7 - Mobile Modernisms

Summary

This chapter attends to the transnational and multiracial nature of modernist writing in Britain, and the critical paradigms that have only recently made this archive fully visible and audible. Black and Asian writers, publishers, editors, and broadcasters were working within and across the cultural and political networks of literary London in this period. Theatres, bookshops, meeting halls, and boarding houses provided a generative topography for various forms of cultural production. Through exploring key texts – C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins, Una Marson’s The Moth and the Star, Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, and Aubrey Menen’s The Prevalence of Witches – we can chart the global perspectives and histories that took writers to London and how these were transformed and structured by their encounters in the city. These texts, in both their subject-matter and experiments with language, voice, and register, as well as genre and literary mode, are products of movement between cultures, belief systems, and literary conventions. Their diverse oeuvres suggest the versatility required of colonial writers, but also their position at the meeting point of multiple literary and political traditions.