Impulses of Modernism and Imperialism

I can't help but wonder if modernism itself can't also be seen as part of, or rather an outgrowth of, the same impulses that gave birth to imperialism, given that others have already noted, with the aid of Fanon's polemic article, the violence inherent in both systems/ideologies. The impulses being those of modernity; a willful questioning of and destabilizing of the status quo in the case of modernism, and out-and-out economic exploitation in the case of imperialism. In fact, on could say that modernism is in large part a result of the fruits of imperialism (one thinks back to Gikandi's article on Picasso and his relation with African art), and by playing on those motifs, modernism does violence to the representations of the colonized.

Folks complain of their posts getting longer; mine keep getting shorter. Way to buck the trend, me?

- Yingzhao

The politics and aesthetics of representation

I am interested in the ‘artistic’ representation of the Marabar Caves by Forster. While Gikandi finds that Picasso’s ‘western’ feel of representation is problematic because the masks are used as an object for the western artist instead of creating a free and equal ground for all cultures to interact with each other, I find that Forster’s representation of the Marabar Caves is equally problematic, less so for its symbolism of a metaphysical absence, a lack that matches Forster’s perception of a Godless universe –
“Nothing, nothing attaches to them, and their reputation” (116, italics mine) – than for its representation as an Indian mystery, one that is unknowable and eludes understanding. In other words, Forster’s representation of the Marabar Caves, to me, becomes an essentialism; all of India is reduced to the Marabar Caves in Forster’s novel, just as the entire worth of Africa is displaced onto the tribal masks that Picasso uses in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. India is therefore timeless because the Marabar Caves “are older than all spirit” (116).

The question here is whether Forster, as a modernist artist, is also a colonialist that imposes a western-orientated view of the east?

I feel that Forster’s representation of the Caves (and here, this is similar for colonial or western attitudes towards representation) is ultimately a troubling and disturbing one.
In Forster’s novel, Adela and Mrs Moore’s quests to “see the real India” (21) is marked primarily by their viewing of the Caves. Through these two characters then, Forster implicitly tells us that the ‘real India’ is the Marabar Caves, imposing a western ethnocentric view of India onto his readers. All that we read about or learn of the Caves applies to western perceptions of India as “dark,” exotic (“like nothing else in the world”), mysterious (“bear no relation to anything dreamt or seen”) and oppressive (“like an imprisoned spirit”) (116). The modernist representation of the Caves as that which cannot be pinned down (different characters have differing perceptions and experiences in the Caves, emphasizing the shift from an objective to a subjective reality as mentioned in Auerbach), was also a source of colonial anxiety for the western artist because they lacked knowledge about, and thus were fearful of encountering the Other (one is reminded here of Kurtz’s “the horror! the horror!”).

Forster’s representation of the Marabar Caves can be extended to his larger representation of India as a whole in his novel. Like Kipling’s Kim, Forster’s text indulges in exhibiting India as an oriental emporium, one in which the smells, sounds, festivities of India – “the pageant of birds in the early morning, brown bodies, white turbans, idols whose flesh was scarlet or blue” (42-43) – are displayed for the consumption of his western readers/audiences. In other words, Forster exoticizes India as the Other to the West even as India motivates him to write.

Finally, Forster’s representation of India is biased because in essentializing India, he decontextualizes his representation of India from its political contexts. Forster plays down the importance of Indian nationalism as a significant political force in the history of India. Particularly, I am reminded of Levine’s “Britain in India,” which among other things, talks about the disparate representations of the Indian Mutiny: “The political elements of rebellion were played down while violence against unarmed British citizens was accentuated” (79). So, the British represented the Mutiny as barbaric and uncivilized – all of which were reasons that augmented the justification for colonial rule and discipline in India. Subaltern studies, however, would view the Mutiny as the beginnings of early nationalist thought or actions.

So, yes I agree with Ashis Nandy that "All representations of India are ultimately autobiographical."

(Western) art and its relation to modernism pose a problematic situation in that, on one hand, “art has come to function as the defining point of cultural achievement and civilization…clearly distinct from the danger and defilement represented by the Other…”; on the other hand, modernism challenges this thesis because it would seem to “posit the Other not as a threat but as a source of new energies” (Gikandi 458). At the same time, modernism creates a kind of surveillance, “routine maintenance”, on the type of art that can be allowed, and on the overall effects of the Other. The African can only be allowed as “the citadel of modernism”, if the object has been separated from the body. This idea of cleansing and purifying the Other seems to defy the very purpose of artists seeking the unknown for new sources, to awaken consciousness within people.

In addition, I would agree with Gikandi that it was merely the idea of primitivism that appealed to Picasso, for an idea can be interpreted and rationalized. But the African bodies and cultures posed a far greater danger, not only because they could “contaminate”, (Levine mentions how Britons were afraid to ‘go native’, and would send their children back to Britain to root out local culture), but also because they were “incomprehensible” (as Conrad describes in Heart of Darkness) – the Other could not be adequately represented and defined. Furthermore, the Other could possibly reflect a darker and unknown side of the colonizer, and this could threaten his very state of being.

In that sense, the relation between modernism and the Other, wavers between trying to represent consciousness and a deep-seated anxiety of the Other, between the African as an object of art divorced from its culture and the African as a living body. Even the very notion of “representing consciousness” is questionable. It’s as if modernism tries to delve into the Other, yet unable to do so, gives its audience its own version of the African. Yet, how can it still be called modern, if rather then test new grounds and find new ways of representing consciouness, there remains a need to survey and cleanse the Other, one key source of reference? Can Picasso’s art still be considered “modern”? And what is “modernism”? – if the term (1) seems to be indicate a rather Eurocentric view, which effectively eliminates the Other; (2) seems to suppress what it tries to express (that of "consciousness").

Modernism's Mirror

I'd like to use the following quote from the Auerbach reading as a springboard for the rest of this post:

"The writer as narrator of objective facts has almost completely vanished; almost everything stated appears by way of reflection in the consciousness of the dramatis personae." (534)

The motif of reflection/mirroring seems particularly pertinent to the issues raised by Auerbach and Gikandi: firstly in how mirroring as a means of constructing the self appears to be a trait (or product?) of modernism. I say this based not only on Woolf’s technique of using the random external event to reflect the inner self (538) and Gikandi’s argument of how Picasso uses the African art object to isolate the “pure” forms of Western art; Auerbach’s own method of explication - reflecting the stylistics of modernist fiction off (an)other text – bears this out as well. Of course, one can give a pat explanation for this trait: the destabilizing of the central, unitary self that accompanied the modernist movement (as Auerbach says several times) means that identity can only be asserted in relation (or reflection) to another, or an external circumstance. However, I would argue that this method of mirroring comes with its own problematic set of double standards, as it were.

It seems to me that we can read Gikandi’s argument as providing the underside to what is generally considered innovative and pathbreaking about modernism. One such feature: the external and mundane serving as a mirror/catalyst for the richer inner world. Here’s what Auerbach has to say about it:

“in Virginia Woolf’s case the exterior events have actually lost their hegemony, they serve to release and interpret inner events…” (538)

Besides the striking choice of the word “hegemony” - with its connotations of power relations - here, I can’t help but see a parallel between this and Gikandi’s argument. The external, or the African/Other (bearing in mind the common technique of relegating the Other to the margin), is not considered in and of itself but in how it sheds light on the internal/central self.

At the same time, both Woolf and Auerbach both employ the technique of extrapolation: using something small (a brown stocking, a short extract from To the Lighthouse, a madeleine..sorry Proust) to derive larger conclusions. Yet how is this different from what Gikandi accuses Picasso and other Primitivists of doing – fetishizing and using a part of African culture (like the mask) as sufficient representation of the whole?

I guess it’s hard to think of such questions without bringing in value judgments – Auerbach was right when he said that this was “indicative…of certain tendencies and needs on the part of both authors and public” (546). Yet my question is: is it possible to conceive of the self without a mirror? We are used to thinking in dichotomies, I think - even the module title seems to be setting up a sort of self-other divide…but how else can we think of one without the other?

- Andrea

The Fear of Contamination- Reading Levine and Gikandi

In reading the articles by Levine and Gikandi, the common concerns of fear of “contamination” and “anxiety of influence” struck me as interesting and worth looking into in these two articles. Levine, in her essay, delves into the attitudes of the colonisers towards the cultures of the colonised, that “It was colonized peoples who were expected to conform to British behaviors and values: movement in the other direction was considered contamination, not assimilation” (107) Interestingly, in Gikandi’s essay which was published as recently as 2003, Gikandi expresses his displeasure at modernism’s shedding of the “contaminants of the Other” (456) as it enshrines itself, canonises itself as part of Western culture. A thought that entered my mind as I read this was that, if Gikandi is right, then while the age of Western colonisation ended decades ago, the ethnocentrism of the West has persisted given its insistence on claiming modernism as purely a Western aesthetic, denying the role that their empires played that “made modernism possible” (456). Interestingly then, we, the once-colonised have not truly been released from the shackles of colonisation, as “colonialism of the mind” persists to this day with the West still insisting on and establishing its hegemony in the world of English literature.

Therefore, perhaps in our decision to take on this module and examining the canonised texts, we begin to acknowledge the role played by the colonised Other in the formation of the Modernist movement, that Gikandi claims has been dreadfully under-rated and perhaps begin to right the wrong that has been done in the process?

Sorry if this is short and rather sketchy, I’m experiencing a bad case of writer’s block this week, been thinking for hours. I'll post something much much better next week.

-Leong Hui Ran

The Brown Stocking and Empire

Initially, Auerbach’s The Brown Stocking seemed to be purely about modernism, with little or no connection to issues of empire. However, the essay ends with the claim that “in this unprejudiced and exploratory type of representation” that is modernism, “we cannot see but to what an extent…the difference between men’s ways of life and forms of thought have already lessened” (552). This conclusion illuminated for me a common thread running through all three readings: the invisibility of the Other and the West’s perpetual refusal to perceive Others as unique individuals

Auerbach claims that modernism’s exploitation of interior thought foregrounds the “elementary things which our lives have in common” and erases superficial differences that divide. Because of this, “the strata of societies and their different ways of life have become inextricably mingled; there are no longer even exotic peoples”.

To me the description of modernist writing as unprejudiced and precise begs question. Modernism arises from the traditions of Western culture and is an aesthetic movement practiced by an elite class of artists; how then can modernist explorations of thought be equally representative of all ways of life? The claim of its lack of bias, then, already points to Auerbach’s privileging of the position from which writers people like Virginia Woolf write, and it remains a bias that is invisible to him.

What then, of the claim that “there are no longer even exotic peoples”? To me, the term exotic resonates with Rubin’s description of Africa as “something that transcends our sense of civilized experience, something ominous and monstrous”(Gikandi 468) ­– in other words, something unknown; and unknowable. The understanding of their innermost processes that comes with the modernist enterprise then causes the loss of this quality of exoticism because the exotic Other is now knowable; he can be understood in terms of the fundamental elements he shares with the Western writer and his representations.

Gikandi writes that Picasso had little interest in Africans as human beings and producers of culture, only as subjects of his art . Similarly, Levine describes the British as expecting the colonized people to conform to their standards of behaviour and value systems. Auerbach’s claim for the modernist enterprise, again, rests upon the assumption that the “exotics” can be understood and represented adequately in terms of the Western artist. That which outside the writer’s experience and the limits of his writing are, it seems, disregarded. The sense of the invisibility of the Other thus persists throughout modernism notwithstanding Auerbach’s claims of a movement towards unification.

-lynnette

Response: Gikandi, Levine and Auerbach

Uh, I haven't seen a precedent, so I hope I'm doing this right. Here's a response to the three readings this week, focusing primarily on the Gikandi. It ran a bit longer than I'd expected - apologies! I'll definitely work on trimming future responses... My first read-through of "Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference" left me sceptical of how far Gikandi had fulfilled the Picasso-centric goals of his piece as laid out in the early passages with his rather general conclusions of "perspective and spectatorship." (476) However, looking at it again, I wonder more appreciatively whether the article does not in its execution mirror the challenge of "displac[ing] Picasso…from [his] ritualised place" (476) he is keen for studies of modernism to take up. After all, the tight focus on Picasso the article begins with gives way to wider considerations of modernism, and allows, particularly, the African 'other's' perspective to dominate such considerations near the close, diluting and eventually edging out the Picasso factor - and thus view from traditional Modernist studies - to finally leave at least this reader with the stronger impression of the African take on the development of modernism. Of course, I say this, but all in all I still can't be sure whether that was Gikandi's intention, or if he simply meandered as was my original impression…

Something else that struck me from the article was an observation that I felt was a disturbing echo of another in Levine's "Ruling an empire," a chapter I thought was a straightforward read, if somewhat heavy on the disdain the author felt for the Empire's belittling of its colonial subjects - certainly it is a justified disdain and the obvious and contemporarily 'proper' way to view colonial rule, but it fairly drips from every other sentence engaging the colonial view of its subjects, a feature of the narration I found distracting in an excerpt with so much factual information. In any case, Levine notes that, in spite of the missionaries' criticism of "imperial policy and practice," they were "nonetheless a part of imperial conquest" (120) - "it was not imperialism as a philosophy that missionaries criticised." (121) Upon reading this, I was immediately put in mind of Gikandi's statement that "even when artists such as Picasso questioned colonial practices, they seemed to reproduce the colonialist model of African societies; they questioned the practice but not the theory of colonialism." (476) As Levine points out, literary portrayal from even the Victorian era of such missionaries has largely been "unflattering," (121) so their duplicity is hardly a surprise; however, to realise that 'revolutionary' artists often respected in literary studies were guilty of the same duplicity that seems self-evident in the case of missionaries does chill me. The insularity that shaped the Western view of the 'other' that is often accepted as fact, that both Levine and Gikandi point out as a flaw of commonly accepted knowledge is thus made real to me with startling clarity, and I realise I still have a way to go in my personal "displacement and deritualisation," as Gikandi would have it. (476) Reflecting thus on my thoughts after reading Auerbach's "The Brown Stocking," this realisation is underlined. Other than a brief raised eyebrow at the effusiveness of "Yet what realistic depth is achieved in every individual occurrence, for example the measuring of the stocking!" (552) I had found very little quarrel with the chapter, thinking it fascinating and enlightening about a topic I still know precious little about. Only after Gikandi and Levine did I think to ponder more on the brief mention of "exotic peoples" (552) and the lack thereof contributing to the development of the modernist technique. Now that I think about it, Auerbach's conclusion thus seems incredibly simplified. I'm not sure what to make of it yet, but at least, thanks to Gikandi's challenge, I'm coming into awareness of the possibility that something may be made of it.

Tan Hui Jun, Jean [HT074193A]