Afterword:Modernisms in our image . . . always, partially Sonita Sarker (bio) This collection bears witness to the role of the nation-state as the crucible for modernism and modernity emerging from the late-nineteenth into the twentieth century. The essays bring alive the emotional resonance of nationalism for hierarchically racialized and sexualized subjects at (neo)colonial centers and margins. Indeed, in the last turn-of-the-century's battle of modernities, the nation-state was the universal model under dispute among socialist, anarchist, and capitalist philosophies for colonial as well as anticolonial subjecthood, as it is at this turn into the twenty-first century. In this context, anti/post-colonial literature aspires to be or becomes national literature even as it problematizes the concept of nation. Until as recently as 2002, the issue of nation-state identity in modernist literary studies had been rendered in one of two ways: either largely implicit or absent from discussions of Anglo-American and Western European authors, or the only focus in overdetermined approaches to Latin American, Asian or African authors. Since 2003, however, as Modernism/Modernity itself evinces, more essays inquire into various nationalisms—Black, Jewish, Irish, Yugoslav, mestizo Latin American, Scottish, Italian—all premised on nation-state identities. This material environment for what Simon Gikandi describes in the preface as the production of "linguistic gestures" thus situates "modernist" and "postcolonial" not only in terms of literary genres but also in their common basis in modernities of conflicting configurations.1 While modernists often used the term "international" to project their own image of the world, this special issue's focus on "transnationalisms" strives to reflect "ours."2 [End Page 561] Both terms—"international" and "transnational"—spur their/our desires to juxtapose, if not inevitably to compare, ideas and identities in and across spaces and times. The essays in this issue thus seek to reposition their author-subjects through and then beyond the materiality of citizenship and prescribed identities toward connection with the other. Such repositionings inevitably raise critical questions: if hegemonic forms of internationalism only serve to aggrandize the imperial self, does transnational criticism desire to draw a correlation between modernist writing and particularized (liberatory) conceptions of transnationalism? Did the modernists, like us, wish to expose the contingency of nation? As many of these essays suggest, the literary genre (the novel and the poem) is not just the container of this desire but its very shape. Genre becomes desire for the subject in and beyond the boundary of the nation, in and beyond the limits of historical period. This issue displays modernisms in our image…always, partially. Reading and writing after these essays allows me to pursue the paths of these desires. I. Trans/nationalism—the concept as vehicle—challenges critics to stretch formerly construed geographies and critical histories for understanding past modernisms. In the resulting implicit or explicit comparisons that transnationalism also urges, we witness simultaneities that are multiple, unequal, and contradictory. One of the simultaneities emerging strongly from this group of essays is that, within the particular conditions of late-nineteenth century to mid-twentieth century cultural politics, a sense of nationalism is concurrent with supranational linkages.3 As the essays in this collection demonstrate—Jessica Berman's, Jahan Ramazani's, and Urmila Seshagiri's, for example—many modernist authors see nation as contingent upon a sense of belonging and renounce it often because of the shape that nationalist leaders give it. At the same time, while modernist authors supersede national boundaries, they believe in the cultural uniqueness of their respective nations. Trans/nationalism takes the simultaneous and contradictory forms we see across the essays in this issue, for example, in Virginia Woolf's or in C.L.R. James's pan-Africanism. In Three Guineas, Woolf does not renounce her claim to England even as she denounces a masculinist, jingoist Englishness. In "Revolution and the Negro," James celebrates the contributions of Negroes to dominant nations while calling on them to fight slavery across nation-state boundaries.4 If, as I suggested above, nationalism is the vessel for modernism and modernity, transnationalism is the hinge between postcolonialism and postmodernity. In this context, can we understand "trans" also as "post"? Does the modernist...