Modernism after Postcolonialism by Mara de Gennaro (review)

Modernism after Postcolonialism discusses the notion of the Other, central to European metaphysics. Examining concepts such as classification, sovereignty, memory, and solidarity, the book engages with the complex negotiations that govern diverse or unequal relations. Questioning the repressive forms — strategies and practices — that are embedded in colonial narratives, the author aims to write a “translucent” narrative “so that the world may once again be imagined as radically heterogeneous” (6). It brings out some of the aspects of colonialism that are often absent in post/colonial discourse. Chapter 1, “Troubling Classification,” shows that theories of difference, subalternity, hybridity, and relation are ultimately inadequate because they efface complexities that they cannot assimilate. The author examines Gertrude Stein’s novella-length story “Melanctha: Each One as She May” and J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, along with other texts, arguing that while both narratives engage with intimacy and community, they also show the limits of such engagement. Their narrative forms, though definitive and objective, are “saturated with colonialist logics of social and cultural classification” (26). Classification is problematic, not because it has no useful purpose, but because classifying others carries colonizing impulses. Melanctha, the central character in Stein’s story, suffers because other characters repeatedly and decisively read her, tell a coherent story about her, and this puts her at an acute disadvantage, “as her rebuffed affection and ongoing suicidal despair reveal” (47). The dichotomies and uneasy comparisons in Stein’s and Coetzee’s texts thwart the reproduction of sameness and otherness. Instead of submitting to the demands of what is constituted as “the pure and the proper” (60), Stein’s Melanctha and Coetzee’s Lucy embrace their anxiety, their vulnerable condition. The author draws on what she calls a poetics of “métissage” (27) or racial intermixing to represent racial tension in the two texts in a productive way because métissage steers the reader toward imagining a diversely constituted solidarity as it highlights connections rather than an otherness “normalized through languages of imperialism” (27): such a poetics is believed to build rather than bury or sustain anxieties about the Other. The quote from Aldous Huxley with which the subsequent chapter “Troubling Sovereignty” begins sets the tone of discussion surrounding the concept of sovereignty: “If the world presents itself to me as a unity as well as diversity, that is because I myself am one as well as many” (61). One experiences oneself as a unity but also as diversity at the body level. The idea of absolute sovereignty hinges on separating the latter from the former, and it is this violent separation, especially in colonial contexts, that makes “sovereignty” troubling. Citing Walcott, de Gennaro focuses on the transforming potential of unconventional forms: by developing styles other than the dominant ones and by resisting the nominal and embracing the adjectival, Walcott “amplifies not simply what brings color