Worlding Modernism: The Political, the Postcolonial, and the Modern Body

Abstract

This dissertation contends that the population one belongs to shapes their relation to the modern state. State laws and power structures allow lives to flourish, or neglect people or kill them, based on classifications of race, gender, and species that are imagined to have definite biological boundaries. This political domination over life is inscribed within global twentieth-century literature, and when read in this light, a biopolitics of modern literature emerges. The project breaks new ground in the analysis of transatlantic, multicultural literature, reading works of American, British, African, and Caribbean literature together for the first time and through a new theoretical lens, and in doing so unmaking the Eurocentrism and whiteness that have long structured the field of biopolitical theory. I engage with texts from Ezra Pound’s Cantos, to Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, to Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman and Virginia Woolf’s Flush. These works are read alongside theory and philosophy from foundational biopolitical thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, but—crucially—these perspectives are revised by working with diverse theorists such as Achille Mbembe, Jemima Repo, and Alexander Weheliye, who have brought much-needed attention to the raced and gendered dynamics of biopolitics. In doing so, I make it possible to re-see how racism, sexism, and dehumanization have coincided to shape twentieth-century literature and politics. The biopolitical tensions uncovered in my texts reveal that the lives represented in modern global literature are managed by a politics that sorts bodies into differently valued groups. My approach demonstrates that, far from being amendable blemishes on global politics, racism and sexism are the very foundation for the political order we know. This perspective enables me to analyze works of modernist literature in completely new ways—worlding modernism by rethinking its geography as well as its capacity to change the knowledge and politics that compose our worlds. Throughout, the project underscores the ethical force of literary study by asserting how literature fosters social equity and makes us capable of responding anew to racism, slavery, and colonialism as I look toward a new politics and ethics of global hospitality.