Conversations in Bloomsbury: Colonial Writers and the Hogarth Press

Abstract

In her recent book, Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race, Jane Marcus calls for the Indian writer Mulk Raj Anand (1905–2004) to be brought ‘back to Bloomsbury’ (J. Marcus, 2004, p. 5), where he lived and worked from the mid-1920s to the mid-1940s. Recently, critics have begun to investigate Anand’s position in the leftist circles of interwar London, but not specifically his interactions with the Woolfs and the Hogarth Press.1 Anand was not the only colonial writer to be involved with the Press; the Trinidadian, Marxist, historian and cultural critic Cyril Lionel Robert James (1901–1989), on his ‘voyage in’, made his first stop at Bloomsbury, published with the Hogarth Press, and was keen to prove himself equal to the intellectual debate synonymous with the area’s artistic communities. The position of these two colonial intellectuals in London — both polymaths and radicals — emphasises the metropolis’ role as a crucible of anti-colonial politics. In particular, the Hogarth Press was a key disseminator of anti-colonial thought in the interwar period, suggesting an alternative take on its role as a facilitator of international modernism. James’ and Anand’s collaborations with the Woolfs typify the conflicted yet transformative exchanges which occurred between colonial and British writers in modernist London. However, British modernist art’s implication in cultural imperialism, and those definitions of modernity founded on various kinds of racial hierarchies, complicate intersections between British and colonial writers.