Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914

4. Jon Hegglund argues that mapmaking represents one way in which communal feeling becomes geographic; that is, it becomes less entwined with local experiences and immediate encounters and more engaged with abstract matters of distance and totality in the imagining of communities beyond one’s visible surroundings. See Hegglund, World Views: Metageographies of Modernist Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 7–8. Baal’s attempts to map thus evoke the tension between the knowable and the unknowable as the artist attempts to gain control over not only a wider and more chaotic expanse but also a new concept of country.

5. Jed Esty, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 202.

6. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 165–166.

7. Pheng Cheah, “Introduction Part II: The Cosmopolitical Today,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 31, 38.

8. Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 17.

9. Fredric Jameson, “Future City,” New Left Review 21 (May–June 2003): 76.

10. See Martha Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” in For Love of Country?, ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 2–20; and U.S. Social Forum, “Declaration of the Social Movements Assembly—World Social Forum 29 March 2013, Tunisia,” Facebook post, March 31, 2013, https://www.facebook.com/ussocialforum/posts/10151324541686472.

11. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 22.

12. For three of the most influential examples, see Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); and Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

13. Brian C. Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy: A Disciplinary History of International Relations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).

14. Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (1939; repr., New York: Perennial, 2001), 8, 13.

15. Carr, Twenty Years’ Crisis, 238.

16. Samuel Moyn, “The Political Origins of Global Justice” (Cyril Foster Lecture in International Relations, University of Oxford, November 2013), 4. Transcript courtesy of the author.

17. United Nations General Assembly, “Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order,” May 1, 1974, http://www.un-documents.net/s6r3201.htm. For a fuller history of the formation of the New International Economic Order and its history within the Non-Aligned Movement, see Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: The New Press, 2007); and Gilbert Rist, The History of Development, 3rd ed. (London: Zed Books, 2008), 140–171.

18. Moyn, “Political Origins,” 10–22.

19. Lawrence Rainey, ed., Modernism: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), xxii.

20. Graham Hough, Image and Experience: Studies in a Literary Revolution (London: Duckworth, 1960), 4–5.

21. Hugh Kenner, “The Making of the Modernist Canon,” Chicago Review 34, no. 2 (Spring 1984): 49–61.

22. Susan Stanford Friedman, “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 8, no. 3 (September 2001): 508.

23. Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), xii.

24. For an overview of such studies, see Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,” PMLA 123, no. 3 (2008): 737–748.

25. Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, eds., Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 3–4.

26. Pamela Caughie, Disciplining Modernism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 9.

27. Mark Wollaeger, introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. Mark Wollaeger with Matt Eatough (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 5. In addition to the edited collections mentioned here, a range of monographs have redefined modernism as transnational. Jessica Berman argues that “reading modernism transnationally” will draw attention to the social and political contexts of modernist exchange over the more entrenched pathways of formal influence. Christopher GoGwilt finds grounding for transnational comparison by treating the literary passage philologically, meaning as “a dislocation or tropological displacement of material culture.” Matthew Hart has distinguished transnationalism from international modernism by arguing that transnational approaches capture the “situational” nature of culture. See Berman, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 9; GoGwilt, The Passage of Literature: Genealogies of Modernism in Conrad, Rhys, and Pramoedya (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 219; and Hart, Nations of Nothing but Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 17–18.

28. Paul Saint-Amour, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 37–43.

29. See, for example, Dilip Gaonkar, ed., Alternative Modernities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); and Satya Mohanty, ed., Colonialism, Modernity, and Literature: A View from India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

30. I borrow the phrase from Nergis Ertürk, who has warned against deploying a global modernist gaze that merely confirms European modernism’s self-image. See Ertürk, “Modernism Disfigured: Turkish Literature and the Other West,” in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. Mark Wollaeger with Matt Eatough (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 530.

31. For examples of singular modernity proponents, see Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002); and James Ferguson, “Decomposing Modernity,” in Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 176–193.

32. Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 10–11.

33. “Communism of the idea” is from Susan Buck-Morss, “The Gift of the Past,” Small Axe 14, no. 3 (November 2010): 183.

34. Here my efforts build on the interventions of Simon Gikandi, Alejandro Mejías-López, and Eric Hayot. Gikandi points to how various institutions of modernism (criticism, commentary, museum culture) have anxiously grappled with the place of non-European cultures, particularly African ones, in the making of modernist art and literature. Such institutions have historically acknowledged the role of foreign cultural practices while denying them the authority of “influence.” Gikandi shows how disavowing cross-cultural encounter as the condition of possibility for modernism became foundational to the Eurocentric “ideology of modernism.” Mejías-López’s study of Latin American modernismo, a movement begun by Rubén Darío in Nicaragua, is also a salutary reminder of the gap between modernism as a multilingually lived assemblage of historical–aesthetic movements and modernism as a literary–historical institution. Mejías-López cites a critical tradition of scholarship on modernismo that, against the movement’s own self-definition, suggested that its writers “lived a mirage” of modernity. Such a consensus consequently devalued the purchase of Latin American modernismo within the origin story of modernism, further insulating the latter term from its non-European contexts. Hayot, building on René Girard’s concept of mimetic desire, advocates for giving imitation and desire for the Other pride of place in new theories of modernism. He reminds readers that Ezra Pound’s famous dictum “make it new,” a phrase that has become a metonym of modernist ideology itself, was in fact adapted from an entry in Morrison’s dictionary of Chinese, which attributed the phrase to an inscription on a Shang dynasty basin. Such studies show that modernism’s particular Europeanness is the product of an institutional history that, if uncontested, would actually continue to perpetuate a colonial epistemology. See Gikandi, “Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference,” Modernism/Modernity 10, no. 3 (2003): 475; Mejías-López, The Inverted Conquest: The Myth of Modernity and the Transatlantic Onset of Modernism (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009), 17; and Hayot, “Chinese Modernism, Mimetic Desire, and European Time,” in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. Mark Wollaeger with Matt Eatough (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 161.

35. Outside the disciplinary domain of international relations, Manu Goswami provides a valuable guide to the convergence of anticolonial intellectual history and interwar internationalisms. See Goswami, “Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms,” American Historical Review 117, no. 5 (December 2012): 1461–1485.

36. On the ramifications of standard time, see Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time (New York: Norton, 2003); and Adam Barrows, The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). For a history of the passport, see John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

37. Rebecca Walkowitz’s model of critical cosmopolitanism has influenced my understanding of modernism as a category that can be used to identify specific intellectual projects rather than simply describing the biographical, historical, or social conditions under which those projects are pursued. See Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 7. Modernist internationalism diverges from critical cosmopolitanism, however, in the role that difference (colonial, national, racial, or linguistic) plays in its formulations. While Walkowitz shows how cosmopolitanism blurs such differences within Britain, I focus on the way such differences circulate across global lines of power.

38. See, for example, Tsitsi Jaji, Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

39. David James and Urmila Seshagiri propose a return to a more strictly periodized modernism, in part as a tool for historicizing contemporary literature and in part to preserve the distinctive formal energies of early twentieth-century art. See James and Seshagiri, “Metamodernism: Narratives of Continuity and Revolution” PMLA 129, no. 1 (2014): 87–100.

40. In thinking outside of teleological approaches, Srinivas Aravamudan has argued that the early Enlightenment model of translatio provides an alternative to the “nationalist straitjackets” that come to circumscribe and confer meaning on particular literary works. Translatio targets acts of literary transmission and cultural borrowing, which reveal the “hybrid genealogies” of seemingly homogenous literary categories. Aravamudan poses translatio as a corrective to the inevitable exclusiveness of teleological literary histories that tend to narrow narratives of causality rather than broaden them. Such narrowing produces certain effects; for example, the rise of the English novel, “ ‘spontaneously generated’ from native soil rather than in dialogue with the East.” See Aravamudan, “East–West Fiction as World Literature: The Hayy Problem Reconfigured,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 47, no. 2 (2014): 209, 216.

41. Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (1973): 1360.

42. Bruce Robbins, “Introduction Part 1: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 3.

43. Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity: An Unfinished Project,” in Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity, ed. Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 38–58.

44. The hybrid feeling of pessoptimism was coined in Emile Habiby, The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist, trans. S. K. Jayyusi and T. Le Gassick (1974; repr., Northampton, MA: Interlink, 2003).

45. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 161, 167.

46. David Hume, “Of Simplicity and Refinement in Writing” (1742), in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1987), 196–197.

47. Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 15.

48. Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home (1937; repr., New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 230–231.

49. Stefan Collini, “What Is Intellectual History?,” History Today 35, no. 10 (October 1985), http://www.historytoday.com/stefan-collini/what-intellectual-history.

50. Such criticisms are iterated in the discourse recounted in Collini, “What Is Intellectual History?” as well as in more recent collections on new directions in the field. See, for example, Darrin M. MacMahon and Samuel Moyn, eds., Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Mia E. Bay et al., eds., Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); and Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, eds., Global Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

51. Raymond Williams, Writing in Society (London: Verso, 1983), 231.

52. Étienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, ed. Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (London: Verso, 1991), 94–95.

53. Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Post-colonial Literatures of Liberation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 32–33.

55. Ibid., 388–391.

57. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor–Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

58. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 21–22.

59. Here, I join Vilashini Cooppan in arguing against stagist and progressivist notions of history in which globalism is portrayed as superseding nationalism rather than developing alongside it. I also build on the insights of John Marx, who has noted the relevance of early twentieth-century debates about empire to ongoing criticisms of and engagements with international governance under the rubric of globalization. See Cooppan, Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); and Marx, Geopolitics and the Anglophone Novel, 1890–2011 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

60. My thanks to Leela Gandhi for helping me clarify this point in my argument.

61. Anna Tsing, for instance, has argued against “assumptions of global newness” in the field of anthropology. See Tsing, “The Global Situation,” Cultural Anthropology 15, no. 3 (2000): 333. Such assumptions grant unprecedented social effects to contemporary forms of globalization without adequately considering their prehistories.

62. Ann Cvetkovich associates the term “public feelings” with a “more expansive definition of political life,” a definition in which “political identities are implicit within structures of feeling, sensibilities, everyday forms of cultural expression and affiliation that may not take the form of recognizable organizations or institutions.” See Cvetkovich, “Public Feelings,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 462.

63. Zadie Smith, White Teeth (New York: Vintage International, 2000), 282 and 448.

64. The use of “minorly” here is meant to invoke the “minor” in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). There, the minor designates a style of writing that deterritorializes or forms an internal other to the major language in which it appears. English has, of course, become the preeminent major language of globalization.

65. Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle (1992; repr., London: Verso, 2011), 3, 36, 78.

66. Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World, trans. Surendranath Tagore (1919; repr., London: Penguin Books, 2005), 197.

1. During the summer of 1930, Rabindranath Tagore also staged dialogues with French writer Romain Rolland and physicist Albert Einstein, the latter of whom served as a member of the League of Nations International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation. Although Tagore registered doubts about the power of the League of Nations to facilitate peace among states, his participation in committee activities and the pacifist movement remained steady, from his signing of Rolland’s manifesto for intellectual autonomy, “La déclaration pour l’indépendance de l’esprit” (1919), to the publication of his correspondence with Gilbert Murray under the title East, West (1935) in the International Committee’s Open Letter series.

2. Rabindranath Tagore and H. G. Wells, “Tagore and Wells,” in A Tagore Reader, ed. Amiya Chakravarty (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 107.

3. In a letter to Macmillan, dated November 5, 1918, Tagore claimed collaborative authorship and approval of the novel in ways he would refuse to do for the translated novels published in its wake: “My nephew Surendranath has translated the latest novel of mine which I think you will find acceptable. A large part of it I have done myself and it has been carefully revised.” See Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World, trans. Surendranath Tagore (1919; repr., London: Penguin Books, 2005), viii. All subsequent citations refer to this edition.

4. See, for example, Nabaneeta Sen, “The ‘Foreign Reincarnation’ of Rabindranath Tagore,” Journal of Asian Studies 25, no. 2 (February 1966): 275–286; and Mahasweta Sengupta, “Translation, Colonialism, and Poetics: Rabindranath Tagore in Two Worlds,” in Translation, History, and Culture, ed. Susan Bassnett and André Lefevre (London: Pinter, 1990), 56–64.

5. Rebecca Beasley, “Modernism’s Translations,” in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. Mark Wollaeger with Matt Eatough (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 567. See also Stephen G. Yao, Translation and the Languages of Modernism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).

6. Here my work builds on methodologies from world literature as theorized by David Damrosch, who argues that circulation and translation transform what is often construed as a singular literary work into a literary network comprising various editions and translations. Such a network calls for a reexamination of the relationship between originality and derivation—the aesthetics of a work and its material transformations through media and languages. Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

7. Important works by literary scholars that respond to Tagore’s resurgence within nonliterary discourses of cosmopolitanism include Bruce Robbins, Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (New York: New York University Press, 1999); and Rebecca Walkowitz, “Cosmopolitan Ethics,” in The Turn to Ethics, ed. Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York: Routledge, 2000), 221–230.

8. See Martha Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” in For Love of Country?, ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 2–20; Isaiah Berlin, The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and Their History (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997); Ranajit Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 108–110; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 149–180; Ashis Nandy, The Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of the Self (Delhi: Oxford India, 1994); and Amartya Sen, “Tagore and His India,” New York Review of Books, June 26, 1997, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1997/jun/26/tagore-and-his-india.

9. The excerpt from the Athenaeum review is available in first editions of Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1917). All subsequent citations refer to this edition. The Nation review is reprinted in Kalyan Kundy, Sakti Bhattacharya, and Kalyan Sircar, eds., Imagining Tagore: Rabindranath and the British Press (1912–1941) (Delhi: Shishu Sahitya Samsad, 2000), 321–322.

10. Jeremy Braddock, Collecting as Modernist Practice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 6.

11. Rebecca Walkowitz, “For Translation: Virginia Woolf, J. M. Coetzee, and Transnational Comparison,” in The Legacies of Modernism, ed. David James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 257.

12. Krishna Kripalani, Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography (New Delhi: UBS Publishers Distributors, 2008), 292.

13. Rabindranath Tagore, “The Protest of a Seer,” Times Literary Supplement, September 13, 1917. Reprinted in Imagining Tagore: Rabindranath and the British Press (1912–1941), ed. Kalyan Kundy, Sakti Bhattacharya, and Kalyan Sircar (Delhi: Shishu Sahitya Samsad, 2000), 290.

14. Gauri Viswanathan, “Synthetic Vision: Internationalism and the Poetics of Decolonization,” in Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, ed. Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 327.

15. Samuel Kinser, Rabelais’ Carnival: Text, Context, Metatext (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 17.

16. Indeed, the name Tagore itself is an Anglicization of Thakur, which means “Lord”—an allusion to social hierarchy that would be unintelligible to general English readers.

17. Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 34.

18. My thinking about the relationship between cultural autarky and national autonomy is informed by Gary Wilder’s work on democratic federalism and multinational statism. See Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

19. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed Books, 1986), 11.

20. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 6.

21. Rey Chow, “The Old/New Question of Comparison in Literary Studies: A Post-European Perspective,” ELH 71, no. 2 (2004): 289–311.

23. H. D. Harootunian, “Ghostly Comparisons: Anderson’s Telescope,” Diacritics 29, no. 4 (1999), 145.

24. It is worth pointing out the problems that oral performance poses for world literature. Tagore’s re-mediation of lectures into print discounts “their lives as oral texts,” an oversight that Caroline Levine has argued routinely afflicts scholarship in world literature. Even if oral versions of the entries in Nationalism are lost to the ephemerality of performance, registering their contribution to the anthology’s transnational network activates useful questions about which modalities of circulation count in current formulations of world literature. Levine, “The Great Unwritten: World Literature and the Effacement of Orality,” MLQ 74, no. 2 (2013): 219.

25. Jatiprem can be rendered as jati-prem, or “nation-love.” Jati has a very complex philological history in Bengali. Like nation’s ties to natal, jati’s etymological meaning is “to be born.” In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Tagore was writing, jati could designate a race, tribe, or caste—any group that might fall under the category of an ethnos. See Swarupa Gupta, “Samaj, Jati, and Desh: Reflections on Nationhood in Late Colonial Bengal,” Studies in History 23, no. 2 (2007): 177–203.

26. Pradip Kumar Datta, “The Interlocking Worlds of the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa and India,” in South Africa and India: Shaping the Global South, ed. Isabel Hofmeyr and Michelle Williams (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2011), 59.

27. Quoted in Sisir Kumar Das, ed., The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, vol. 1 (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1994), 629.

28. David Porter, “The Crisis of Comparison and the World Literature Debates,” Profession (2011): 253.

29. See Ezra Pound, “Rabindranath Tagore,” Fortnightly Review 93, no. 555 (March 1913): 571–579. For more on this, see Aarthi Vadde, “Putting Foreignness to the Test: Rabindranath Tagore’s Babu English,” Comparative Literature 65, no. 1 (2013): 15–25.

30. The history of title changes to Ghare Baire is interesting to note. The first English translation, which appeared in the Calcutta-based journal The Modern Review in 1918–1919, was called At Home and Outside. The international English translation was retitled The Home and the World.

31. Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 15.

32. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Harcourt, 1948), 230.

33. Goswami, Producing India, 10, 242–277.

34. Ibid., 181–182.

35. For a comprehensive account of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s significance to the development of the novel in India, see Priya Joshi, In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), especially 141–171.

36. In the 2005 Penguin Classics edition, William Radice authored a supplementary note section, whereas the 2001 Macmillan India edition offers a more complicated updating of the Tagores’ translation. The main text contains added paragraphs of “fresh translation,” without cutting or otherwise disturbing the original translation. The book also contains a substantial appendix by Sri Sukhendu Ray, which offers supplementary notes and alternative translations of the original translation. The purpose of this endeavor seems to have been to restore nuances of meaning that had been lost in the initial translation, without denying readers the authorial imprint of Tagore over the 1919 translation.

37. Tagore, Home and the World, 17.

38. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 94.

39. Georg Lukács, “Tagore’s Gandhi Novel,” review of The Home and the World, by Rabindranath Tagore, Marxist Internet Archive, accessed November 3, 2014, http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/1922/tagore.htm.

40. E. M. Forster, “The Home and the World,” in Abinger Harvest (London: Harcourt, 1936), 330–331.

41. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995), 34 and 209.

42. It seems fitting also that the “hideous confusion” of foreign and domestic commodity continues down from imperial history into our own contemporary moment. Pears soap is now “Made in India,” and the Indian producer owns all rights to the brand.

43. Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Political Significance,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 220.

45. Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism.”

46. Robbins, Feeling Global, 161–162.

47. Maulana Mohamed Ali, Selected Writings and Speeches, ed. Afzal Iqbal (Lahore: Ashraf Press, 1944), 77.

48. Rabindranath Tagore, “A Vision of India’s History,” in A Tagore Reader, 196.

1. Arthur Power’s 1970 essay entitled “James Joyce—The Internationalist” represents a good example of the type of scholarship on Joyce that aligned national belonging with provincialism. Power’s essay leaves the reader with the impression that Joyce’s internationalism derived from a dismissive rejection of Ireland rather than an attempt to situate it within the Continental framework of Europe. See Power, “James Joyce—The Internationalist,” in A Bash in the Tunnel: James Joyce by the Irish, ed. John Ryan (Brighton: Clifton Books, 1970), 181–188. Andrew Gibson, writing on the history of Joyce criticism, argues that for decades the “Poundian” tradition, which accentuated Joyce’s Europeanness, won out over the “Wellsian” tradition, which emphasized Joyce’s entanglements with Ireland. Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics, and Aesthetics in “Ulysses” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1–3. My account in this chapter joins recent attempts by R. Brandon Kershner, Tekla Mecsnóber, and Gayle Rogers to think past the opposition between Europeanness (as international standard) and Irishness (as national culture) in order to consider the intersection of Irish nationalism with continental politics. See R. Brandon Kershner, “Introduction: Joycean Unions,” in Joycean Unions: Post-Millennial Essays from East to West, European Joyce Studies 22, ed. R. Brandon Kershner and Tekla Mecsnóber (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), 5–15; and Gayle Rogers, Modernism and the New Spain: Britain, Cosmopolitan Europe, and Literary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 63–95.

2. Marjorie Howes and Derek Attridge point out the limited usefulness of the critical practice of contrasting Joyce’s “tolerant cosmopolitan modernism with the narrow Irish nationalism he rejected.” Such moralizing oppositions forgo an analysis of the interdependence of modernism and nationalism and consequently hew toward incorrectly confirming modernism’s remoteness from issues of collective identity and international analysis. Howes and Attridge, introduction to Semicolonial Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 11.

3. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 151.

4. My account of Joyce’s aesthetics as more of a counterweight to revivalism than an outright rejection of it builds on Pericles Lewis’s argument that Joyce internalized some of the assumptions that animated the cultural revival and the Gaelic League, even if he disagreed with their methods and solutions for advancing the race via a reclamation of lost origins. See Lewis, Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 38.

5. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 2.

6. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1965), 21–22.

7. James Joyce, “The Day of the Rabblement,” in The Critical Writings, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1959), 70.

8. Joseph Valente, “James Joyce and the Cosmopolitan Sublime,” in Joyce and the Subject of History, ed. Mark A. Wollaeger, Victor Luftig, and Robert Spoo (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 61.

9. Emer Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1995), 130.

10. I borrow the language of “effective motives” and “avowed intentions” from Robert Pippin, Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 134. My understanding of self-deception in this chapter also has been informed by Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), especially 85–104. Pippin’s work on self-deception has ranged from individual forms, in which subjects develop complex and puzzling ways of hiding their desires from themselves, to collective forms, in which, Pippin argues, modern states (especially liberal ones) come to rely upon origin stories that deny their foundational violence.

11. Robert Spoo, James Joyce and the Language of History: Dedalus’ Nightmare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 123.

12. Joyce observed the speech at the Law Students’ Debating Society, in 1901, and, while living in Trieste, also purchased Taylor’s pamphlet entitled “The Language of the Outlaw.” See Neil R. Davison, James Joyce, “Ulysses,” and the Construction of Jewish Identity: Culture, Biography, and the “Jew” in Modernist Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 80.

13. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (1922; corrected text, New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 116–118. All subsequent citations refer to this edition.

14. Thomas Kabdebó, A Study in Parallels (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001).

15. Arthur Griffith’s influence and Hungary’s long-standing place within Irish anticolonialism helps to explain why Hungary continued to stand out at the turn of the twentieth century despite the rising tide of what Andrew Gibson calls “ ‘emergent nation’ internationalism.” Gibson’s examination of Irish periodicals such as the Workers’ Republic and the United Irishman shows a rise in Irish affiliation with other small nations: “[Anticolonial] struggles grouped together the Davids—Ireland, Hungary, Norway, Finland, Poland, Serbia, to which some added Cuba, Haiti, the Philippines, and more—against the Goliaths dominating them.” Gibson, The Strong Spirit: History, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Writings of James Joyce, 1898–1915 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 18–19.

16. Arthur Griffith, The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland (1904; 3rd ed., Dublin: Whelan and Son, 1918), 70–71.

17. Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995), 2.

18. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 151.

19. James Joyce, Stephen Hero, ed. Theodore Spencer with John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon (New York: New Directions, 1944), 62.

20. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 164–165. It should be noted that Ellmann does not use “Irish” to connote Joyce’s national belonging, as critics in Irish or postcolonial studies have sometimes done. Instead, he uses it to connote the colonial environment about which Joyce wrote, and he tends to produce an image of Joyce that aligns the colonial with the provincial.

21. James Joyce, Dubliners (1914; repr., New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1996), 49. All subsequent citations refer to this edition.

22. Vincent J. Cheng, Joyce, Race, and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 106.

23. “Wealthy and cosmopolitan crowd” is from Cheng, Joyce, Race, and Empire, 107. Seamus Deane suggests that friendship is the ruse by which Jimmy, like his father, sacrifices nationalism to a vague humanism. See Deane, “Dead Ends: Joyce’s Finest Moments,” in Semicolonial Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 23.

24. My distinction between comparisons that establish equivalence and those that establish similitude is indebted to Natalie Melas’s postcolonial theory of comparison. See Melas, All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).

25. In the critical history of “After the Race,” some have viewed Jimmy as the target of a purposeful con. Robert M. Adams speculates that Routh and Ségouin planned the card game to fleece Jimmy of his money. Adams, “A Study in Weakness and Humiliation,” in James Joyce’s Dubliners: A Critical Handbook, ed. James R. Baker and Thomas F. Staley (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1969), 103. This possibility also has been raised in Cheng, Joyce, Race, and Empire, 108; and Deane, “Dead Ends,” 23.

26. See Andrew Goldstone, Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 25. The Wilde quote is from An Ideal Husband.

27. Joyce, of course, was not immune to using such vocabulary himself in his nonfiction, calling the Irish “the most belated race in Europe” in “The Day of the Rabblement” (Mason and Ellmann, Critical Writings, 70). His fiction, however, affords an opportunity to think beyond the polemical propositions and conflicting characterizations of Ireland threaded throughout his letters and essays. Enda Duffy treats “After the Race” as primarily a “tale of class resentments” rather than colonial comparisons, but in both our readings speed is the motif through which Joyce unfolds various forms of social antagonism and envy. Duffy, The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 127–128.

28. James Joyce to Grant Richards, May 20, 1906, in Richard Ellmann, ed., Selected Letters of James Joyce (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 88.

29. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” New Left Review I/62 (July–August 1970): 96.

30. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; repr., New York: Penguin, 1993), 220.

31. David Kurnick, Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 153–154.

32. Ernst Bloch, Literary Essays, trans. Andrew Joron and others (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). Hope, for Bloch, must be “unconditionally disappointable” (341) in order for it to presage radical political transformation—that is, the kind of transformation that transcends preexisting structures of change.

33. Deane, “Dead Ends,” 36.

34. Saikat Majumdar, Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 46–47.

35. Ellmann, Selected Letters, 89–90.

36. David Lloyd, “ ‘Counterparts,’ Dubliners, and Temperance Nationalism,” in Semicolonial Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 145–147.

37. Joyce, Dubliners, 41, 48. Luke Gibbons reads Maria’s repetition of the stanza as the transformation of “enabling rituals into their immobilizing opposites,” but he tends to associate that paralysis more with pathology and tragedy than with the kindling of resistance through bodily refusal. Gibbons, “ ‘Have You No Homes to Go To?’ James Joyce and the Politics of Paralysis,” in Semicolonial Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 162.

38. Joyce, Portrait, 276. Here my reading of Joyce’s uncreated racial conscience is informed by but is not quite the same as Pericles Lewis’s theological interpretation of the meaning of uncreated conscience. Lewis defines “uncreated” not as something “brand new” created ex nihilo (out of nothing) but as a reenactment and reshaping of “the eternal substance that precedes and conditions all his [Stephen’s] personal experiences.” That substance is precisely his race, which is not meant to be overcome like so much resistant material but to be the impetus for the modernist harmonizing of “individual consciousness and the external reality it confronts.” See Lewis, Modernism, 2, 4. In my understanding of Joyce’s uncreated conscience with respect to Dubliners, “uncreated” does not refer transcendentally to an Irish race enduring in and beyond history but rather to a set of seemingly inert gestures that persist as the waste material of an increasingly politicized and self-conscious project of racial nationalism.

39. Joyce, Ulysses, 14, 78, 158.

40. Ellmann, Selected Letters, 271.

41. Robert E. Spoo and Enda Duffy have argued that Ulysses, though set in 1904, registers events concurrent with its composition, such as the Easter Rising and the Great War. See Spoo, “ ‘Nestor’ and the Nightmare: The Presence of the Great War in Ulysses,” Twentieth Century Literature 32, no. 2 (1986): 137–154; Duffy, The Subaltern Ulysses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); and Duffy, “Disappearing Dublin: Ulysses, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Space,” in Semicolonial Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 37–58. Although I am not suggesting that we allow the future of the novel’s composition to trump the timeframe in which the narrative is set, I believe, like Paul Saint-Amour, that “the forward-looking elements of Ulysses” need to be recovered to arrive at historically situated arguments that match the complex temporalities of the novel. See Saint-Amour, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 227.

42. Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge, 122.

43. Joyce, Ulysses, 276.

44. Karen Lawrence, The Odyssey of Style (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 103.

45. It also contradicts Joyce’s compositional methods. Michael Groden’s examination of the drafts of “Cyclops” shows that, contrary to what readers might expect, Joyce wrote the parodies first, then developed the barroom setting, and finally created the first-person narrative voice. Groden, “ ‘Cyclops’ in Progress, 1919,” James Joyce Quarterly 12, no. 1–2 (Fall 1974–Winter 1975): 134.

46. Enda Duffy (Subaltern Ulysses, 110–111) has identified an implicitly liberal and unwittingly anti-Irish bias in the critical history of Ulysses, evidenced by tendencies to attack the citizen’s aggressive language while leaving Bloom’s platitudinous claims unexamined. For an account of the respectability politics behind what David Lloyd calls “temperance nationalism,” see Lloyd,“ ‘Counterparts,’ Dubliners, and Temperance Nationalism,” 141.

47. Duffy, Subaltern Ulysses, 112.

48. David Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 137.

49. Don Gifford, “Ulysses” Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 358.

50. George Bernard Shaw to Sylvia Beach, October 10, 1921, in Richard Ellmann, ed., Letters of James Joyce, vol. 3 (New York: Viking Press, 1966), 50. My thanks to Paul Saint-Amour for pointing me to this letter.

51. Margot Norris, Virgin and Veteran Readings of “Ulysses” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 202.

1. “Nicolae Gheorghe,” Economist, August 17, 2013, http://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21583590-nicolae-gheorghe-campaigner-rights-roma-died-august-8th-aged-66-nicolae.

2. European Parliament, “Resolution on Discrimination Against the Roma,” September 25, 1995, http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:51995IP0974:EN:HTML.

3. Étienne Balibar, “Toward a Diasporic Citizen? From Internationalism to Cosmopolitics,” in The Creolization of Theory, ed. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-Mei Shih (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 207.

4. Joseph Slaughter, Human Rights Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 106.

5. Nancy Armstrong, How Novels Think (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 28, 35.

6. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 7; and Carole Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing, and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (London: Routledge, 1994), 12.

7. Brent Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 13–14.

8. A recent special issue of Modernism/Modernity entitled “The Harlem Renaissance and the New Modernist Studies” encourages and exemplifies such bridging work by undertaking the project of rethinking the institutionally separated but historically related categories of modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Adam McKible and Suzanne W. Churchill, the editors of the issue, seek to redress the “critical practices that occlude and obscure the connections between the field(s) of study” while also remaining wary of conflating the fields. See McKible and Churchill, “Introduction: In Conversation: The Harlem Renaissance and the New Modernist Studies,” Modernism/Modernity 20, no. 3 (2013): 429. Previous studies that have argued for reading black writers not only as adjacent to modernism but also as modernist themselves include Jennifer Wilks, Race, Gender, and Comparative Black Modernism: Suzanne Lacascade, Marita Bonner, Suzanne Césaire, Dorothy West (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008); Miriam Thaggert, Images of Black Modernism: Visual and Verbal Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010); and James Smethurst, The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

9. An important exception to this claim is the work of Kate A. Baldwin, who traces the “transnational genealogies of black internationalism” beyond the African diaspora to Russia and later the Soviet Union. Baldwin’s focus on Russia leads her to examine the interracial solidarities underpinning black internationalism, which leads her work to deviate from what she calls “standard accounts of a black transnationalism” descended from Gilroy’s paradigm of the Black Atlantic. Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 4, 85.

10. Claude McKay’s disinterest in returning to the Caribbean partially explains why he is read primarily as a Harlem Renaissance writer, whereas Lamming’s dedication to theorizing the West Indian novel has traditionally placed his oeuvre within the West Indian national tradition. See Sandra Pouchet Paquet, The Novels of George Lamming (London: Heinemann, 1982). However, recent works on both figures have established the difficulty of assigning them to just one national tradition. For a reading of McKay that emphasizes his diasporic Caribbean origins, see Louis Chude-Sokei, The Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 207–248. For studies that have recast Lamming as an immigrant writer in the British tradition, see John Clement Ball, Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 101–175; and J. Dillon Brown, Migrant Modernism: Postwar London and the West Indian Novel (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013).

11. George Lamming, “Interview with George Lamming,” in Kas-Kas: Interviews with Three Caribbean Writers in Texas, ed. Ian Munro and Reinhard Sander (Austin, TX: African and Afro-American Research Institute, 1972), 16.

12. See Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); and Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?’,” in Kant: Political Writings, 2nd ed., ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54–60.

13. Claude McKay, Banjo: A Story Without a Plot (New York: Harper, 1929), 137. All subsequent citations refer to this edition.

14. Claude McKay, Home to Harlem (1928; repr., Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987), 227–228.

15. Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 113.

17. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Two Novels: Nella Larsen, Quicksand, and Claude McKay, Home to Harlem,” Crisis 35 (1928): 202.

18. Claude McKay to James Weldon Johnson, April 30, 1928, in Wayne F. Cooper, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 247.

19. Shane Vogel, The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 133.

20. See Wayne F. Cooper, ed., The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Poetry and Prose, 1912–1948 (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), 138.

21. See Smethurst, African American Roots, 208; Dewey Jones, “Dirt,” Chicago Defender (July 27, 1929): 12; and André Levinson, “De Harlem à la cannebière,” Les Nouvelles Littéraires (September 14, 1929): 7.

22. Levinson, “De Harlem à la cannebière.”

23. Charles Baudelaire, Ouevres complètes, tome 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 71.

24. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 7.

26. Levinson, “De Harlem à la cannebière.”

27. Cooper, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner, 254. Cooper’s reading of Banjo tends to be shaped by his attribution of a nostalgic primitivism to McKay himself. When Jake in Home to Harlem and Banjo in Banjo are referred to as picaros, it is on the basis of such precivilized qualities as natural instinct and elemental will, rather than a studied response to the adverse conditions of an inhospitable social order.

28. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Review of Claude McKay’s Banjo and Nella Larsen’s Passing,” Crisis 36 (July 1929): 234.

29. William J. Maxwell, “Global Poetics and State-Sponsored Transnationalism,” American Literary History 18, no. 2 (2006): 360.

30. See Cooper, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner, 190.

31. Joel Nickels has written persuasively about how McKay’s suspicion of authoritarian central planning led him to explore anarchist philosophies of political organization in Banjo and in his nonfiction. Nickels, “Claude McKay and Dissident Internationalism,” Cultural Critique 87 (Spring 2014): 10–11.

32. Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 59.

34. Edwards, Practice of Diaspora, 210, 220–221.

35. My thanks to Marina Magloire for her felicitously titled graduate seminar paper “The Metaphysics of Partying in Three Modernist Novels.”

36. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 100.

37. For a discussion of Bataille’s theories in relationship to his frequenting of jazz clubs, see Brent Edwards, “The Ethnics of Surrealism,” Transition 78 (1998): 115. Edwards (Practice of Diaspora, 223) also notes how Bataille’s and McKay’s similar accounts of primitivism reconfigure the usual divisions of modernist classification in which black literature would be separated from European theory.

38. George Bataille, Visions of Excess, trans. Allen Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 102.

39. Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago, Press, 2002), 85.

40. Ernst Bloch, “Something’s Missing: A Discussion Between Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing (1964),” in Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 1–18.

41. The queer-theoretical dimensions of male friendship in Banjo are thoroughly explored by Michelle Ann Stephens, who finds that McKay’s novel anticipates contemporary queer theory’s challenge to the values embedded in the heterosexual marriage contract and the heteronormative nation-state. See Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 167–204.

42. Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

43. George Lamming, introduction to In the Castle of My Skin (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), xxxvi–xxxvii.

44. George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 45.

45. George Lamming, The Emigrants (1954; repr., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 25. All subsequent citations refer to this edition.

46. Wilson Harris, “History, Fable, and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas” (1970), repr., Caribbean Quarterly 54, no. 1–2 (March–June 2008): 22.

47. Nathaniel Mackey, Discrepant Engagements: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 170.

48. See Janet Butler, “The Existentialism of George Lamming,” Caribbean Review 11, no. 4 (1982): 15, 38–39; and Mary Lou Emery, Modernism, the Visual, and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

49. Lauren Berlant, “Citizenship,” in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, ed. Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 37.

50. Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 7. Though Wilder’s research focuses on the constitutive contradictions of French republicanism, in which colonial racism is an operation of rather than a failure of imperial univeralism, his argument becomes particularly resonant with the changes to English imperial policy that came into effect with the British Nationality Act of 1948. The act instituted the category of “Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies.” By creating the possibility for Commonwealth citizenship and loosening border regulations for colonial subjects traveling to England, the law held out the affective promise of blurring the line between Englishness and Britishness, although that line was firmly patrolled in a variety of ways upon the arrival of racialized subjects in England.

51. Houston A. Baker Jr., “Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere,” in The Black Public Sphere: A Public Culture Book, ed. Black Public Sphere Collective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 12–14.

52. George Lamming, “The Negro Writer and His World,” in The George Lamming Reader: The Aesthetics of Decolonisation, ed. Anthony Bogues (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2011), 3.

53. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 107. For drawing my attention to this quote, I am grateful to Theodore Martin, “The Long Wait: Timely Secrets of the Contemporary Detective Novel,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 45, no. 2 (2012): 165.

54. See Simon Gikandi, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 12–16.

55. See Lamming, Pleasures of Exile, 211–229.

56. See Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 74–75.

57. Balibar, “Toward a Diasporic Citizen?,” 224.

1. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 129.

2. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 1–5.

3. Irving Velody argues that the archive sets the conditions of possibility for humanistic and sociological research. Historian Carolyn Steedman sees interest in the archive as symptomatic of a modern disposition toward wanting “to know and to have the past.” Digital humanist Matthew Kirschenbaum retains the emphasis on beginnings with respect to digital archives when he argues that “the conceit of a ‘primary record’ can no longer be assumed to be coterminous with that of a ‘physical object.’ Electronic texts, files, feeds, and transmissions of all sorts are also now, indisputably, primary records.” See Velody, “The Archive and the Human Sciences: Notes Towards a Theory of the Archive,” History of the Human Sciences 11, no. 4 (November 1998): 1; Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 75; and Kirschenbaum, “The .txtual Condition: Digital Humanities, Born-Digital Archives, and the Future Literary,” DHQ 7, no. 1 (2013), http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000151/000151.html.

4. See, for example, Tom LeClair, “The Sri Lankan Patients,” The Nation, June 19, 2000: 31–33; Qadri Ismael, “A Flippant Gesture Toward Sri Lanka: A Review of Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost,” Pravada 6, no. 9 (2000): 24–29, which argues that, in broaching an ongoing historical conflict, Anil’s Ghost should have been more straightforwardly factual and even equitable in its presentation of Sinhalese and Tamil characters; and Arun Mukherjee, Oppositional Aesthetics: Readings from a Hyphenated Space (Toronto: TSAR, 1994). For readings that defend the novel from such criticisms through engagement with religion, see Marlene Goldman, “Representations of Buddhism in Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost,” in Comparative Cultural Studies and Michael Ondaatje’s Writings, ed. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005), 27–37; and John McClure, Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007). For a cosmopolitan stance, see Katherine Stanton, Cosmopolitan Fictions: Ethics, Politics, and Global Change in the Works of Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Jamaica Kincaid, and J. M. Coetzee (New York: Routledge, 2009).

5. Ranjana Khanna, “Frames, Contexts, Community, Justice,” Diacritics 33, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 18.

6. Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient (New York: Vintage International, 1992), 150. Bruce Robbins presents an important recuperative reading of The English Patient that notes that the novel acknowledges Almásy’s historical erasures in a way that the character does not, evidenced partly by the novel’s allusion to the “half-invented world of the desert” that Almásy inhabits. Robbins, Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 166.

7. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell (Boston: Beacon, 1962), 25. For the coining of the phrase “historiographic metafiction,” see Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (Oxford: Routledge, 1988), 105–124. Approaches to Ondaatje’s fiction through the generic lens of historiographic metafiction include Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary Canadian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); W. M. Verhoeven, “Naming the Present/Naming the Past: Historiographic Metafiction in Findley and Ondaatje,” in Shades of Empire in Colonial and Post-Colonial Literatures, ed. C. C. Barfoot and Theo D’haen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), 283–299; Lee Spinks, Michael Ondaatje (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009); Ursula Kluwick, “The Personal and the Public: Michael Ondaatje’s Historiographic Metafiction and the Question of Political Engagement,” in A Sea for Encounters: Essays Towards a Postcolonial Commonwealth, ed. Stella Borg Barthet (Amsterdam: Rodopi; 2009), 273–286; and Christopher McVey, “Reclaiming the Body of the Past: Michael Ondaatje and the Body of History,” Journal of Modern Literature 37, no. 2 (2014): 141–160.

8. Michel Foucault, “The Lives of Infamous Men,” in Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy, ed. Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton (Sydney: Feral, 1979), 76, 80.

9. Ondaatje’s use of literary form thus anticipates the experiential or phenomenological turn within more recent theories of the archive as they have unfolded within postcolonial and African diasporic studies. Antoinette Burton, for example, challenges the objectivity of the archive by examining how scholars’ bodily particularities inflect their encounters with and experiences of archives. Ann Laura Stoler moves away from a theory of the archive that assumes omniscience and total control, and this in turn shapes her departure from equally strong theories of state power. She argues that the archive exemplifies the anxieties and confusions of colonial governance wherein affective knowledge, perception and misperception, played a decisive role in shaping political rationality. Brent Edwards draws on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, Arlette Farge’s Le goût de l’archive, and the late Foucault to address the sensation of the archive as that which exceeds historical intelligibility. Edwards places renewed emphasis on the effect of archival material on a particular viewer, and he values the muteness of artifacts over their capacity to make history readily available. See Burton, ed., Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); and Edwards, “The Taste of the Archive,” Callaloo 35, no. 4 (Fall 2012): 944–972.

10. Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost (New York: Vintage International, 2000), 55. All subsequent citations refer to this edition. The war did not come to an official end until 2004, after the novel was published.

11. Ann Mandel, “Michael Ondaatje,” Dictionary of Literary Biography: Canadian Writers Since 1960—Second Series, ed. W. H. New (Detroit: Gale Research, 1987), 276.

12. Michael Ondaatje, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (New York: Vintage International, 2008), 115. All subsequent citations refer to this expanded edition, though the 1970 and other editions are also discussed. The 2008 edition contains important changes from previous editions, including a new afterword by Ondaatje and a new cover that makes explicit the work’s transnational politics. My decision to privilege this edition of Collected Works draws on Ondaatje’s involvement in extending it, and on the theories of the “fluid text,” by John Bryant, and of “transmission,” by Andrew Piper. Both have established the importance of publication history, revision, and reprinting to the interpretation of a work as both text and object. See Bryant, The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002); and Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). My thanks to Fiona Somerset for the Bryant reference.

13. For clarity, I use the name Bonney when referring to the historical figure, but Billy or Billy the Kid when referring to Ondaatje’s character.

14. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983).

15. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and Other Essays, ed. John Mack Faragher (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 32.

16. Thomas Bender makes a revisionist claim for Turner, asserting that Turner was not as “trapped in his rhetoric” of American self-containment as those he influenced. He invokes an earlier essay entitled “The Significance of History,” in which Turner writes of European history as refusing “the bounds of a nation,” to draw a historical precedent for transnational awareness among American historians. Bender, “Historians, the Nation, and the Plenitude of Narratives,” in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 1–21.

17. Spinks, Michael Ondaatje, 50.

18. Richard W. Etulain, introduction to The Saga of Billy the Kid, by Walter Noble Burns (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), ix–xviii.

19. Ondaatje, Collected Works, 2.

20. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 25.

21. Ondaatje, Collected Works, 88. Paul Newman actually played Billy in The Left Handed Gun (1958), the film to which Ondaatje is possibly referring. John Cassavetes played a violent young gunman in the western Saddle the Wind, also released in 1958.

22. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 184.

23. Stoler (Along the Archival Grain) uses this phrase in reference to the Dutch colonial archives, whose organization, she argues, reflects not the absolute control of an imperial government but the anxieties attendant to maintaining its power.

24. The 2008 cover photograph, taken in 1930, is from the archive of Romualdo García, an early pioneer of Mexican photography in the nineteenth century and a contemporary of Bonney and Huffman. Previous editions of Collected Works that featured historical photographs of Bonney include the 1997 edition released by Anansi Press (the original publishers, in 1970); the Vintage 1996 edition; and the 2004 Bloomsbury edition. The 1974 Norton edition features the title of the work, with no photographs, and the first Anansi edition features an image of a man on a horse, though the man is not Bonney.

25. Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 117.

26. I take these ethnic distinctions with a grain of salt. Far from being reified entities, Tamil and Sinhalese are internally heterogeneous groups whose linguistic and religious differences do not map neatly along ethnic lines. As E. Valentine Daniel and Manav Ratti argue, to pretend that they do is to perpetuate a simplified narrative of the conflict. See Daniel, Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); and Ratti, “Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and the Aestheticization of Human Rights,” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 35, no. 1–2 (2004): 121–139.

27. LeClair, “The Sri Lankan Patients,” 32–33. Spinks (Michael Ondaatje, 230), though more favorably disposed to the novel, also criticizes formal elements of Ondaatje’s work that “deny the specificity” of the Sri Lankan civil war.

28. Georg Lukács, “Realism in the Balance,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. V. B. Leitch et al. (New York: Norton, 2001), 1045.

29. The severance of human from natural history has become a fecund site of analysis for postcolonial studies and environmental criticism, particularly in the wake of Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 3 (2009): 197–222. However, in an unpublished manuscript, Priscilla Wald introduces into these fields a wrinkle that comes straight out of the history of human rights. Wald traces how Julian Huxley borrowed concepts from natural history to arrive at his definition of the human, which he instituted as the founding director of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Huxley used theories of evolution and the concept of species to unite humans through their biological sameness and to discredit racial essentialism. Of course, such a species-centered definition of the human does not alter claims to human transcendence; it reinforces them. This is why other species, understood as part of nature, can serve to delimit the human as a definitional category in Anil’s investigation.

30. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 34.

31. Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

32. Djelal Kadir, review of Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time, by Wai Chee Dimock, Comparative Literature Studies 45, no. 3 (2008): 370–372.

33. Bruce Robbins, “The Uses of World Literature,” in The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir (London: Routledge, 2012), 389. Robbins has since begun developing a vocabulary for such measurement, in “Prolegomena for a Cosmopolitanism in Deep Time,” Interventions 18, no. 2 (2016): 172–186. Another major engagement with Dimock’s deep time is Mark McGurl’s, which welcomes the reflection on periodization and scale that deep time enables despite drawing less-optimistic conclusions for its perceptual effects. See McGurl, “The Posthuman Comedy,” Critical Inquiry 38, no. 3 (2012): 533–553.

34. Dimock, Through Other Continents, 2.

35. Leslie Marmon Silko, quoted in Bruce Robbins, “Temporizing: Time and Politics in the Humanities and Human Rights,” boundary 2 32, no. 1 (2005): 194.

36. Robbins, “Temporizing,” 198.

37. Joseph Mali, Mythistory: The Making of a Modern Historiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 9, 23, 27.

38. I borrow the phrase “archive of bones” from Antoinette Burton, who uses it to place Anil’s Ghost at the center of debates about postcolonial historiography and the relative merits of positivist history (as represented by forensic science in the novel) compared with other Western and non-Western modes of articulating historical truths. Burton, “Archive of Bones: Anil’s Ghost and the Ends of History,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 38, no. 1 (2008): 39–56.

39. William E. Jarvis, Time Capsules: A Cultural History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland: 2003), especially 50–82.

40. This point is related to Joseph Slaughter’s argument that the reason Anil’s mission fails is that there is no “democratic public sphere” in Sri Lanka to form an interpretive community around Sailor and give his life legibility within the national context. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 190. Where I differ from Slaughter is in claiming that Anil’s team illustrates a dysfunctional kind of interpretive community in which each member’s adoption of a different interpretive tactic only intensifies Sailor’s symbolic function within the novel.

41. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 309.

42. L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953; repr., New York: New York Review of Books, 2002), 1.

43. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, particularly the chapter “Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts,” for a trenchant meditation on “relationships to the past” that remain intractable to historical methods of investigation and thus indescribable within their prevailing disciplinary conventions. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 101.

1. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “integrate,” accessed August 4, 2014, http://dictionary.oed.com; and Merriam-Webster (online), s.v. “integrate,” accessed August 4, 2014, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/integrate.

2. Branko Milanović, “Global Income Inequality by the Numbers: In History and Now—An Overview” (Policy Research Working Paper 6259, World Bank, Washington, DC, November 2012): 2; and Milanović, The Haves and Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 160–161.

3. Zadie Smith, White Teeth (New York: Vintage International, 2000); and Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (New York: Random House, 1988), 351.

4. Caryl Phillips, “Mixed and Matched,” review of White Teeth, by Zadie Smith, Guardian, January 9, 2000, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/jan/09/fiction.zadiesmith; and James Wood, “Human, All Too Inhuman: The Smallness of the ‘Big’ Novel,” New Republic 24 (July 2000), 41–45.

5. Zadie Smith, “Two Paths for the Novel,” New York Review of Books, November 20, 2008, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/nov/20/two-paths-for-the-novel/.

6. Christopher Holmes offers a clarifying account of the limitations of such oppositions by tracing them through Smith’s and James Wood’s essays on the state of the contemporary novel. Holmes, “The Novel’s Third Way: Zadie Smith’s Hysterical Realism,” in Reading Zadie Smith: The First Decade and Beyond, ed. Philip Tew (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 141–155.

7. Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), especially 21–81.

8. I am paraphrasing Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994).

9. Nicholas Dames, “Trollope’s Chapters,” Literature Compass 7, no. 9 (2010): 856–857.

10. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Paul Saint-Amour argues that Joyce’s claims of “exhaustive documentation” in Ulysses, usually at the center of debates about his naturalism, also need to be understood within the historical context of Easter 1916, which made the destruction of Dublin seem like “a real possibility.” Paul Saint-Amour, “Over Assemblage: Ulysses and the Boîte-en-Valise from Above,” European Joyce Studies 15 (October 2003): 54.

11. For sociological and geographic approaches to the global city, see Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Doreen Massey, World City (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).

12. Zadie Smith, “The Embassy of Cambodia,” New Yorker, February 11 and 18, 2013, section 0–9.

13. For an account of the novel and its reception in relationship to multiculturalism, see Dominic Head, “Zadie Smith’s White Teeth: Multiculturalism for the Millennium,” in Contemporary British Fiction, ed. Richard J. Lane, Rod Mengham, and Philip Tew (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), 106–119.

14. James Procter, “New Ethnicities, the Novel, and the Burdens of Representation,” in A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction, ed. James F. English (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 113. In the context of Turkish-German literature, B. Venkat Mani writes of the importance of attending to how ethnos and demos overlap in order to avoid fetishizing multicultural difference and inclusivity. The goal, instead, is to produce a more complex account of negotiated belonging between “the native and the naturalized, the inherited and the inhabited, the fated and the willed.” Mani, Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007), 11.

15. Nancy Fraser, Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 3.

16. Louise Doughty, review of The Embassy of Cambodia, by Zadie Smith, Guardian, November 4, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/04/embassy-of-cambodia-zadie-smith-review.

17. Mattathias Schwartz, “The Anchor,” New Yorker, April 21, 2014, 79.

18. The 2006 Schengen Borders Code is a particularly important policy in establishing the “fortress.” It relaxed borders among European Union nations while tightening borders around Europe, particularly for African and Asian nationals.

19. Commission of the European Communities, “Wider Europe—Neighbourhood: A New Framework for Relations with our Eastern and Southern Neighbours” (Brussels: Commission of the European Communities, March 11, 2003): 4. http://www.enpi-info.eu/library/content/communication-commission-wider-europe%E2%80%94-neighbourhood-new-framework-relations-our-eastern-and.

20. The irony of Smith’s story is that it presages the United Kingdom’s decision to withdraw from the European Union. The “Brexit” vote is the latest and most powerful example of the backlash against internationalism. Its implications are yet to be seen.

21. The visitors, until the very end of the story, are white, which is why the narrator regards them as not Cambodian.

22. Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 236.

23. Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited, trans. Jane Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 88.

24. I use “it” because it is gender neutral.

25. Lauren Elkin, review of NW, by Zadie Smith, Daily Beast, September 2, 2012, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/09/02/nw-by-zadie-smith-review.html.

26. Priscilla Wald, Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 3.

27. Zadie Smith, “This Is How It Feels to Me,” Guardian, October 13, 2001, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/oct/13/fiction.afghanistan.

28. Zadie Smith, NW (New York: Penguin, 2012). All subsequent citations refer to this edition.

29. Democracy Village started as a temporary settlement in Parliament Square to protest Britain’s invasion of Afghanistan. It mushroomed to encompass a variety of leftist issues, including land and labor reform and antiglobalization protests.

30. Lindsey German and John Rees, A People’s History of London (London: Verso, 2012), 11–12.

31. Zadie Smith, “The North West London Blues,” New York Review of Books, June 2, 2012, http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/jun/02/north-west-london-blues/.

32. Jordanna Bailkin tracks the relationship between decolonization and the welfare state, and her findings show how welfarism continued to be implicated in imperial and hegemonic practices—hence the afterlife, rather than the end, of empire. Bailkin, The Afterlife of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

33. Michael Szalay cogently argues, “Little is gained and much is lost when we let a scorn for liberalism occlude the often nuanced and conflicted work performed by political abstractions.” Szalay, New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 22. I think Smith’s defense of the welfare state reflects the nuances and conflicts of her politics, which should be explored rather than smoothed over. She credits the welfare state with her personal success, but in her fiction she also seems to be aware of and reckoning with both the fallout and the dismantling of that imperfect system.

34. I have tried to loosen up this classification pattern by noting that Smith also displays affinities with writers of locality and class, such as Thomas Hardy and David Peace. See Aarthi Vadde, “Narratives of Migration, Immigration, and Interconnection,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction after 1945, ed. David James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 61–78.

35. Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 67–68.

36. Amanda Claybaugh, “Coming of Age on the Council Estate,” Public Books, February 14, 2013, http://www.publicbooks.org/fiction/coming-of-age-on-the-council-estate.

37. Christoph Hermann, “Neoliberalism in the European Union,” Studies in Political Economy 79 (2007): 67. “Washington Consensus” is itself a much-disputed term. It was coined by John Williamson in 1989 to refer to a ten-point policy platform governing trade between the developed and developing world. Policy points that laid the foundation for what we understand as neoliberalism include deregulation, liberalization of trade, market-determined interest rates, privatization of state enterprises, and marginal tax rates. One less-pernicious policy point included the shifting of public spending from subsidies to primary education, health care, and infrastructure investment. In the 1990s and 2000s, the institutions of the Washington Consensus, mainly the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, came under attack by antiglobalization activists, and the term came to encompass a larger set of neoliberal practices, beyond Williamson’s initial delineation.

38. Timothy Mitchell has also raised concerns about the misimpressions to which critical representations of social processes can contribute. In particular, he has raised the issue of what I would call overcoherence—that is, attributing to forces such as capitalism, the economy, and technology an “internal rationality, an element of sameness, or an inherent power” that they do not have. Such critical language unwittingly buys into and substantiates the illusions of coherence that proponents of market-based or large, top-down systems claim for them. Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Technopolitics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 14.

39. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 51, 315.

40. Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1992), 3.

41. It is well known that Joyce boasted that if Dublin were destroyed it could be reconstructed from Ulysses. Richard Ellmann, “The Limits of Joyce’s Naturalism,” Sewanee Review 63, no. 4 (1955): 567. Smith’s novel at times evokes a similar precision. Smith reproduces a Google Maps route between two places, juxtaposed with a deeply sensory account of what it feels like to walk a London street. Wendy Knepper, writing on the “spatially oriented aesthetic” of NW, argues that such juxtapositions illustrate the interactive and immersive sides of the novel. The endeavor to create new kinds of immersion is the basis for what Knepper calls Smith’s “late modernist techniques.” Knepper, “Revisionary Modernism and Postmillennial Experimentation in Zadie Smith’s NW,” in Reading Zadie Smith: The First Decade and Beyond, ed. Philip Tew (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 116. I would add that the interactive dimension of NW continues in the digital publicity for the novel, which featured “naturalist” YouTube videos that overlaid readings from the text onto the London streets and buildings they reference.

42. Jesse Matz has theorized modernist impressions as playing a mediating role between sensations and ideas and, in doing so, blurring the oppositions between them. I have this definition in mind in my own argument. Matz, Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

43. Tanya Agathocleous has discussed the history of the panorama’s ideological significance, ranging from Victorians’ attempts to gain purchase on the “chaos” of urban space and the mystery of global wholeness to its more contemporary associations with the totalizing and ordering gaze of European imperialism. Agathocleous, Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), especially 69–114.

44. Jameson, Postmodernism, 52.

45. Smith, “Two Paths for the Novel.”

46. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974), 7–8.

47. I borrow the quoted phrase from Anna Tsing, “The Global Situation,” Cultural Anthropology 15, no. 3 (2000): 333.

48. Toni Morrison, “On the Backs of Blacks,” in “The New Face of America,” special issue, Time 142, no. 21 (November 18, 1993): 57.

49. Bruce Robbins, Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 233.

51. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 14.

52. Immanuel Wallerstein, After Liberalism (New York: The New Press, 1995), 102–103. The existence of foreign aid may seem like an exception to the claim that welfare is resolutely national. However, the politics of foreign aid, which is given voluntarily, is not equivalent to the politics of welfare’s domestic entitlements, which are regarded as a state’s obligation to its citizens.

53. Doron Ben-Atar, Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), xv–xviii.

54. Quoted in Smith, White Teeth, 219. All subsequent citations refer to this edition.

55. Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, ed. Alfred Appel Jr. (New York: Vintage, 1991), 21.

56. Wood, “Human, All Too Inhuman,” 42.

1. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, “World at War,” UNHCR Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2014, June 18, 2015, http://unhcr.org/556725e69.html, 5. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has been tracking refugee populations since its creation, in 1951.

2. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, “Worldwide Displacement Hits All-Time High as War and Persecution Increase,” June 18, 2015, http://www.unhcr.org/558193896.html.

3. Thomas Nail, The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 1.

4. Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2010), 98.

5. I owe the phrase “aggrandizing agency” to Amanda Anderson, “The Temptations of Aggrandized Agency: Feminist Histories and the Horizon of Modernity,” Victorian Studies 43, no. 1 (Autumn 2000): 43–65.

6. Shailja Patel, Migritude (New York: Kaya Press, 2010), 2. All subsequent citations refer to this edition.

7. The most powerful example of the migrant body as journalistic spectacle, emerging from contemporary coverage of refugees, is the image of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy who drowned while trying to reach Europe. Recirculating and “memeifying” his image has renewed debate about the ethics of distributing such images of the dead. Kurdi’s image elicits a powerful emotional response and plays an important role in humanizing refugees. Its power, however, reinforces a victim narrative that emphasizes the need for Western compassion over the need to explore the interiority or capability of refugees.

8. Carrie Noland, Voices of Negritude in Modernist Print: Aesthetic Subjectivity, Diaspora, and the Lyric Regime (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 3, 6, 199.

9. Joseph R. Roach, “Performance Studies,” in Critical Theory and Performance, ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 457.

10. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 23. Adorno’s understanding of utopia derives from his reading of Hegel. In his dialogue with Ernst Bloch, Adorno affirms “the prohibition of casting a picture of utopia actually for the sake of utopia, and that has a deep connection to the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not make a graven image!’ ” Bloch, “Something’s Missing: A Discussion Between Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing (1964),” in Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 11. The representation of utopia in any form not only degrades its value but also threatens its very integrity as a concept of utter transformation. This is not to say that genres of utopian writing do not exist, of course. However, as Jameson points out, such genres are ironically at odds with utopia as a concept.