in Britain and Europe, all of which fed the kind of bellicose, warring imaginary thatPatrick Brantlinger in Rule of Darkness and Cecil Degrotte Eby in Road to Armageddonhave tracked in later 19th-century British literature and popular culture. The Anglo-BoerWars particularly brought new ruthless tactics into the realm of possibility and the publicconsciousness, including the British creation of concentration camps and the murder ofcivilians through the authorized burning of crops and villages. Of course these expansion-ist wars had arisen amidst and in dialectical relation with the accompanying class strugglesof the 19th century, another problem that conscription helped to address. Recalling thesemany battles and cataclysmic wars merely in the second half of the 19th century, onebegins to understand why the vision of a fractured world in grave upheaval might emergeeven among comfortable Anglo-Europeans by that century’s end.

This sense of upheaval was heightened by the fact that this imperially organized andpervasively embattled world was also becoming a more visible, audible, and tightly inter-connected world. The 19th-century saw massive investments in infrastructure, includingin railroads, canals, shipways, radio, photography, and telegraph cables, all of whichdramatically expanded not only the movement of goods and armies but also of news andinformation. The battle front of the Crimean War was represented in photographs, thefirst war to be thus relayed to civilian eyes. Hence, it seems fair to speculate that anyonewho saw or read the newspapers would have a sense of world turbulence, of violentrebellions and reprisals. In this context, it was clear that no center could hold, as Yeatsput it – or perhaps that there had never been one.

Yet, as aggressive imperialist war became ever more global and rapidly mobilized, sodid resistance and solidarity. Those same new technologies of communication and travelthat served war also enabled international awareness, organizing, and protest. Thus, didVirginia Woolf in 1927 observe that each person in London was ‘linked to his fellows bywires which pass overhead, by waves of sound which pour through the roof and speakaloud to him of battles and murders and strikes and revolutions all over the world’(‘Narrow Bridge of Art’ 222). Meanwhile, from a radically different position, FrantzFanon noted, ‘In spite of all that colonialism can do, its frontiers remain open to newideas and echoes from the world outside. It discovers that violence is in the atmosphere,that it here and there bursts out, and here and there sweeps away the colonial regime’(Wretched 70). Recently, scholars such as Priyamvada Gopal and Elleke Boehmer havedocumented the ways that independence movements in Ireland, Africa, India, and theWest Indies formed coalitions, read each other’s newspapers, and gained knowledge andinspiration from each other. And these lines of communication made possible the political



networks leading to communist international congresses and the pan-national or pan-eth-nic congresses, such as the series of Pan-African Congresses held in Europe between1919 and 1945. In part prompted by these groups, Anglo-European ex-colonial adminis-trators, such as Virginia Woolf’s husband Leonard Woolf, began to write critiques ofwhat Woolf called economic imperialism, and writers such as Mark Twain helped tofound the U.S. Anti-Imperialist League, in part to protest the annexation of thePhilippines. At the turn into the 20th century, the post ⁄ colonial vision of a time aftercolonialism became increasingly active, visible, and globally interconnected.

Modernism, or geomodernism, is an art oriented toward this global world, indeed forcedinto being by it. Innovative literary and artistic movements, closely or loosely intermingledwith political movements of all stripes, arose literally around the world, as the newest workin modernist studies makes abundantly clear. African diaspora modernists like ClaudeMcKay as well as nationalist modernists in the ‘Balkans’ aligned themselves with the‘barbarians’, the ‘underside’ peoples of the world, while Vorticists in England did the same,from the other side of the colonial ⁄ modern divide, with quite different aims and effects.What Edward Pavlic calls ‘crossroads modernism’ in African American writers may also beunderstood to register the widespread apprehension of a crossroads, or of a vexed networkof crossed histories, now operating in clear view around the world.13

New global studies in modernism focus productively on particular modernisms situatedin specific colonial ⁄ imperial locales while they also track their active engagement withinter-imperial politics and pressures. Thus, for example recent studies by Brent Edwards,Michelle Stephens, Kate Baldwin, Edward Pavlic, and Leah Rosenberg extend work donein the 1990’s on Harlem Renaissance and Caribbean writers by documenting writers’involvement in international politics – communist, pan-African, and anti-colonial. Espe-cially paradigm-shifting, from a western point of view, is the new modernist scholarshipon Asian modernisms undertaken by such scholars as Shu-Mei Shih in The Lure of theModern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 and Sung-Sheng YvonneChang in Modernism and Nativist Resistance: Contemporary Chinese Fiction from Taiwan.Indeed critics’ comprehension of the Asian sphere of global modernism will soon breakopen in exciting ways with the 2009 publication of the edited collection, Pacific RimModernisms (Gillies, Sword, Yao). Taking fuller account of inter-Asian histories as well aseast-west histories with their jostling modernities and empires, the scholarship in thiscollection dramatically reconfigures the global dimensions of modernism. The essaysre-historicize well-known relations between, for instance, Ezra Pound and Asian poets,and they add to the list of Anglo-European writers influenced by Asian esthetics. Yetthey also undertake the fundamental and even more necessary work of reconstructing thehistorical and esthetic forms of Asian modernisms. Encompassing essays on Chinese, Japa-nese, and Korean modernisms, this new scholarship gives attention to the histories ofmultiple empires and reverse colonizations, as well as to ‘transperipheral’ relations amongmodernisms reaching from Asia to Australia to Spanish America.

Mark Wollaeger’s forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (2010) likewisepromises to startle readers into a new consciousness about the interacting yet diverse sitesof geomodernist practice. While building on the momentum and scholarship gathered ina number of recent collections, including Brooker’s Geographies of Modernism, Doyle’s andWinkiel’s Geomodernisms, and Begam’s Modernism and Colonialism, this handbook creates amore complete picture of multiple global modernisms, with scholarship on Turkish, Afri-can, Balkan, Russian, and Indian modernisms, as well as Latin American, Asian, Anglo-European, and Caribbean modernisms. From the point of view of this essay, some of thisresearch is especially valuable for its thick descriptions of local conditions as they interact



with the frictions of imperial modernities. Many of these scholars, by background ordevoted study, are working with materials in multiple languages even as they groundtheir research in multiple political and cultural histories – thus pursuing the kind of ana-lyses Andreas Huyssen calls for in his essay ‘Geographies of Modernism in a GlobalizingWorld’ in the collection Geographies of Modernism (15).

This new work allows us to rethink the relationships not only among earlier workstypically called modernist but also between these and later works mainly designated aspostcolonial, relations which are too often still described in terms of borrowing. Evenamong critics specializing in postcolonial literature, modernism is often taken as a histori-cal and autonomous given, and postcolonial writers are then characterized as either resist-ing its forms and choosing realist techniques or adopting them and achieving, in thewords of one critic, ‘entry [... ] into the modernist stream’.14 Viewed within the longdialectical history sketched here and sometimes referenced in global modernist studies,the question of ‘precursors’ and borrowers in the realm of geomodernist practice becomessecondary, if not misleading. Or, if borrowing is our model, we would have to beginmuch earlier, in those centuries during which Anglo-European writers learned so muchfrom eastern writers about literary form, as I am exploring in a larger project.

Noting but bracketing that latter question, I will emphasize here only that the fracturedor devastated condition expressed in Anglo-European modernist texts was always already– and increasingly – lived by the colonized, and forced into view by their early 20th-century activism. Indeed, as W.E.B. Du Bois noted long ago and historians such as JohnMorrow have since documented, the phrase ‘world war’ is in fact all too accurate,because, for instance, many South Asian, African, and Caribbean men were conscriptedinto these wars, even as their lands in some cases provided ‘theaters’ of war that displacedtheir families. In this light, we should think of Anglo-Europeans not so much as the ‘pio-neers’ of modernist forms but rather as the folks who had prior and superior access to themeans of production – to the print and paint in which to express these unsettling or dev-astating world conditions. In the end, as Jahan Ramazani hints in Transnational Poetics,modernist and postcolonial writers emerge together, and in relation to each other, from aviolent history. As I would put it, they both express a post ⁄ colonial consciousness thatpresses on all of their worlds and all of their subjectivities, differently, dialectically.

A next step for global modernist studies, as for literary studies more generally, is to takefuller account of the very long history of global literary circulation. Most new work ongeomodernisms focuses on histories contemporary with its texts and gives only limitedattention to earlier political or literary histories. Drawing on the work of scholars in otherdisciplines, other locations, other languages, and much earlier periods, and thinking dia-lectically about the empires within and across which literary forms take shape, we canbegin to see how dynamic and vexed the making of world modernisms is.

And so, too, the making of worlds.

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to the American Council of Learned Societies for fellowship support of theresearch for this essay and the larger project from which it is drawn.

Short Biography

Laura Doyle’s research focuses on transnational, intercultural formations of literary history,with attention to the political and bodily dialectics shaping these formations. Building on



her specialization in African-Atlantic and Anglo-Atlantic literatures, especially the noveland modernism, she has recently turned to Anglophone literature more broadly toconsider the impact of eastern literary forms on western cultures and to explore theimplications for 20th-century Anglophone literature. She has secondary interests inexistential phenomenology as a philosophy and as a historical movement. In addition tonumerous essays, Doyle has published two literary-historical monographs: Bordering on theBody: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture (Oxford 1994, Perkins Prize Award)and Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940(Duke 2008). She is also editor of two essay collections: Bodies of Resistance: New Phenom-enologies of Politics, Agency, and Culture (Northwestern 2001) and, with Laura Winkiel,Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (Indiana 2004). Doyle is the recipient of twoACLS Fellowships, one Rockefeller Fellowship for Intercultural Studies at PrincetonUniversity, a prize for her first book, and the UMass CHFA Outstanding TeacherAward. At UMass-Amherst, she is Professor of English and has served as the AssociateDean for Research and Faculty Personnel in the College of Humanities and Fine Arts.

Notes

* Correspondence: Department of English, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Amherst, MA 01003, USA.Email: [email protected].

1 Saussy, Damrosch, Gallagher, Melas, and Lionnet and Shih are helpful starting points in the large bibliography ofsuch transnational work.2 See, for instance, Gaonkar, Kamali, and Walby.3 Mignolo, xiii.4 Rediker and Linebaugh have documented the force of resistance in early colonization projects in Americas. I amfocusing on a later period, once colonization is established, with outpost governments in place, vast tracts of landseized, and new forms of coercive labor institutionalized on ‘plantations’ from India to the Caribbean.5 See T. Clarkson.6 To define post ⁄ coloniality, I take a cue from Maldonado-Torres’s distinction between ‘coloniality’ and‘colonialism’ in his essay ‘On the Coloniality of Being’:‘‘Coloniality is different from colonialism. Colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which thesovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation, which makes such nation an empire.Coloniality, instead, refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that defineculture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonialadministrations. Thus, coloniality survives colonialism.’’Conversely, I suggest, the anti-colonial consciousness I am calling post ⁄ coloniality precedes the founding of a post-colonial state; the vision of a time after colonialism prepares the movement toward postcolonial states in the realmsof culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production – and, we should add, in the fact of battle.7 See Doyle’s ‘At World’s Edge’ and ‘Geomodernism, Post ⁄ coloniality, and Women’s Writing’.8 Also see recent and forthcoming work by Jane Degenhardt.9 See Melmoth, 11–13, including the reference to Sinbad the Sailor on 13. In Doyle’s ‘At World’s Edge’, I analyze thepost ⁄ coloniality of this text; and in a current project am developing the ‘oriental’ layers of this and other gothic fiction.10 In Looking East, MacLean discusses coffeehouses and notes that Habermas overlooks this origin (58). Yet it isinteresting to note that Habermas says the first English coffeehouse was opened ‘by the coachman of a Levantinemerchant’ (32).11 Coloniality ⁄ modernity might thus also provide a fresh framework for analyzing what Theodor Adorno deemedthe ‘negative dialectics’ of the intellectual’s position in a free yet hegemonic modern culture, whereby dissent canonly operate as a negation without positive content.12 In Culture and Imperialism, at the close of his brief ‘Note on Modernism’, Said suggests that modernist styles arise‘as more and more regions – from India to Africa to the Caribbean – challenge the classical empires and their cul-tures’ (190). Although he did not develop the implications of his comment, notably Said speaks of empires in theplural even as he also highlights the effect of anti-colonial insurgency on modernism. The histories outlined abovegive us a glimpse of the plural imperial histories to which he alludes.13 Sartre notes this situation in his Preface to Wretched of the Earth, when he characterizes Fanon’s call to the colo-nized: ‘Europe has laid her hands on our continents, and we must slash at her fingers until she lets go. It’s a good



moment; nothing can happen at Bizerta, at Elizabethville or in the Algerian bled that the whole world does notknow about’ (Wretched 12).14 For this phrase see Ker (2). Likewise, in a recent study of African writers and modernism, Tim Woods helpfullyexplores some ways that ‘Modernism acted as a mirror held up to colonialism’, yet he then falls into a familiarbinary in explaining that ‘European artists looked to Africa for borrowings to revitalize what was perceived to be aflagging and insipid Western aesthetic, African writers borrowed from European modernism for the purposes ofpromoting a racial politics of counter-colonialism’ (128). Postcolonial writing once again gets read mainly inpolitical terms while canonical modernist writing once again emerges as mainly concerned with esthetics: neithercharacterization does justice to the writers.

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