Reports from a Global Field

Understanding that modernity is always already global and colonial informs how Field Reports approaches modernism. Modernist studies is inevitably a comparative project because modernity has a shared material ground of an ever-expanding colonial-capitalism that traverses and connects the globe but that nevertheless manifests differently in singular locations. Colonial-capitalism produces a world-spanning interrelated singularity that renders the Anglophone world, including its imperial centers, as just one piece in a larger puzzle. As Lisa Lowe argues in The Intimacies of Four Continents, components of the globe—including the Anglophone world—are always already interconnected with parts larger than themselves. The Anglophone world’s connections with other worlds determines its very shape. Field Reports thus conceptualizes non-Anglophone aesthetic expressions from all over the globe as self-evident centers of the theorization of modernism and showcases work by scholars with deep investments in such locales.

Where does understanding modernisms as local responses to a global colonial-capitalist modernity get us? What are the affordances of this redefinition?

For one, it enables us to perceive the cultural and economic interconnections that have defined life in the global south as well as in the global north without falling into the trap of Eurocentrism. Then we can perceive what C. L. R. James already did decades ago: that histories that seem to be disparate and disconnected are actually in dialogue with one another because the modern world has been spatially interlinked through a global capitalist project of combined and uneven development. We can recognize with him that the French Revolution was the shared project of enslaved Haitians and the French Jacobins and that, objectively speaking, there could have been no French Revolution without the Haitian Revolution, and vice versa, because there could not have been French elites without Haitian slaves and French proletarians. This means that the universalizing ideals associated with modernity—such as those tied to the Enlightenment—did not arise in Europe and then spread elsewhere. Rather, as I write in Literatures of Liberation and Priyamvada Gopal also teaches us in Insurgent Empire, they arose in dialogue with emancipatory projects happening elsewhere in response to the collective colonial-capitalist oppression of modernity.

Acknowledging this entangled history is also a way of understanding that the “West” is just as much the creation of the colonial project and its imaginative geography as the non-West. It is not an agent so much as a cog or puzzle piece in a larger world-spanning system. As Gopal writes:

[I]t is in the process of going into the world “beyond” that “Europe” itself came into being. European colonial projects explain so much in the postcolonial world—how could they not explain Europe to itself? . . . Europe’s engagement with decolonization must begin with the world, as it undertakes an unflinchingly truthful engagement with the pivotal role of empire and colonialism in its own making.”[1]

The same urgent project of self-explanation and self-questioning continues to be necessary in the “West’s” neocolonial metropoles. How is the rise of authoritarianism and fascism at home linked to what states do abroad? How are domestic right-wing politics that are directed against the nation’s minorities born of the racial ideologies and violence inflicted on occupied populations elsewhere? The “West’s” refusal to acknowledge and grapple with its own liberal contradictions—of speaking of freedom and liberty while carrying out genocidal colonial projects abroad—threatens to swallow its democracies whole. In 1950, Aimé Césaire called this the “terrific boomerang:”

And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss. People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind—it's Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.[2]

Césaire’s critique implies a recuperative possibility for the hollowed-out corpses of liberal democracies. He asks residents of the colonial metropoles to refuse to “absolve, shut one’s eyes, legitimize” the fascist violence inflicted abroad, not just because it is morally indefensible but also to prevent it from metastasizing at home. Such acknowledgment, registration, and resistance are precisely what global modernisms may offer us, if we learn how to read them. A global modernity defined by colonial capitalism gives birth to modernist responses. These are responses of bearing witness, resistance, and renewal in the face of repression.

Field Reports turns to global modernisms born in various locations, manifesting themselves through different modes, styles, and strategies. In the process, Field Reports does not foreground one aesthetic style as defining for these modernisms, even as contributions stress the salience of the relationship of form to content. We concern ourselves with questions that express an interest in this relationship of content to medium: what kind of poetics does Native American verse forge to respond to the continuing experience of settler colonialism? How does speculative fiction work to imagine and counter the eco-precarity produced by extractive capitalism? How do working class communities in hellscapes like Camden, New Jersey—poster child of American postindustrial decay—write and rewrite the urban novel? How do tribal groups in the North East of India compose their loss into words by envisioning alternative relationships to the land? How do Palestinians forge their despair into an aesthetics of global aloneness? How does the neoliberal novel compose its bildungsromanian arc to elevate a homo economicus who defines himself through individual entrepreneurship rather than collective planetary belonging? How do migrants testify to being casualties of the world system in autofiction?

These are all questions for a redefined modernism made to fit the moment—a multi-faceted, plural-angled modernism of interlinkages and unevenness rather than stadial progress, of dialogue, comparison, and resistance, in as many aesthetic styles as there are locations in the world.