Reviewed by: Indigenous Vanguards: Education, National Liberation, and the Limits of Modernism by Ben Conisbee Baer Ramsey McGlazer Indigenous Vanguards: Education, National Liberation, and the Limits of Modernism. Ben Conisbee Baer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Pp. 384. $75.00 (cloth). Ben Conisbee Baer's Indigenous Vanguards is about the education of modernist educators. But the book is also itself an education, combining range with rigor to alter our understanding of modernism and its limits. Baer focuses mainly on the interwar period and on primary education as it figures in the work of Alain Locke, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, D. H. Lawrence, and Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, among others. Baer's readings are riveting, and they will inform research in fields including postcolonial studies, Marxism, critical and political theory, and comparative literature. Indeed, Indigenous Vanguards is remarkable not least in its pointed, proudly comparativist refusal to remain within the boundaries that delimit areas of inquiry. Baer's book traverses languages and continents, tracing a broad sweep from North America and the Caribbean to Europe, West Africa, and South Asia as it draws attention to the ways in which these regions are already densely interconnected in the histories of transatlantic slavery, capitalism, colonialism, and decolonization as well as in the long history of responses to Enlightenment thought. So, too, are the histories of modernist experimentation and education inextricable from one another, because "modernity's social landscape is a forcefully pedagogical one" (100). Modern education, in other words, shapes modern social life, and it stands to reason that modernist responses to the latter were also engagements with the former. But of course education shapes social life unevenly, and under conditions of colonialism and racialization—"in a regionalized, contradictory, and fissured field"—students and societies are not only given unequal access to education; they are also educated to different ends (101). Modernist experiments registered these differences, which antiracist and anticolonial vanguards also sought to redress. Baer argues that these vanguards' efforts depended on a key affordance of the literary, drawing on literature's capacity to educate otherwise, in a "productive and fragile critical complicity" with actually existing schools (95). Literature dangerously supplements schooling. And for all its impressive scope and engagement with concrete educational initiatives, Baer's book remains steadfast in its commitment to the "singular curriculum" assigned by each of the literary texts that it considers (43). This means paying close attention to the educations that these texts stage, index, fantasize, or forestall. It means attending to "the conduct of the text" and not only to its content, in other words, but it also entails attention to the dreams that recur in the text, the desires that animate it, and the conditions that frustrate their realization (143). In this sense, we could compare Baer's method to the psychoanalytic way of working "one by one," of treating one patient at a time. This is not to suggest that Indigenous Vanguards is simply diagnostic. But the book does demonstrate that symptomatic reading—despite its associations with supposedly dated "strong theory"—remains a vibrant and indispensable practice. Baer writes beautifully about "the push and pull of transference, ever unfixing the game of self-consolidation" (320). In this way, he shows how, in some versions of education, as in psychoanalysis, the stultifying injunction to mirror and assimilate can give way to a more mobile dynamic, in which the work of self-constitution becomes at once anticolonial and provisional: "a self-change required of 'leaders' as well as 'led' that is not simply a reversal of positions," as Baer writes, glossing Gramsci and recalling Marx, or, as in his characterization of Césaire, a "putting-together of bits of … self from cut-outs snipped from materials of the dominant" (35, 145). There is, as those last phrases indicate, a push and pull at work in Baer's own vigorous prose, which honors the energy and the urgency of the struggles that it describes. [End Page 194] The introduction is a master class that gathers lessons from Kant, Marx, Gramsci, Fanon, Althusser, Spivak, and others, asking how their diverse understandings of education speak to the demands of decolonization. (Baer's tributes to Fanon will...