Review | Modernism in the Metrocolony: Urban Cultures of Empire in Twentieth-Century Literature
Reviewed by Shawna Ross, Texas A&M University
Precedents exist for most monographs, making it prudent for a scholar to frame their book’s value as a welcome addition to an existing conversation. But for Caitlin Vandertop’s Modernism in the Metrocolony: Urban Cultures of Empire in Twentieth-Century Literature, justifying the project by its sheer novelty is viable. Although the centrality of metropolitan spaces to modernism has long been acknowledged, and many scholars consider decolonizing modernism the field’s most urgent task, Vandertop combines these scholarly foci in a way that feels both fresh and long overdue. That is because recent trends have made such a combination finally possible, with the necessary puzzle pieces supplied by the geographic expansion of modernism with the New Modernist Studies, the rise of infrastructure studies, and the increasing attention given by humanist scholars to the Anthropocene. Vandertop has assembled these pieces with true interdisciplinarity and an impressive amount of historical knowledge about the built environment. In bringing this knowledge to bear on her literary analyses, she deftly blends the infrastructural and textual dimensions of the argument
Modernism in the Metrocolony surveys artistic responses to this uneven development in Bombay, Dublin, Singapore, and Suva from the 1900s
Chapter one is essentially an extension of the introduction: it outlines Vandertop’s theoretical framework, disambiguates this framework from existing approaches to metropolitan modernity, and carries out necessary definitional work. Much of this work is centered around
Chapters four and five, “Anglo-Indian Crises of Development” and “Ecologies of Empire in Oceanian Modernism,” pursue Modernism in the Metrocolony’s global perspective by focusing on authors and activists from India and Fiji. Chapter four constitutes a real advance for Anand scholarship because of its attention to his second novel, Coolie (1936), which has received less scholarly attention than his earlier novel Untouchable (1935). According to Vandertop, Anand’s sophomore effort “launches a modernist challenge to the developmental telos associated with the European novel” and “subverts the national-linguistic clarity associated with the genre by drawing on the lack of clarity and failure of communication produced in colonial environments” (114). Chapter five’s promise to analyze images of “gendered walking” constitutes the book’s only engagement with gender, but in practice the chapter’s ecological dimension predominates, leaving the task of exploring the intersections among gender, sexuality, and the metrocolony to future scholars. Vandertop’s strategy can be understood as a calculated risk, for understanding imperialism as an ecological crisis is a crucial insight for ecological modernist studies. The conclusion, “Mega-Dublins,” points out that “colonial-era borders continue to determine levels of access to the institutions of cultural production” (152), which underscore
If a criticism were to be made, it would be that causal links between metrocolonies and stylistic experimentation are left unproven. To provide one example, Vandertop claims that Joyce’s Ulysses demonstrates how “the complexities of metrocolonial experience were generative of modernist formal innovations” (77). Certainly, a scholar should not be compelled to provide, say, quotations from letters in which Joyce declares that the contradictions embedded in Dublin’s colonial architecture inspired the “Wandering Rocks” episode. Still, many of the claims of influence rest on analogical similarities (a kind of circumstantial evidence), and the space for close readings, which could have cemented the causal links, is routinely appropriated for providing historical context and critiquing prior theorists of modern urbanism (both meaningful missions). Ultimately, what matters is what Modernism in the Metrocolony does accomplish: it revitalizes the study of modernism and the city by casting out calcified concepts from the 1980s and 1990s and replacing them with new critical preoccupations and methodologies.