<b>Newly Discrepant Engagements:</b>A Review of Three Recent Critical Works in Modernist Postcolonial Studies

John Cullen Gruesser. Confluences: Postcolonialism, African American Literary Studies and the Black Atlantic. Atlanta: U of Georgia P, 2005. xi, 177 pp. $37.95 cloth. Edward Marx. The Idea of a Colony: Cross-Culturalism in Modern Poetry. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004. viii, 213 pp. $50.00 cloth. Charles W. Pollard. New World Modernism: T.S. Eliot, Derek Walcott, and Kamau Brathwaite. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2004. x, 231 pp. $55.00 cloth; $19.50 paper. Considered collectively, the volumes reviewed here represent a spectrum of literary criticism we might call modernist postcolonial studies. In The Idea of a Colony, a cross-cultural study of Anglo-American, African American, and Indian modern poetries, Edward Marx deploys a critical approach to colonial alterity that actually reproduces, rather than sufficiently problematizes, the primitivist and exoticist othering of Eastern and Southern cultures by high modernism. In Confluences, John Cullen Gruesser globalizes African American studies by bringing that field into dialogue with postcolonial theory and literatures, as well as theorizations of the Black Atlantic. Charles W. Pollard's New World Modernisms successfully produces a postcolonial reading, and essentially a new understanding, of Anglo-American high modernism through his consideration of how the work by Afro-Caribbean poets [End Page 176] Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott demonstrates their critical and poetical responses to Eliotic tropes. Even though only Marx and Pollard are concerned with the literary period we call "modernism," the neologistic rubric of "modernist postcolonial studies" suggested above can aid us in understanding how all three authors situate themselves at the interstices of several critical fields. They bring strands of English Studies into conversation in order to arrive at an implied new theoretic whole; yet, for the most part, those conversations also allow for the continuing integrity of each field's project. In their discussions, new dialogues arise among modernist and contemporary period literary studies, African-American studies, postcolonial studies, all the "New" -isms (New Modernism, New Americanism, and New World Studies/Literatures of the Americas), comparative literature, and critical theory. More compelling than how it signals the authors' recombinative critical methodologies, though, the rubric of "modernist postcolonial studies" directs us toward a framework for assessing how these works either fall in line with or fall short of engaging some of the most pressing ethico-political concerns in postcolonial theory today. In order to situate our relations to these texts, then, I wish to provide a brief narrative about humanism, difference, and postcolonialism. None of these studies offers such a narrative, but it will prove crucial for locating our selves as general readers, as potential consumers of these volumes, and as scholars invested in making our critical engagements with literature conversant with those publics supposedly "outside" academia. The Idea of a Colony, Confluences, and New World Modernisms all implicitly continue a line of inquiry articulated over a decade ago by the poet-critic Nathaniel Mackey, in his seminal essay collection Discrepant Engagements (1993). (It is worth nothing that, despite their affinities to his work, none of these authors mentions this earlier book.) There, Mackey introduces a distinctive form of a cross-cultural literary study, bearing much potential for postcolonial theory, premised on his "interest of opening presumably closed orders of identity and signification, accent fissure, fracture, incongruity, the rickety, imperfect fit between word and world" (19). Juxtaposing his readings of the Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris (from whom Mackey took his book's title) with readings of African American poets Amiri Baraka and Clarence Major, as well as the Caucasian Black Mountain poets Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan, he explores literary filiations crossing racial, generic, and national boundaries, all without obviating those differences. Indeed, as he describes his critical methodology, "[s]uch practices highlight—indeed, inhabit—discrepancy, engage rather than ignore it" (19). His primary interest in discrepant engagement is to foreground the creative and critical agency of othering, "that other...

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