Laura Winkiel

Nancy Cunard's Negro and the Transnational Politics of Race

There is no living library that does not harbor a number of booklike creations from fringe areas. They need not be stick-in albums or family albums, autograph books or portfolios containing pamphlets or religious tracts; some people become attached to leaflets and prospectuses, others to handwriting facsimiles or typewritten copies of unobtainable books; and certainly periodicals can form the prismatic fringes of a library.1

Suffrage Burlesque: Modernist Performance in Elizabeth Robins's The Convert

This essay examines how Elizabeth Robins borrowed from the theater to fashion new forms of modern identities for women. Robins combines melodramatic and burlesque performance genres in ways that alter the conventions of realist narrative and prefigure the cosmopolitan, fluid subjectivities of high modernism. Ranging from anti- and pro-British womens suffrage rhetoric to emergent forms of leisure activities and crowd theories, this essay contextualizes the problems, fears, and advantages of cross-class identifications. While Robins ultimately contains these sexualized, working-class energies, she nonetheless documents a powerful critique of middle-class forms of subjectivity and knowledge that imagines a leveling of class hierarchies.

Immigration and the Practice of Freedom in Nadine Gordimer's The Pickup

If poverty is the issue, does that mean that the economic competitors are African immigrants only? Firstly, South Africa has had xenophobic symptoms since the mid 1990s. The fact that ‘‘kwerekwere’’ refers to African immigrants not Chinese nor any European immigrants says something. Secondly, the South African government has been mindful of the discontent that South Africans, especially Blacks, have about African immigrants. Instead of dealing with it, govt. decided to adopt a ‘‘quiet diplomacy’’. That is obviously not new in South African political discourses. My interpretation of the causes of the attack is that they are due to the ‘‘Legacy’’ of the Country. We must not forget that until the 1990s we were made to believe that South Africa was not part of the African continent. South Africa itself was compartmentalised according to ethnic background and interrelations among black people themselves were prevented with an iron curtain. Once the country rejoined the continent and the world no civic education dealing with integration was implemented. This has resulted in hatred and there are a number of stereotypes that have been perpetuated about the behaviour of ‘‘amakwerekwere’’ among local people. All these need to be addressed urgently and the only way would be to engage in civic education programmes. Who should do it, given that it seems as if no one is prepared to take the responsibility?

Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics by Peter J. Kalliney (review)

games, gambling, addiction, and the psychology of play. While less integrated than some of her earlier chapters, Bursteins analysis of Balthus offers intuitive analyses of these works and suggests the directions that her vision of cold modernism might be applied. Bursteins Cold Modernism is a welcome addition to the body and breadth of what we today understand as the transatlantic modernist movement. Its recovery of less canonical works and its important integration of the claims of modernity on these texts make it a pleasurable, timely read and merit its inclusion in undergraduate and graduate coursework.

Postcolonial Avant-Gardes and the World System of Modernity/Coloniality

This essay argues that the postcolonial avant-gardes crafted new sites of enunciation (spatial positions) rather than temporal ones in order to confront modernity from a geopolitical position that at once claims a European-style engagement with modernity and that also raises awareness of the effects of coloniality. It shows how avant-garde writers such as Oswald de Andrade, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, and Wopko Jensma articulated new points of departure for formerly colonized cultures, a move that explicitly criticized historicism for the way in which it universalizes a particularly European version of history. This criticism served to validate and authorize their non-Eurocentric locations. The essay also demonstrates how the post-colonial avant-garde dismantles a Eurocentric framework by means of a spatialized collage form and other performative aesthetics.