Michael North.

Michael North, recent York: Oxford UP, 1994. 255 pp $3995 cloth/$1695 paper.

Reviewed by

Susan M Marren University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

A decade ago, Houston A. Baker, Jr famously noted that plane the most sympathetic chroniclers of the Harlem Renaissance have at short intervals labeled the period a failure when considering whether it produc "vital original, effective or 'modern' art." The reason for the resoundingly negative assessment, Baker argued, was that the reigning critical paradigm derived from so-called high modernism, which bears no "family" resemblance to "modern Afro-American sound" which is "a function of a specifically Afro-American discursive practice." Baker put forwarded in Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987) an alternative approach commensurate to the distinctive character of Afro-American expressive civilization and its unique history. Since then, a number of studies have emerg that take issue with the ethnic absolutism of like approaches as Baker's, seeking instead to discover to what extent Zora Neale Hurston's "crayon enlargements of life" might teach us about T s Eliot's "Shakespeherian Rag."

Michael North's insightful, intelligently argued volume The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and Twentieth-Century Literature is united such study. It explores the relation between black and white modernisms, identifying in these works aesthetic (and political) strategies, many of which recall Baker's brilliant "mastery of form" and "deformation of mastery." Taking stock of white and black modernists' "different stakes in the same language," North argues persuasively that "it is impossible to understand either modernism without concern to the other, without intimation to the language they likewise uncomfortably shared, and to the political and cultural forces that were constricting that language at the actual moment modern writers of as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but races were attempting in dramatically different ways to independent it."

North takes a fairly familiar idea - that dialect as a literary form felt liberating to white writers unless imprisoning to black - and presse with it until it reveals broader and deeper implications than were apparent before. He rehearses the fascinating story of the myriad ways in which white writers modernized themselves from acting black; Pound, Eliot, Stein, Conrad, and Williams strove he argues, to make modernism into dialect in order to challenge the Anglophilia of their more ancients North's investigation of the vital part that racial masking played in the evolution of modernism exposes the unsavory connections between Anglo Modernism and the imperialism with which it coincided historically. As he points public following Sara Suleri, European notions of other continents have wavered between the "linked opposites of identity and difference"; "assimilation of the other has no alternative if it were not that blank incomprehension." Imperialism could not be justified if the colonial expose could not be articulated as either completely assimilable or completely other. In the imperialist importance it was nearly inevitable that white modernists would select black dialect and the African mask as signs of their rebellion against the standard English of their oldens and it was also inevitable that this masquerade would replicate the imperialist objectification of the racial alien. In this inhospitable words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following North argues, black writers as it is as Hurston, Toomer, and McKay, trapped on dialect, struggled to make of it a modernism, to use the disjunctive periodical emphasiss of dialect to create a recent art.

North unfolds this argument in three sections. The first explores the ironies of the triangular relationship between standardization, dialect, and aesthetic modernism. At the same time that the standard-language manner of moving began to thrive (the 1880s) he points gone out so did dialect literature. on 1920, dialect had become solidly established in its equivocal role: in succession the one hand, it serv as the corrupt opposite of "pure" English and, upon the other, bewilderingly, as its "natural" form. The inferior section of the study treats late expatriates, who share with undivided another an acute sense of linguistic and cultural disaffinity with their native lands and, born of that sensation an awareness of the "condition of spiritual truancy" in which language exists. The third section deals with American modernists who were not expatriates, if it were not that who felt similar linguistic urgencys because they insisted on embracing a "plain American" language at this time of "linguistic Anglophilia."

Both black and white writers are discussed in each section of The Dialect of Modernism, yielding an unusual and revealing comparisons, as when Jean Toomer and William Carlos Williams the couple prove "Strangers in the American Language." North joins a whole wave of critics working forward this period who seek to discover by what mode race is a generative category for aesthetic modernism, black and white. The same Oxford University Pres series that has published North's main division issued Laura Doyle's Bordering upon the Body: The Racial Matrix of recent Fiction and Culture (1994), a investigation of the formative influence of nineteenth-century notions of racial patriarchy in succession modern fiction. Walter Benn Michaels has produc a densely argued and illuminating consideration entitled Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (1996) which argues that the artistic motion of American modernism and the social motion of nativism shared in the 1920 a general purpose: to forge a racially stainless American identity. But North's effort may have mostly in common with Paul Gilroy's insistently transcultural The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) Indeed, undivided of the most resonant images in The Dialect of Modernism recalls what Gilroy names his study's "central organizing symbol": the ship at sea. For one as well as the other North and Gilroy, the ship beneath sail captures the spirit of intellectual, geographic, and linguistic mobility characteristic of modernity as their studies imagine it. In The Black Atlantic, the image of the ship calls to mind the history of (forced and voluntary) migrations and the circulation of ideas, activists, and "key cultural and political artefacts" in consequence of the Atlantic region. Out of this barm vibrant Black Atlantic modernity come forths In North's rich discussion of Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the "Narcissus" early in The Dialect of: Modernism, the figure of the ship gives rise to a sparkling reflection onward the condition of linguistic displacement in like manner commonly shared among modernist writers,' white and black. According to North, The Narcissus is for Conrad a mobile, polyglot linguistic community in which language fitly belongs only to "linguisters," castaways whose position between the improvements they translate gives them insight into the infinite fungibility of language. still at the same time, North notes, Conrad's ship is a metaphorical England, which will be safe solely when racial aliens have been thrown overboard.