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Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, eds. Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2005. xi + 354 pp.
This useful but uneven volume appears, as have any number of other "new modernist" studies, in the shadow of Dilip Gaonkar's 2001 collection Alternative Modernities, which along with Donald Pease's and Robyn Wiegman's Futures of American Studies (2002) helps to chronicle a significant paradigm shift in the humanities. This shift can be characterized as a turn to the global, in both senses of that word: a tendency toward more globalized readings of Euro- American canonical works, events, and discourses, as well as an expansion of the canons themselves beyond their Euro-American focus. Comparative literature, to cite just one example, has been undergoing a similar shift towards the global, a development much noted in the ACLA's (American Comparative Literature Association) most recent "State of the Discipline" report. Thus does modernism, a field circumscribed by its Eurocentric focus in the first place, now join what we might call the "scramble for planetarity," following Spivak's term. As in comparative literature, which is now turning its attention to its erstwhile others, modernists now find themselves in a position analogous to Britain's in the seventeenth century: playing catch-up, trying to establish a belated presence in an arena already carved up by others. Postcolonial studies, to name only one such intellectual project, has long interrogated the hegemony of canonical modernist texts and writers in twentieth-century literature and has also exhaustively theorized the relations of writers such as Conrad, Forster, and others to the postcolonial writers and texts that would later appropriate and critique them. Thus is Geomodernisms doubly disadvantaged: not only is the new modernism a late arrival to a critical enterprise that postcolonial studies and related projects have thoroughly explored, but it constitutes something of a second wave even within the new modernism itself, following the lead of Gaonkar, Arjun Appadurai, and others.
Given this position of relative belatedness, the onus is on...