Ethnic Modernism (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ethnic Modernism Henry Veggian Ethnic Modernism. By Werner Sollors. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2008. Werner Sollors has cultivated a distinctive habit of sculpting new arguments from rutted and well-traveled key words. "Descent," "consent," ethnicity," and "thematic criticism" are certainly not his creations but Sollors has often reconfigured them like an urban planner who makes a familiar place appear as a newly invented city. Indeed, his explanation of the term "invention" in the 1989 essay "The Invention of Ethnicity" is exemplary of this habit, which results from the pedestrian finesse of Sollors's prose: its arrangements are direct yet fluid, its vocabulary repetitious yet heterodox, and its arguments explore tangents of familiar themes that were forgotten or dismissed. Ethnic Modernism attempts to do for "modernism" what Sollors has done for those previously cited keywords. What is most interesting about this particular example is that Sollors's must consider the term in relation to his own prior writings on it. The words "modern," modernity," and "modernism" recur often in Sollors's early works, where they rarely synonymous. For example, the subtitle of his first monograph, published in 1978 with the title Amiri Baraka/Leroi Jones: The Quest for a "Populist Modernism," invoked the Symbolist tradition of using the poor, the ethnic, the racial underclass as its subject. In that work Sollors represented Jones/Baraka as a "black Baudelaire" using modernist literary technique to engage matters of racial identity. The book oriented Sollors's career towards what he then rightly considered to be an undervalued relationship between modernist aesthetics and sociological categories of ethnicity and race. Over several decades of writing, the former came to trouble the latter. While explaining the term "ethnicity" in a later essay, Sollors distinguished between a medieval "ethnic" past and modernist dissociation from it. More recently, Sollors stressed in an introduction to Dumas' novel Georges that unlike Dumas' contemporary readers, "modern" readers would require footnotes to explain certain 19th century allusions. Time, subjectivity, irony, society, interpretation, reception: each seems to inflect "modernism" in a different way. They also conflict with one another, leaving many questions unresolved. Was modernism an [End Page 118] anti-ethnic and anti-racial force? Had modernism disrupted the recovery of ethnic history or made it possible? Ethnic Modernism engages the opportunity to follow these matters which had come to resemble traffic jams. There is a powerful dynamic at work in the title Ethnic Modernism insofar as the first term represents the principal avenue of his career and the second resembles an unpaved and neglected side street. Beginning with the book's introductory essay, Sollors stresses the simple but important distinction between the standard definition of modernity as "sociological and technological developments" and the "aesthetic movements" of modernism. (10) This distinction does not aim to merely invert cause (modernity) and effect (modernism); rather, Sollors uses examples of mass transit to connect the chapters, forming a grid, as it were, of recurring and interlocking points. The book's narrative will often turn on these points and move the work in a new direction. The setting is a large city. It is any and every city. Stein's Lena rides hopelessly on a streetcar, Saroyan's narrator observes morbid subway faces. In a short sketch by Mary Antin a streetcar conductor scolds two littering Italian children. Faulkner's narration in The Sound and the Fury becomes a "stream of consciousness trolley" (122) and "transport" becomes a trope for the neo-mystical modernism of Jean Toomer's prose. The examples are pervasive. Henry Roth, Mike Gold, Richard Wright, and Leo Szilard are also invoked, to name only a few of the ethnic modernists who turned the "streetcar settings" of modernity into aesthetic boundary-crossing. But where the aesthetics of an early ethnic modernism hoped that modernity could be turned against itself, the technologies of modernity eventually prevail by reinforcing segregation, internment, and imprisonment. It is truly a binary relationship, in the literal sense of the word, which means a pair of railway tracks, on which pre-WWI modernism and modernity travel towards an eventual Cold War collision. The book's second chapter concludes with Sollors's assessment that Gertrude Stein "had set up a model...