Chapter 9 - Postcolonial and Transnational Modernism

Summary

Modernist literature framed Edward Said’s career from his earliest book on Joseph Conrad to his final works on “late style” in music and literature. If Said’s literary and political commitments were, across much of his career, autonomous and running parallel to each, he developed, in his final decades, a political vocabulary – celebrating border-crossing, marginality, self-consciousness, and exilic consciousness – drawing on modernist aesthetics. Self-consciously transnational modernist literary history and criticism has proliferated since Said’s untimely death, and a whole new critical subfield embraces and expands his terms. But what tensions follow these terms in their journey from aesthetics to politics? This chapter assesses postcolonial and transnational modernism after Said.