OVERVIEW
MODERNIST SUBJECTIVITY BETWEEN EMPIRE AND THE ORIENTAL
METROPOLIS
"London has become Chinese" - Virginia
Woolf
When Virginia Woolf uttered the above statement
sometime in the early 20th century, it was in
specific reference to a traveling gallery of Chinese
art that had drawn large crowds of interested
London art-goers. Yet, for all its specificity,
it also offers an interesting and more general
insight into the shifting and unstable dynamics
between the London metropolis and its imperial
colonies located in Asia and Africa. For instance,
as Patricia Laurence argues, Woolf and the Bloomsbury
group in particular embodied this flexible dynamic
in which British and "Oriental" subjectivities
were made and remade.
Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism, has
offered perhaps the most authoritative account
of the relationship between the metropolis and
colonies in his description of empire's "consolidated
vision." By focusing on geography, Said argues
that British culture, particularly in novels by
Conrad, Forster, and Kipling, helped to create
specific "structures of reference and attitude"
that engendered a "consolidated vision of
the globe" in which British dominance over
foreign people became naturalized as "good."
English novels written in and about the metropolis
helped to consolidate this view by tying the domestic
order of "here" to "over there"
in the colonies. England and Englishness began
to function formally on a world scale.
Woolf's comment, however, offers an interesting
spin on this reading in terms of a simultaneous
"voyage in" of Oriental otherness into
the metropolis. Said, of course, accounts for
the presence of racial minorities, but largely
imagines the "voyage in" as a response
to "the imperial vision" - that is,
the emergence of opposition by Third World intellectuals
in the 1940s. Two very different but linked narratives
arise, however, when
we think about the "voyage in" of Orientals
into the metropolis as coeval with the consolidation
of the imperial vision at the turn of the century.
First, there exist the first-person narratives
of East Asian and Indian immigrants to London
in the early 20th century, which describe their
encounters with British home culture. These accounts
offer an interesting glimpse into a "hybrid
subjectivity" that prefigures the more "resistant"
Third World subjectivity that would follow with
CLR James and George Antonius. This mode of subjectivity
(which will be regarded as part of the "oriental
modernist" subjectivity of Woolf, Yeats and
others, described below) appears more engaged
with questions of self-translation and negotiations
with micro, intersubjective imperialism. For instance,
Lao She rescripts the British missionary narrative
as at-home conversations with his Cambridge host
family over breakfast.
Along with these individual visitations, London
itself was geographically changing, particularly
with the Chinatown and East Side districts. Writers
such as HG Wells and William Booth began conceiving
parts of London as having "internal colonies,"
areas of underdevelopment that mirrored the East.
This view of the city helps to trouble the idea
of the metropolis as a racially stable site in
the expansion of empire. Not only were new racial
ideologies, as Anne McClintock argues, destabilizing
notions of gender and class in London, but the
city itself was becoming unstable. New racialized
spaces begin to emerge. Thomas Burke and Sax Rhomer
in particular help to articulate what they see
as new, racialized urban subjectivities in a geographically
changing city.
Subjectivity, then, is where my list ends. Not
all responses to "London becoming Chinese"
(and black and Indian) amounted to the racist
screeds of Burke and Rhomer. Many artists, particularly
British modernists, found new possibilities for
subjectivity in
the intensifying closeness between "here"
and "there." The instability of migration,
whether it be Britishmen abroad or Orientals coming
"here," accorded with the hybrid and
flexible values of high modernism. For instance,
Yeats found an enabling voice to speak through
in Leo Africanus, an imagined Third World mystic,
and Roger Fry found an artistic lens in Chinese
images to articulate his subjectivity.
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