Review by Choice Review
The innovative essays in this collection emanate from conferences sponsored by the Modern Language Association. Thus, the book represents high-level academic literary criticism by scholars who go boldly where few have gone before. They explore and try to redefine "modernism" and "modernity" by setting their sights on aesthetic creativity in Cuba, Brazil, Haiti, India, China, Taiwan, Lebanon, and South Africa--and, in a few instances, more familiar territory (England and the US). Confidently using the critical language of postcolonial analysis in discussing self-awareness, anxiety, freedom, and resistance to assimilation by a dominant ethos, the essays analyze features of rationalized racism, American Indian subjectivity, Haitian primitivism, "Atlantic modernity," Arab humanism, "cabaret" modernism, and the construct of the gypsy. A few essays assess cross-cultural parallels, e.g., between E. M. Forster's A Passage to India and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Jurgen Habermas are among the predictable guides. The book's tentative but fruitful concept of "geo-modernism" offers a new way of understanding cultural continuities and conflicts through the lens of modernist literary representation. This is a book for seasoned literary adventurers. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, and faculty. M. S. Vogeler emerita, California State University, Fullerton
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
