Modernism after Postcolonialism

"Elegantly written, Modernism after Postcolonialism skillfully interweaves issues of postcolonial and migrant politics, modernist aesthetics, and issues of transnational comparison. It will be of great interest to researchers, teachers, and students of modernism, postcolonialism, globalization, comparative literature, Francophone postcolonial studies, human rights, and gender and ethnic studies."—Laura Winkiel, University of Colorado at Boulder, author of Modernism: The Basics

"Modernism after Postcolonialism is a seductive, beautifully written work. Much of what seduces here is the clarity and delicacy of de Gennaro's close readings."—Carrie Noland, University of California, Irvine, author of Merce Cunningham: After the Arbitrary

"Modernism after Postcolonialism provides a striking intervention in our critical understanding of twentieth-century verse. Reversing timelines in standard literary histories and moving the postcolonial forward to reframe a reading of modernism, Mara de Gennaro gives us a new, lucid, powerful, and convincing sense of a global poetry in the twentieth century."—Vincent Sherry, Washington University in St Louis, author of Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence

"Mara de Gennaro establishes uncertainty as a conceptual tool that enables and enriches the task of comparison. Beneath the surface of her text lies a much larger political project: the attempt to undo hegemonic modes of analysis that see total certainty as the necessary appendage to notions of cultural purity. This book is going to stir up debate well beyond postcolonialism and modernism."—Ato Quayson, Stanford University, author of Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism

"This graceful and original book models new ways of reading canonical modernist writers in light of postcolonial fiction and cultural theory from the Global South. Celebrating creative opacity against imperial boundaries and rigid forms of knowledge, this is a book for our times. It eschews the rhetoric of fear and walls and proposes a wholly different vision: of the beauty of a world of new connections, new entanglements, and transformative relations. In the process, it redefines comparative literature as a project of deterritorialization and affirms the political potentiality of the field's characteristic anxiety."—Rita Barnard, University of Pennsylvania, author of Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writing and the Politics of Place