Modernism and the Colonized Other

After going through all the readings, and briefly going through what has already been posted, I'm struck by just how far Modernism as an aesthetic movement seems to be affected by the Other, especially the colonized Other.

Gikandi's analysis of Picasso's relation to African art as well as classicism reminds me of that archtypal Modernist work, The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot. Intertextual references to classical works abound here, as well as an explicit reference to Sanskrit and ancient Indian work in the final section of the poem. Does Eliot gloss over his debt to the Indian 'Other', as Gikandi alleges Picasso did? In a piece of writing, and especially with a borrowing from another language, such would be difficult, and in the later footnote to The Waste Land Eliot does acknowledge his borrowings from Sanskrit. But then again, at that time Sanskrit was seen as the root of the 'Indo-European' class of languages - in other words, his borrowings from its literature can be framed as simply a borrowing from a previously overlooked branch of European civilisation, notwithstanding the entire sweep of Indian history and culture which was to come after. Either way, Eliot's use of his classical and Sanskrit sources (among others) serve a similar function to Picasso's use of classicism and nativism. Referring back to Gikandi's essay, early on he paraphrases (458) Eliot as saying that "one could no longer understand culture without knowing 'something about the medicine man and his works'"; Gikandi points out, however, that the primitive serves only as a conduit to understand 'civilization', and not an endpoint in itself. We look at the Other in order to gain a better picture of the Self, but we ultimately keep out distance from the Other. Such it is with Eliot, and such it is, as Gikandi subsequently shows, with Picasso. One wonders whether the learning of Sanskrit and its assorted works was accompanied by the same sort of violence that brought the African masks to Europe where they could capture Picasso's attention.

Levine's essay on the British Empire provides a more than adequate backdrop to this ambivalent relationship between the European (or in this case British) self and the (in this case colonized) Other. We find that the British were concerned with keeping the 'purity' of their race and culture - no wonder then that Modernist art seems loath to acknowledge its debt to its African Other. Levine also notes that 'the needs of the colonized remained ... subservient to those of Britain' (116); in a similar fashion modernists like Picasso and Eliot used the Other in their works only as it suited them. Here modernity enters the picture, as elements of the Industrial Revolution spread throughout the colonies as a purported 'neutral' elements, but with of course a Western origin. As Levine notes, in the 'celebration of a technology-driven western model of development' (117), the implied political message of Western superiority over other cultures was obvious.

Auerbach's essay analysing the extract from Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse was not as interesting as the others, to me, but it did draw attention to one of the hallmarks of modernist writing: that of the multiple streams of consciousness. In particular, Auerbach notes how these streams are brought to bear in order to decipher a single enigma - the person of Mrs Ramsay - over the course of a single 'inconsequential' moment in time. And Auerbach concludes that 'there are no longer even exotic peoples' (552) with the use of enough 'random moments' like those that Woolf employs. The 'random moment' is 'comparatively independant of the controversial and unstable orders over which men fight and despair'; it purports to be neutral, free of ideology. This levelling that Auerbach asserts will take place as a result sits in odds with Levine's and Gikandi's essays, and I myself am not convinced that such would result. To me, the 'haziness, vague indefinability of meaning' (551) seems a better representation of the extract chosen, and of the modernist works studied here in general; an attempt to query our Selves with unfamilar instruments, to tease out the hidden meanings within. The (colonized) Other is simply one of those instruments, and the multiple streams of consciousness another.

- Yingzhao