Modernism in the Metrocolony: Urban Cultures of Empire in Twentieth-Century Literature 1108835627, 9781108835626

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M OD ERNI SM I N THE METR OCOLONY

While literary modernism is often associated with Euro-American metropolises such as London, Paris or New York, this book considers the place of the colonial city in modernist fiction. From the streets of Dublin to the shop-houses of Singapore, and from the botanical gardens of Bombay to the suburbs of Suva, the monumental landscapes of British colonial cities aimed to reinforce empire’s universalising claims, yet these spaces also contradicted and resisted the impositions of an idealised English culture. Inspired by the uneven landscapes of the urban British Empire, a group of twentieth-century writers transformed the visual incongruities and anachronisms on display in the city streets into sources of critique and formal innovation. Showing how these writers responded to empire’s metrocolonial complexities and built legacies, Modernism in the Metrocolony traces an alternative, peripheral history of the modernist city. caitlin vandertop is Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick. A former lecturer at the University of the South Pacific and research assistant at the University of Hong Kong, her work on modernism and colonial urban culture has been published in journals including Modern Fiction Studies, Textual Practice, Novel, the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Interventions.

MODERNISM IN THE METROCOLONY Urban Cultures of Empire in Twentieth-Century Literature

CAITLIN VANDERTOP University of Warwick

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108835626 doi: 10.1017/9781108891127 © Caitlin Vandertop 2021 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2021 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Vandertop, Caitlin, author. title: Modernism in the metrocolony : urban cultures of empire in twentieth-century literature / Caitlin Vandertop, The University of the South Pacific. description: Cambridge, uk ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: lccn 2020015219 | isbn 9781108835626 (hardback) | isbn 9781108891127 (epub) subjects: lcsh: English literature – 20th century – History and criticism. | Colonial cities in literature. | Urbanization in literature. | Modernism (Literature) classification: lcc pr478.c55 v36 2020 | ddc 820.9/358–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015219 isbn 978-1-108-83562-6 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Acknowledgements

page vi

Introduction: The Colonies in Concrete

1

1 Metrocolonial Modernism

25

2 Architectures of Free Trade in Conrad’s Singapore

48

3 Synchronising Empire Time in Joyce’s Dublin

76

4 Anglo-Indian Crises of Development

95

5 Ecologies of Empire in Oceanian Modernism

120 146

Conclusion: Mega-Dublins

154 187 200

Notes Bibliography Index

v

Acknowledgements

The work for this book began at the University of Hong Kong and continued at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji, and it was made possible with the support of residents and researchers in both cities. In Hong Kong, I’m deeply indebted to Douglas Kerr for his generosity and guidance throughout my time as a graduate student and beyond. Special thanks are owed to Robert J. C. Young, Kendall Johnson and Wendy Gan for their invaluable reports on the original thesis, and to a number of other academics for commenting on ideas at earlier stages of my research, including Elaine Ho, Julia Kuehn, Rey Chow, Pheng Cheah, Stuart Christie, Paul Smethurst, Rita Kelly, Andrew Thacker, Emily Ridge, Rob Magnuson Smith and Natalie Pollard. In Fiji, I’m grateful to my colleagues in the School of Language, Arts and Media at the University of the South Pacific for their support and friendship as I completed the manuscript, especially Sudesh Mishra, Matthew Hayward and Fiona Willans, as well as Nicholas Halter, Ryota Nishino and Paul Geraghty, who advised me on Suva-related resources. At USP, the final chapter of this book benefitted from conversations with my undergraduate and postgraduate students, especially those in my ‘Oceanic Literatures in English’ seminar. Most recently, I’m grateful to my colleagues in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick for listening to me present on the project and offering insightful feedback and questions. I am especially indebted to Ray Ryan at Cambridge University Press for his encouragement of the project and his expert advice throughout the publishing process. The feedback from CUP’s anonymous readers has greatly enhanced the book, as has the work of Edgar Mendez and Linda Benson during the production stages. Being able to work on a project so dauntingly international in scope was possible only with financial support, which I received in the form of a fellowship and travel grants from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council; a scholarship from the College of vi

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Humanities at the University of Exeter; and a staff research grant from the School of Language, Arts and Media at the University of the South Pacific. I could never have finished this project without love and encouragement from my mother and sister, Rose and Jessie, and I’m grateful to them for more than I can say. Thanks also go to my grandparents for always taking an interest in my studies, and to Ralph Erle for generously offering up a writing shed when I needed to focus. A final and most heartfelt thank you to Marius Chan, for all his help with this project and everything else. An early version of Chapter 2 was published as ‘Architectures of the Invisible Hand: Envisioning Capital in Joseph Conrad’s Singapore’ in Textual Practice 34.1 (2020), 127–45. This has been printed in revised form with the permission of Taylor and Francis. Sections from an earlier version of Chapter 4 were published in a paper titled ‘Peripheral Urbanism, Imperial Maturity and the Fiction of Development in Lao She’s Rickshaw and Mulk Raj Anand’s Coolie’, which appeared in Novel: A Forum on Fiction 53.2 (2019), 369–85.

introduction

The Colonies in Concrete

From Karl Marx to Max Weber, classical social theory believed that the great cities of the future would follow in the industrializing footsteps of Manchester, Berlin, and Chicago . . . Most cities of the South, however, more closely resemble Victorian Dublin, which, as historian Emmet Larkin has stressed, was unique amongst ‘all the slumdoms produced in the western world in the nineteenth century . . . [because] its slums were not a product of the industrial revolution. Dublin, in fact, suffered more from the problems of deindustrialization’. (Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, London: Verso, 2006, 16)

I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. (James Joyce, quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982, 505)

From Oxford to Cape Town, debates over the legacies of the British Empire have continued to cluster around features of the built environment. While some commentators have celebrated the British landmarks of cities such as Hong Kong and the imperial histories that they commemorate, others have shown how these structures served to concretise divisions, cement inequalities and create unsustainable coastal ecologies, noting the polarising effects of colonial urban policies as they continue to be felt across postcolonial cities.1 In this context, disputes over the symbolic presence of monuments, statues and buildings have energised campaigns for postcolonial reparations as well as efforts to ‘decolonise the university’ in recent years. What such struggles make clear is that a statue or street name is never ‘just’ a symbol. Rather, these structures shape our lived environments in ways that have lasting material effects, forming flashpoints in everyday struggles over the meanings, values and narratives with which we negotiate the colonial past. With these ongoing struggles in mind, this book explores how colonial urban narratives are reproduced and contested in literary texts written at 1

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Introduction: The Colonies in Concrete

a key moment in the British Empire’s urban history. During the late colonial period, as successive waves of decolonisation swept regions from Ireland in the 1910s to the Pacific islands in the 1970s, a number of writers took inspiration from the cultures of colonial port cities, where they reflected critically on the ideals inscribed into their architectural landscapes. From the monuments of Dublin to the statues of Singapore, and from the suburbs of Wellington to the botanical gardens of Bombay, colonial cities served as symbolic centres for the universalising claims of imperial modernisers; yet they also offered a degree of visual resistance to the impositions of an idealised English culture. For this reason, the stylistic importations of colonial planners often produced striking and visible contradictions, contradictions which – this book argues – became important to the critical and aesthetic innovations associated with modernism. Historians of the British Empire have identified a ‘turn to development’ in imperial discourse of the early twentieth century.2 Joseph Chamberlain, secretary of state for the colonies from 1895 to 1903, claimed that the British Empire had entered a new stage of ‘kinship’ – having brought ‘security and peace and comparative prosperity to countries that never knew these blessings before’ – while Frederick Lugard, colonial administrator and founder of the University of Hong Kong in 1911, used the language of development to affirm the empire’s continued commitment to the ‘happiness and welfare of the primitive races’.3 Although the discourse of development was principally concerned with the management of resources, the new development boards and improvement trusts established across a network of colonial ports – including Bombay (1898), Calcutta (1912), Rangoon (1920), Singapore (1927) and Lagos (1928) – brought together a diaspora of professional planners, engineers, land surveyors and health and sanitation specialists.4 Meanwhile, legal and political discourses of integration, ‘equalisation’ and ‘development along native lines’ found special purchase among the elite trusteeships that managed urban municipalities, and these ideals were visually enshrined by the architects of new universities, libraries and courts of law. The power of cities to cultivate a sense of unity, pride and loyalty among colonial subjects in the early twentieth century was emphasised by Lord Meath, promoter of the Empire Day movement (the precursor to Commonwealth Day). Observing how the governors of the dominions were conducting their business from palatial buildings ‘beneath the shadow of Nelson’, Meath recommended the erection of urban monuments, the cultivation of parks and gardens and the hosting of public celebrations, viewing ‘beautification and development’ as the key to strengthening imperial sentiment.5 As the neoclassical

Introduction: The Colonies in Concrete

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buildings, imperial monuments, Gothic cathedrals and botanical gardens established across Victorian cities were interlaced with modern tramways and telegraph networks, post offices, prisons and uniformed police, these spaces came to form the symbolic heartlands for imperial dreams about the spread of British freedoms and the rule of law. Not only were Britain’s developmental claims visually inscribed into the architecture, but fantasies of ‘exporting’ Britishness were written into urban toponyms (‘New London’ or ‘New Brighton’) and in the ideas for replica cities imagined by planners (Lagos, for example, was to be the ‘Liverpool of West Africa’, Bombay the ‘Manchester of the East’ and Rangoon the ‘Garden City of the East’). Helping to brand the empire as a network of enclaves united by the benefits of British development, colonial cities became the emblems of a projected universalism, forming signifiers in stone of an aspirational global modernity to come. Despite the universalising rhetoric of colonial planners, however, the contradictions belying urban development discourse were highly visible at street level. The cities that had grown as administrative centres and export-processing zones for imperial commerce generated striking forms of social unevenness, whose effects proved visually inescapable in the stratified workers’ colonies of 1880s Bombay, the proto-‘gated communities’ reinforced after plague outbreaks in 1890s Hong Kong or the compartmentalised Delhi of the 1920s. The grand planning models adopted in settler cities in Australia and New Zealand meanwhile failed to silence the demands of excluded migrant and indigenous populations. Across colonial cities, the tangible effects of imperial policies – including segregation, police brutality, military garrisons on the streets, poverty, health crises and environmental disruption – exposed the gap between British ideals and activities. The result was a clash between the discourses of development imported by colonial administrators and local elites, and the exclusions upon which colonial economies had historically depended. Yet, perhaps because of the contradictory modernity on display in colonial cities, these spaces also generated striking methods of resistance. In Dublin, statues of former invaders were festooned with garlands of flowers but also defaced, decapitated and bombed, while the vandalising of monuments, the occupation of public buildings and the resistance of colonised subjects to the renaming of streets and districts forced authorities to negotiate contested and contradictory meanings. Given the frequency of strikes, riots and acts of popular resistance across colonial port cities, these spaces were in many ways the symbolic and material battlegrounds of the late colonial period.

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This book examines literary responses to colonial urban experience as they form part of a peripheral history of the modernist city. While the focus is on literary texts written from the 1900s into the 1970s and set in Dublin, Singapore, Bombay and Suva, each chapter begins by examining the colonial discourses and foundational narratives with which individual cities were imagined. In the late nineteenth century, representations of British colonial cities in fiction and travelogues reveal a wide spectrum of responses to colonial urban aesthetics, ranging from celebratory accounts of the solidity of meaning embodied in the monumentalised landscapes to more ambivalent and critical assessments of the complexity of these meanings in their local settings. On one end of the scale, Rudyard Kipling evokes a triumphalist sense of the industry, prosperity and cosmopolitanism on display across a range of port cities, from Bombay to Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong, Melbourne and Cape Town. The fact, he claims, that cities such as Bombay and Calcutta are ‘several decades in advance’ of surrounding rural regions affirms both the benefits and continued necessity of British militarism.6 Heralding a form of incipient globalisation, cities in Kipling’s narrative become the vanguards in a homogenising process of British advancement: Singapore is described as ‘another Calcutta’ (233), itself ‘no more Anglo-Indian than West Brompton’ (198); Rangoon’s main streets and steam tramway network recall those of Penang Town, ‘very like Park and Middleton streets in Calcutta’ (225); and these, as in Singapore and Bombay, display ‘unfailing signs of commercial prosperity’ (233). The sense of déjà vu characterising Kipling’s journey appears to confirm what had only been a fantasy in Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days (1873), where Hong Kong is imagined as ‘a town in Kent or Surrey transferred by some strange magic to its antipodes’, its Gothic churches and macadamised streets mirroring those of ‘Bombay, Calcutta and Singapore’ in their display of ‘English supremacy’.7 Writers and travellers in the 1920s and 1930s generally outweighed Kipling, however, in their distaste for Victorian colonial urbanism.8 Aldous Huxley described the anachronism of Bombay’s neo-Gothic architecture as ‘appalling’, while Evelyn Waugh dismissed Cape Town as ‘a hideous city’ that reminded him of Glasgow, its ‘trams running between great stone offices built in Victorian Gothic’.9 Seeking exoticism and escape, some travellers took issue with what they found to be a brash imposition of English culture onto the landscape, preferring a culturally sensitive accommodation to local difference. Graham Greene, arriving in Freetown, Sierra Leone, wrote that everything ugly in the city had been ‘planted’ by the English: ‘the stores, the churches, the Government offices,

Introduction: The Colonies in Concrete

5

the two hotels; if there was anything beautiful in the place it was native’.10 In 1929, the modernist writer and architectural critic Robert Byron complained that ‘the whole of [British] India is one enormous conspiracy to make one imagine one is in Balham’, describing Darjeeling as ‘Bognor and Southend roofed in corrugated iron’.11 By contrast, he presents Edwin Lutyens’s New Delhi as an exception to the rule, not so much a ‘Canberra in Asia’ as an attempt to accommodate Mughal aesthetics through a mature fusion of ‘the best of East and West’.12 Elsewhere, anti-colonial intellectuals voiced perspectives that were more sceptical of such claims to imperial maturity. In 1924, Rabindranath Tagore described modern Indian cities as parasitic rather than progressive: they ‘feed upon the whole social organism that runs through the villages; they continually drain away the life stuff of the community . . . while making a lurid counterfeit of prosperity.’13 Echoing Gandhi’s claim that modern cities ‘live upon the villages’, Tagore describes these spaces as false copies that fail to truthfully represent the nation’s condition as a whole, anticipating anti-colonial writers such as Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, for whom the city supported an elite class of workers and students divorced from the interests and lived realities of the rural majority.14 Fanon’s famous account of the settler city as a ‘world divided into compartments’ – carved into white and ‘native’ towns – was part of his broader critique of the racist organisation of the colonial world, while Césaire described the city as a space of collaboration between local elites and European powers who, far from modernising colonial territories, ‘actually tended to prolong artificially the survival of local pasts in their most pernicious aspects’.15 These accounts suggest that as spectacles of urban modernisation were confronted with the direct practices of dispossession upon which colonialism was predicated, the contradictions and anachronisms at the heart of colonial modernity became arrestingly visible in metrocolonial locations. What this book will argue is that the uneven, asynchronous modernity witnessed so visibly in metrocolonial spaces came to influence a range of writers associated with modernism. Anglophone writers in this period drew on their unique experience of a number of cities – including Dublin, Bombay, New Delhi, Singapore, Kingston and Wellington – where they incorporated the divisions, dislocations and incongruities of everyday life into the formal texture of their work. British modernists were inspired, for example, by Katherine Mansfield’s experience of New Zealand’s Empire City, where the fact that ‘one way of life was imposed on another, and did not quite fit’ – as her biographer puts it – helped to generate strange

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Introduction: The Colonies in Concrete

encounters and modernist disruptions.16 In this spatial context, Mansfield’s formal attention to the theme of artificiality responds to her sense of the invented nature of the colonial world in Wellington, whose socially divided suburbs were forcefully imposed onto Māori society. Another writer alive to the impact of colonial urbanism and the contradictions behind metropolitan facades is Joseph Conrad, whose surreal and spectral Singapore reveals the bizarre lifestyles of European planters who import everything from food down to the very gravel they walk on. Focusing on the city’s whitewashed houses and manicured gardens, Conrad transforms the ‘unreal’ and ‘superimposed’ quality of the urban architecture into the stuff of urban impressionism. Another writer to incorporate the formal qualities of colonial cities into his narratives is E. M. Forster, whose A Passage to India (1924) opens by mapping the divide between the European town and the ‘unknowable’ Indian quarter in the imagined British hill city of Chandrapore. While Forster encodes the novel’s interrogation of cross-cultural understanding into the city’s spatially segregated form, the Anglophone Indian modernists whom he worked with in Bloomsbury, Mulk Raj Anand and Ahmed Ali, set their politically engaged novels of the 1930s in these neglected Indian quarters, from Bombay’s industrial estates to the Muslim neighbourhoods of Old Delhi. These last examples are inspired by what is perhaps the most celebrated modernist depiction of the colonial city: James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Here, the grandiose monuments of colonial Dublin jar with the local uses to which they are put, confronting the universalising symbolism of the British Empire’s Second City with the sensuous particularities of local Dublin life. Fredric Jameson has argued that the form of Dublin’s ‘great village’ is essential to Joyce’s modernist juxtaposition of the classical and contemporary, colonial and metropolitan, rural and urban.17 Yet while Jameson views Dublin as a unique site of ‘overlap and coexistence’ that is exceptional within literary modernism, this book’s broader catalogue of texts suggests that peripheral urbanism was in fact far more central to modernism than has been acknowledged. Joyce’s influence not only on British modernists but also on Chinese and Anglo-Indian novelists in the 1930s and 1940s, and on later postcolonial writers from Walcott to Rushdie, reveals how formal experiments in the urban laboratories of the British Empire helped to shape the aesthetic and political trajectories of late modernism more broadly. As the scope of these examples suggests, this study enters into debates over the ‘global turn’ within modernist literary scholarship, a field in which colonial urban culture has remained relatively under-examined. Although

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scholars have explored historical representations of cities under British rule, most have tended to approach the subject retroactively through the lens of contemporary literature. Studies such as Rashmi Varma’s The Postcolonial City and Its Subjects (2011), Jini Kim Watson’s The New Asian City (2011) and Stuti Khanna’s The Contemporary Novel and the City (2013), for example, focus primarily on the postcolonial and postimperial city. Although Khanna’s book traces the intersections between Joyce’s Dublin and Rushdie’s Bombay, she notes the tendency among critics to associate the modernist city with European metropolises such as London, Paris and Berlin – where themes of modernisation, alienation and consumerism take centre stage – in contrast to ‘postmodern’ cities such as Los Angeles, Shanghai, Johannesburg and Mumbai, where questions of hybridity, simulacra, incommensurability and ethnic and religious tension loom large.18 Meanwhile, studies of twentieth-century modernist writing and the city, such as Anna Snaith’s Modernist Voyages (2014), Elizabeth Evans’s Threshold Modernism (2018) and Andrew Thacker’s Modernism, Space and the City (2019), have tended either to prioritise experiences of migrants in European metropolises or to contrast modernist urban life with peripheral experiences marked by ‘banality’ and slowness, as for example in Saikat Majumdar’s reading of Mansfield and Joyce in Modernism and the Banality of Empire (2013). This is not to imply an absence of comparative literary studies of colonial cities, however. As volumes such as The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (2012) make clear, an entire field has emerged around the study of modernist cultures among intellectuals from locations outside Europe and North America.19 From the leaders of the Bengal Renaissance to Shanghai’s League of LeftWing Writers, modernist intellectuals mediated between local sites of cultural and knowledge production and the institutional authority and prestige of the imperial centres. By shifting the focus from writers in the metropole to those working at the semi-periphery, we see how modernism’s global turn was shaped by writers in cities such as Dublin, Calcutta and Shanghai, as much as by those in London or New York. While this book contributes to this project of decentring the EuroAmerican metropolis, it does so by returning to a critical intervention posed by scholars based primarily in the Global South, for whom aesthetic innovations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries responded to an experience of peripherality. The book brings together arguments from theorists in Ireland, Brazil, China and the Pacific Islands, who, read together, historicise the emergence of a critical aesthetics attentive to ‘misplaced’ or ‘magical’ concepts, of the kind embedded in the visual

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and architectural landscapes of the ‘Westernised’ city. My point of departure here is Marshall Berman’s provocative attempt to trace the original ‘unreal city’ of literary modernism back to the St. Petersburg of Dostoevsky, whose ethereal and dreamlike urban impressions are seen to respond to the strange, partial and conflicted modernity of the periphery. In cities that are both outside the West yet overwhelmingly influenced by its cultural imports, Berman suggests, the meanings of modernity appear most ‘complex, elusive and paradoxical’.20 Like Berman, the Brazilian literary critic Roberto Schwarz shows how the weight of an inherited imperial culture in the urban centres of Brazil came into conflict with the asymmetries, co-existing temporalities and disparate social energies shaping everyday experience, leading to a strange and defamiliarising urban aesthetics. Similarly, the coeval forces of modernisation and dispossession on display in colonial Dublin, as Declan Kiberd indicates, meant that the city was less a backwater than a laboratory for cultural insurgency, whose writers were able to borrow but also to ‘pulverize’ English literary conventions.21 To be peripheral, Joe Cleary writes, is ‘to be compelled to develop within constraints, sets of forces, and agendas – economic, political, cultural, intellectual – that have largely been prescribed or conditioned by developments in the metropolis’.22 Yet, for precisely this reason, modernism ‘emerged with the greatest violence and brilliance not at the center of the modern literary world-system but on the semiperipheries of that system’.23 Examining the possibilities of this idea, this book traces a comparative, peripheral history of the modernist city.

Liverpools of the East: ‘Exporting’ Modernity to the Colonial City What exactly is a colonial city?24 Are all cities colonial cities? And, if so, are all cities equally colonised, or are some cities more colonised than others? In one sense, all cities can be seen as colonising: they extract a surplus from the wider economies to which they are attached and facilitate the transfer of wealth and resources from areas such as farms, mines and plantations. By the same token, all cities might be viewed as colonial, insofar as their resources are ‘colonised’ by capital.25 Perhaps what the suggestion that all cities are colonial cities risks overlooking, however, is the role of the nation state within post-imperial and postcolonial urban contexts, a role that reveals how some cities may be more vulnerable to colonisation – or more effective colonisers – than others. As Robert Young puts it, part of postcolonial criticism’s power lies in its ability to consider ‘how differently

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9

things look when you live in Baghdad or Benin rather than Berlin or Boston’.26 This is not to disavow the colonial history of cities such as Boston purely because of the national privileges afforded to them today. Nor is it to suggest that administrators of cities such as Dublin, Bombay or Hong Kong – once tentatively labelled Celtic or Asian ‘Tigers’ – did not historically collaborate with elite landholding sectors of colonised populations. In fact, we can think of a city like Singapore as ‘colonised’ by Britain but also ‘coloniser’ of plantations and mines in the Malay Archipelago; both colonial and colonised at once, such spaces are better described as metrocolonial.27 One way of working with the category of the colonial city is to establish a typology of spaces capable of linking the diversity of experience within them to their shared colonial histories. Within the British Empire, this typology might include imperial cities, settler cities, partially and unsettled administrative centres, and military and naval bases. The urban geographer Robert Home has separated the grand planning model adopted in settler cities, which typically resulted in wide, geometric streets, classical symmetry and green belts, from the more chaotic and uneven development of extractive and administrative port cities, where minimal investment in public infrastructure often led to superficial improvements or facades.28 Despite these visible differences in urban layouts, Home includes both settler and non-settler models in his study of colonial cities. This suggests that although life in administrative colonial centres was a world away from the planned modernity of settler cities, certain colonial practices – such as racial and ethnic zoning, the stratification of indigenous and migrant workers and the architectural impositions of an idealised English culture – were to be found across heterogeneous spaces. In fact, as Duncan Bell points out, distinguishing settler colonies from other colonial spaces can be problematic insofar as it obscures three very real similarities: namely, that all forms of imperialism ‘involved the violent dispossession of and rule over indigenous peoples’; that all ‘had roots deep in the political and intellectual history of Europe’; and that ‘all generated diverse forms of opposition, at home and abroad’.29 As Bell suggests, placing settler colonies in a category of their own can lend support to the false assumption that these territories were culturally void or demographically unoccupied. At the same time, it is important to note the crucial role of settler colonies such as New Zealand, Canada, Australia and South Africa in the development of British imperial ideology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Bell shows, these colonies were viewed as more durable and legitimate: ‘It was in the settler colonies, not India, that many liberals found the concrete place of their

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dreams’.30 Widely viewed as replicas of the ‘mother country’, these spaces became fantasy sites of mimetic transfer, giving rise to the imperial ideal of ‘a different perhaps nobler, kind of civilizing mission, defined by the construction of exemplary new political communities embodying the virtues of British freedom and law’ (47–8, emphasis in the original). Yet, as the chapters in this book show, all colonial cities – including those functioning as administrative centres within extractive, non-settler colonies – became sites for fantasies of mimetic transfer, concretising liberal dreams about the spread of British freedoms. Even in those colonies that functioned primarily as sites for resource extraction, the port city was the symbolic heartland for the idea of a more durable and legitimate mode of British rule. Working with and against these categories, then, this book considers the extent to which settler ideologies were applied to the urban centres of nonsettler colonies, showing how a set of shared phenomena – namely, urban segregation, uneven development and the importation of European modernising discourses – generated shared experiences across cities. Central to these experiences, as accounts from writers as well as colonial administrators reveal, is the characterisation of colonial cities as recipients of an imported British modernity. Equally central, however, is the emergence of an oppositional culture that, in negating such characterisations, calls into question the narrative of modernity as a European phenomenon exported to colonised recipients. The idea that modernity could be exported to colonial territories was a pervasive one in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and this was nowhere more obvious than in the field of urban planning. As town-planning movements gained traction in Europe, conceptions of colonial cities as replicas of European counterparts circulated alongside plans for new modernist conurbations and garden cities in the tropics. Zanzibar, for example, was envisaged as ‘the garden city of tomorrow’, Rangoon ‘the garden city of the East’ and even Palestinian Jerusalem under the British Mandate was to be a ville nouvelle. Although the majority of these plans failed to materialise due to economic constraints, a number of superstar architects and planners did attempt to export planning models abroad, among them Henri Prost in Morocco, Daniel Burnham in the Philippines, Herbert Baker in Pretoria and Stanley Adshead in Lusaka. Perhaps the most controversial figure of this milieu was the founding father of international modernism, the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, whose seven plans for Algiers in the 1930s have since been regarded as the epitome of modernist universalising arrogance. Corbusier’s plans never went beyond

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paper, due, he claimed, to economic imperatives: the fact that the French state cultivated an environment friendly to speculative financial and property markets, while handing out mining and military concessions and relying on cheap migrant labour, for example, all made colonial urbanism a fundamentally chaotic process at odds with modernist planning.31 Corbusier’s travel writings also show how his designs, despite their universalising aims, borrowed heavily from romanticised impressions of the vernacular architectures observed in Serbian villages and cities in the M’zab, whose small, whitewashed buildings, clean lines and communal squares were, he claimed, built with regard for the sensibilities of occupants.32 Given the influence of vernacular building cultures on Corbusier’s designs, it becomes difficult to view modernism as a purely European phenomenon to be exported abroad. Well-planned cities were in fact a common feature of precolonial urban societies; even Sir Stamford Raffles found that the larger towns of Indonesia were characterised by an ‘extreme neatness and regularity’ that ‘must be ascribed entirely to the natives’.33 Key to the narrative of urban modernity as a European export is the assumption that colonial cities, despite their strategic and commercial importance, were typically no more than ‘sleepy fishing villages’ prior to European colonisation. As historians have pointed out, this narrative has served to legitimise the dismantling of pre-existing domestic industrial and craft economies to make way for export-oriented markets, a process that accelerated the decline of formerly powerful regional trading centres, often inland or elsewhere along the coastline.34 Understanding colonial urbanisation in a relational way helps to dispel two pervasive myths. The first is that colonial cities were created ex nihilo, a claim that underestimates the extent to which colonial powers tended to reroute existing trade networks. Raffles, for example, did not so much ‘found’ Singapore out of nothing as establish a base for East India Company factories in a region already enmeshed within a thriving Malay trade culture. The second myth is that these cities were subject to systematic regional planning, a claim that overlooks the primacy of resource extraction, which often led to severe imbalances between rural and urban regions.35 The question of whether British planners sought to modernise colonial territories is equally complex. Although the nineteenth century saw the introduction of modern infrastructures and technologies of mobility, including railways, steamships, deep water harbours, tram networks and telegraph cables, these transformations imposed new forms of immobility, forced mobility, segregation and bureaucratic restrictions on colonised populations,

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weakening domestic industries, aggravating environmental and food crises and accelerating militarisation and conflict. In this respect, the idea of colonial urbanisation as a modernising force cannot be taken as a given. As an emblem of the colonial project that speaks to the complex mechanisms by which communities were put into new and transformative relationships with one another, Marian Aguiar identifies the example of the railway in nineteenth-century British India.36 Not only did this technology facilitate the militarised reorganisation of domestic economies to minimise competition with Manchester, but it also served as a symbol of the modernising forces of empire. As Aguiar shows, the railway captured cultural ideals of rational and technological enlightenment that reinforced Britain’s sense of universal certainty in its mission to unite the world. The Marquess of Dalhousie, governor-general of India in the 1850s, was convinced that the railways would lead to the national wealth and social improvement that marked ‘various kingdoms of the Western world’, while even Marx claimed that the railway would allow India to overcome the caste distinctions dividing its workforce.37 The railway’s project of mobility and speed enacted a colonial desire to overcome the stasis of traditional rural life, promising to set India on a linear trajectory towards modernity. Yet, although the colossal brick and iron structures, grand marble terminus buildings and new steam and metallurgy technologies were impressive to behold, the ‘network of iron’ did not simply overturn ethnic and caste distinctions, primarily because its facilitation of exportoriented trade exacerbated rural-urban divisions. The impact of this was notably severe in the 1870s and 1890s, when inflation caused grain prices to exceed the purchasing power of rural populations, creating catastrophic food crises that led to an increase in rural-to-urban migration.38 As in Ireland in the 1850s, the British government refused to invest in public works and continued to finance production methods yielding the highest returns. If the fabric of social life in Britain was transformed by the railway and its ‘ringing grooves of change’, these modernising promises were contradicted by the railway’s uneven and polarising effects on colonial Indian society. Symbols of a similarly complex modernity appeared in the grand government buildings, universities, libraries, museums, monuments, parks, botanical gardens, racetracks and cricket grounds of British colonial cities. Although these were typically products of a joint enterprise between English (or English-educated) planners and local investors and were built by local, migrant and indentured labourers, their exteriors attempted to denote the racial and cultural supremacy of the coloniser by borrowing

Liverpools of the East

13

ideals of civilisational refinement from antiquity. Of course, these buildings were not only symbols but social spaces with specific functions, including disciplinary spaces, such as the barracks, jails, courthouses, police stations and asylums; secure residential spaces that offered cocoons of wealth and security for elite residents, typically on high ground (Hong Kong’s Victoria Peak, for example); and modern spaces of leisure such as tea rooms, clubs, department stores, hotels and cinemas. While the new billiard rooms, libraries, sporting grounds and public baths of colonial cities were exclusive and exclusionary spaces, divided along racial as well as class and gender lines, they also functioned as assimilative cultural mechanisms that promoted shared values between colonising and colonised. One traveller in 1895 notes how the activities of cricket, football and lawn tennis transformed the public spaces of Singapore, now ‘covered in the afternoons with Chinese engaged in these games’, viewing this as evidence of Chinese pride in a British identity.39 Perhaps the most iconic space of all was the gentleman’s club, which, although initially reserved for white men, had its exclusivity contested in the early twentieth century. While Indians are forbidden from entering the club in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), George Orwell’s Burmese Days (1934) dramatises attempts made by Burmese elites to gain membership. These examples show how the rooms, buildings and playing fields of the British Empire reinforced assumptions about the supremacy of English culture, yet also how these ideals were adopted and appropriated by colonised subjects. By focusing on such forms of appropriation, colonial cities can be viewed as cultural contact zones, whose marketplaces, docks, gambling dens, maidans and other outdoor gathering places, business houses and even brothels allowed for encounters that breached divides of race, class and gender. Yet although the subversive elements of cultural hybridity and cosmopolitanism have been emphasised in studies of individual cities, it could be argued that the forms of racial hierarchy, segregation and restriction introduced by colonial powers generally made cities (such as Guangzhou, to take one example) less cosmopolitan than they had been in previous centuries. Furthermore, although cultural hybridity is often perceived as transgressive in its capacity to unsettle coloniser/colonised binaries, architectural historians have suggested that hybridity was fundamental to colonial policy. The historian Thomas Metcalf, for example, argues that inasmuch as India’s architecture was modernised, it was equally constructed to portray a ‘traditional’ society in contrast to Europe’s progress: by juxtaposing various elements of India’s past to form the IndoSaracenic style, for example, architects ‘at once created a past for India and

14

Introduction: The Colonies in Concrete

asserted British mastery of that past’.40 Other historians have shown how the hybrid, eclectic architecture of colonial Bombay was integral to the consolidation of a new and conciliatory vision of British ‘imperial maturity’, cementing ideologies of integration, synthesis and ‘development along native lines’.41 Rather than constructing a global network of Liverpools, colonial planners were committed to the cultivation of hybrid spaces that promoted both ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ forms of social organisation. If the colonial city cannot be defined according to its cosmopolitanism (given how this could be actively reversed by new forms of segregation) nor by modernisation (given the regressive nature of colonial urbanism’s effects on precolonial trading centres), perhaps it can be connected more convincingly to the rise of a modern consumer culture. Singapore is a case in point: imagined as a great commercial emporium and a trading hub in the flows of opium, tea, spices, tobacco, oil, tin and rubber linking Britain and China, this new ‘metropolis of the Indian seas’ would, according to Raffles, bring ‘arts and civilization’ to the islands of the Malay Archipelago, binding them through ‘commercial intercourse’.42 From the midnineteenth century, modern consumer goods were displayed in various outlets: Raffles Hotel, the ‘Savoy of Singapore’, promoted jewellery, silverware, tobacco, fabrics and glassware in the palatial department store Little’s (‘the finest store East of Suez’), leading the Malay scholar Munshi Abdullah to marvel at the merchandise pouring in ‘like a torrent’: ‘A brimming tide of goods flowed in from every country . . . things which our grandparents never saw’.43 As precursors to today’s multinational chains, companies and emporia purveying luxury goods such as Whiteaways and Lane Crawford transformed colonial cities into points of entry to a Western consumer culture. They became magnets for those stationed upcountry for months on end: in colonial Rangoon, George Orwell imagines officers rushing ‘to Smart and Mookerdum’s bookshop for the new novels out from England, the dinner at Anderson’s with beefsteaks and butter that had travelled eight thousand miles on ice’.44 As Rashmi Varma points out, the presence of imported consumer goods in colonial cities created new household economies, enabling ideas of modernisation, Westernisation and civilisation to shape elite class structures while helping to graft a capitalist economy onto the colonies.45 From a commercial standpoint, this process was never incompatible with the idea of cultural hybridity; in fact, an ‘East-meetsWest’ identity was central to both imperial imaginaries and marketing campaigns in port cities. In Singapore, cultural diversity was viewed as evidence of the benevolence of British laissez-faire rule. One commenter in 1889 observed the following:

Haussmann in the Tropics

15

In one spot you are dazzled with the silks of India; in another the sarongs of Java are spread out like a kaleidoscope . . . . All this mixed humanity exists in order and security and sanitation, living and thriving and trading, simply because of the presence of English law and under the protection of the British flag.46

The colonial city here is envisaged as an exotic bazaar and haven for freefloating merchandise and ‘mixed humanity’ alike. That many of these descriptions come from marketing material suggests that impressions of the city as an emporium of luxury goods and cosmopolitan subjects aimed to attract traders, investors and tourists. More broadly, it suggests that colonial cities were witnesses to the emergence of a transnational consumer culture significantly in advance of so-called globalisation. All this raises the question of how subversive academic accounts of colonial cities as hybrid, cosmopolitan contact zones continue to be. Despite attractive narratives of colonial port cities as cultural melting pots, reports of the exclusions faced by both local and migrant populations paint a different picture. By the early twentieth century, Singapore had not come to resemble a ‘Manchester of the East’ at all; in fact, travellers frequently voiced alarm at the possibility of cheap Chinese labour threatening Manchester factories. Although the governor of the Straits Settlements described the city’s identity as ‘the Clapham Junction of the Eastern Seas’ in positive terms, residents were plagued by urban poverty, unsafe housing, unregulated working conditions, inadequate infrastructure and inequality.47 Meanwhile, initiatives to improve sanitation and prevent disease were impeded by limited funding. In Lagos, the ‘Liverpool of West Africa’, efforts to tackle malaria were abandoned due to lack of financial support from the British Treasury, pushing planners to develop strategies to segregate wealthy enclaves from the rest of the population; this, as in other colonial ports, sparked a wave of strikes, riots and demonstrations.48 The response was telling in that where ‘development’ did manifest itself – in military, health and law enforcement objectives – planners were less concerned with a universalising attempt to export European modernity abroad than with the need to manage these contradictions before they generated insurgency.

Haussmann in the Tropics Discussions of global urbanisation often begin with Baron Haussmann’s redevelopment of Paris in the 1850s and 1860s, which, as Walter Benjamin

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Introduction: The Colonies in Concrete

suggested, was central to the top-down management, containment and surveillance of urban populations, as well as the promotion of new public behaviours and consumer identities. Yet, rather than viewing Haussmannisation as a starting point for urban planning in the colonies, its colonial prehistory can be identified in the militarised occupation of French Algiers in the 1830s. Here, the French army created new boulevards and squares removed from the old city centre (kasbah), converting mosques into cathedrals and razing large areas to make way for a military parade ground.49 Insofar as these processes were key to French attempts to contain uprisings, colonial urbanism was once again concerned less with exporting modernity than with testing out containment strategies, committed less to a ‘Paris of the East’ than to a ‘Haussmann in the tropics’.50 In the British context, some of the earliest experiments in colonial urban planning took place in Ireland. Scholars have traced the history of twentieth-century ‘colour lines’ to the policies of religious segregation in Ulster towns, while Dublin has been viewed as a laboratory in which new methods of military surveillance, colonial education and incarceration were tested out. Carl Nightingale, in his history of ‘divided cities’, identifies early forms of urban segregation in Irish towns; yet he also traces the etymology of the word ‘segregation’ in its modern usage to health and sanitation discourses, noting how, in British Hong Kong in the 1890s, urban stratification followed sanitation initiatives targeting airborne and waterborne disease.51 This medicalisation of urban planning led to the separation of communities into ‘native’ and ‘European’ quarters, segregating ‘unhygienic’ from ‘hygienic’ bodies. A literary example of this appears in Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil (1925), which shows how the luxury high ground of Hong Kong’s Peak allowed for the relative insulation of European inhabitants from the plague outbreaks devastating surrounding regions.52 Efforts among colonial planners to prioritise health, safety and public order also served economic purposes, as was apparent in the extreme example of segregation in African colonial towns. As Tomas Frederiksen shows in his discussion of British Northern Rhodesia, African workers were excluded from the towns and required to live in ‘native reserves’ near the mines, where they were legally prevented from opening their own businesses. Yet despite this segregation of the workforce, the British aimed to create modern economic subjects through the promotion of colonial education, market relations, luxuries and social status, adopting inclusive cultural practices through the missionary schools that insisted on ‘the right of the individual for self-advancement’.53 The result, Frederiksen shows, was that profound contradictions haunted the Zambian copper belt

Haussmann in the Tropics

17

towns. As John Comaroff suggests, these contradictions characterise colonial governance more broadly, whose power lies in its ability to absorb and ignore them – ‘its capacity to be ordered yet incoherent, rational yet absurd, violent yet impotent; to elicit compliance and contestation, discipline and defiance, subjection and insurrection. Sometimes all at once’.54 One writer who captures a vivid sense of these contradictions as they are experienced and lived in the colonial city is Frantz Fanon. In part because of his medical experience in Algeria – where he encountered colonial segregation in the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital – Fanon was highly alert to the connection between urban form and the production of racialised economic subjects. For Fanon, colonial cities were the fortresses of colonialism – ‘little islands of the mother-country’ – where, due to class advantages and technical advances, ‘modern ideas reign’.55 The divisions within the city itself reflect those of the colony and the colonial world more broadly. In his famous description of a world divided into compartments, Fanon imagines the settler’s town as ‘a strongly-built town, all made of stone and steel’ and ‘a brightly lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt, and the garbage cans swallow all the leavings, unseen, unknown and hardly thought about’ (32). The ‘native town’, by contrast, is ‘a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other . . . . The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light’ (32). Fanon’s Manichean image makes visible the unevenness of the colonial city, which is characterised not by full modernisation but by co-existing enclaves of modernity and tradition. He draws on the example of the ‘native’ sector of Algiers, and more specifically on the segregated women’s quarters of the Algerian home, to show how colonial subjects are locked in by the constraints of tradition, a fact that he connects to the stasis brought about by colonial rule. In Fanon’s world of compartments, colonisation does not involve a blanket modernisation of the city but exacerbates already existing polarities by improving certain areas and further marginalising the invisible quarters on which the city’s wealthy half depend. This suggests that the exportation of colonial culture, whatever its homogenising, modernising or Westernising effects, remains a highly uneven and incomplete process, determined by structures of access that afford colonial privileges to a few yet which depend on the expropriation of colonised populations.56 Fanon’s characterisation of the colonial city in binaristic terms corresponds with what he sees as the political fracturing of colonised communities. Within the atmosphere of stasis brought about by colonial rule, subjects are immobilised and ‘blocked’ (or ‘fixed’, ‘sealed’, ‘locked’ and

18

Introduction: The Colonies in Concrete

‘walled in’).57 Fanon’s psychoanalytic framework suggests that being walled in relates not only to spatial incarceration or zoning but also to the psychic consequences of atomisation. The townspeople are viewed stereotypically by the rural majority as mercenaries who ‘seem to get on with the occupying powers, and do their best to get on within the framework of the colonial system’, a system in which ‘my friend is part of my scheme for getting on’.58 Children in the cities dream of individual rewards or passing their exams, while striving urban workers who manage to turn the colonial system to their advantage are ‘the most comfortably off fraction of the people’ (98). For Fanon, this constructs a ‘society of individuals where each person shuts himself up in his own subjectivity, and whose only wealth is individual thought’ (38). The channels ‘hammered’ in place by the colonial regime separate subjects who ‘get on’ from those who are ‘walled in’. The passing of exams, the ability to move up the hierarchies of the factory system, the adoption of the colonial language through missionary education – each rewards compliant individuals with a measure of social mobility that immobilises the community as a whole. Fanon connects this sense of immobility to the city’s architectural landscape as ‘a world of statues: the statue of the general who carried out the conquest, the statue of the engineer who built the bridge; a world which is sure of itself’ (41). With its grand public buildings, military squares and foreign goods on display, the monumental landscape immobilises meaning just as it does subjects, leading to an internalisation (and epidermalisation) of colonial value that papers over the contradictions of modernisation-as-dispossession with a sense of false certainty. For Fanon, the certainty of the world of statues cements the fiction of self-driven development, affirming the historical narrative of a European modernity achieved by its own labours. Just as the white town disavows its reliance on the native quarter – its garbage removed ‘unseen, unknown and hardly thought about’ – so does Europe render invisible the resources that have fuelled its industries: raw materials from Latin America, China and Africa, from where ‘there has flowed out for centuries . . . diamonds and oil, silk and cotton, wood and exotic products’ (80). For Fanon, this problem of representation is linked to the contemporary reportage of colonial violence. Addressing the French public, he condemns the ‘absurdity’ and ‘phraseology’ involved in ‘speeches on the equality of human beings’ insofar as they mask the serious discrepancies between public reactions to the losses of French soldiers and the massacre of colonised civilians (70). Again, this selective vision mirrors the way that subjects are segregated in the colonial city. In the ‘native town’, Fanon suggests, people are born, ‘it matters little

Difference through Connection

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where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how’ (32). The city’s ‘native’ quarter thus forms a microcosm of a world in which colonised populations are excluded both as agents of history and as subjects of contemporary interest. Nevertheless, Fanon suggests that it is precisely this combination of invisibility and dependence that allows anti-colonial struggles to have a paralysing effect on metropolitan populations. ‘Since the European settlement is often confined to the towns’, he writes, ‘the psychological effects of demonstrations on that settlement are considerable: there is no electricity, no gas, the dust-bins are left unemptied, and goods rot on the quays’ (98). The sudden, visual manifestation of rubbish, resulting from the breakdown of formerly invisible, smooth-running infrastructures manned by colonial subjects, makes the fact of metropolitan dependence clear. At such moments, the irruption of a colonial ‘reality’ breaks with the established spatial and visual order, exposing the underlying structural violence that ‘has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world’ (33). Yet while this disruptive visibility opens up a strategy of political resistance, Fanon also emphasises the semantic potential of such gestures as they undermine the coloniser’s rhetoric. ‘Let us admit it’, he asserts, ‘the settler knows perfectly well that no phraseology can be a substitute for reality’ (36). The divisions and antagonisms of a local ‘reality’ disrupt the abstract, integrative rhetoric of the coloniser, who, Fanon suggests, responds to antagonism by promoting ‘universal’ and ‘Western values’ (35). If these values congeal in the world of statues, Fanon’s writing, by contrast, transforms the monumentalised landscape of the coloniser into the stage for a violent collision between claims to abstract universality and everyday material conditions, between grand colonial ideas and the exclusions upon which they rest. Far from being naively Manichean, his thinking confronts the liberal idea of a modernity exported to the colonies with the contradictory evidence on display in the built anachronisms, enforced stasis and stark divides of the city itself – harnessing the form of the metropolis to reveal the complex and contradictory truth of colonial modernity.

Difference through Connection: Towards a Concrete Comparativism Fanon’s attention to the divided form of the colonial city is the starting point for this book’s analysis of metrocolonial aesthetics. In Chapter 1, I discuss literary representations of the peripheral city, highlighting depictions of the urban landscape as dreamlike and anachronistic in modernist

20

Introduction: The Colonies in Concrete

and proto-modernist texts. From Dostoevsky to Machado, Kafka to Joyce, I show how the clash between imperial and Westernising discourses, on the one hand, and the perceived incompleteness of urban modernity at the periphery of Western Europe, on the other, played a key role in the critical and experimental urban aesthetics that emerged from the late nineteenth century. Chronicling literary responses to the complex modernity on display at the margins of European culture, I build towards a theory of modernism at the urban semi-periphery – or what I term ‘metrocolonial modernism’. Having sketched out this theory, Chapter 2 turns to the city as imagined in literary impressionism from the early twentieth century, reflecting on the spectral, ethereal landscape of Singapore as it appears in the fiction of Joseph Conrad. In Conrad’s writing, the neoclassical buildings housing the banks and corporations appear superimposed and emptied of life, rendering Singapore’s grand and solid modernity strangely superficial and insubstantial. As scholars have argued, this works to unsettle the city’s colonial identity as a triumph of modernity and order over primeval jungle, which, as J. H. Stape suggests, makes Conrad’s Singapore an archetypal ‘unreal city’ and a crucial location for the development of urban impressionism.59 Building on this argument, Chapter 2 shows how Conrad not only stages the breakdown of colonial progress but also engages critically with the British laissez-faire discourses framing the city’s foundational identity as a free port. In this way, a connection opens up between his modernist experiments with narrative agency and the city’s own colonial identity as the product of the ‘invisible hand’ of market forces. If Chapter 2 reads the colonial city as a laboratory for urban impressionism, Chapter 3 highlights its equally formative impact on the ‘high’ modernist aesthetics of the 1920s, focusing on the role of colonial Dublin in the work of James Joyce. Taking up Joseph Valente’s definition of Dublin as a metrocolonial space, I show how imperial ideals of unity, equalisation and harmony were inscribed onto the architectural landscape and crystallised in early twentieth-century British philanthropic discourses. Specifically, I focus on the Empire Day movement, whose organisers aimed to inspire pride and participation in colonial subjects through a day-long urban celebration. While this event attempted to synchronise time across the empire’s cities, as part of an early Commonwealth imaginary, Joyce’s ‘Wandering Rocks’ episode from Ulysses confronts readers with experiences of dissonance and asynchronism, just as the temporality of the episode itself resists readerly synchronisation. The chapter ends by identifying this technique as an anti-colonial form of ‘local universalism’, showing how

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this travelled beyond Dublin into the cities imagined by Indian writers in the 1930s. Turning next to one of the writers inspired by Joyce, Chapter 4 considers the 1930s urban fiction of Mulk Raj Anand, who adopts a selfavowedly Joycean emphasis on local specificity and engages critically with the Indian cities imagined by contemporaries including Rudyard Kipling, Aldous Huxley and E. M. Forster. In Forster’s A Passage to India, as with Conrad, the emphasis on urban division affirms a sense of the text’s spatial and narrative limits; yet Anand’s detailed representation of Bombay in his novel Coolie (1936) – which follows the short life of a worker who migrates to the port city – enacts a shift away from this emphasis on unknowable cultural divides, presenting difference as integral to the organisation of the metrocolonial economy. Showing how this leads to a crisis of development, enacted at the level of plot through the protagonist’s untimely death as a rickshaw puller, this chapter suggests that Anand not only challenges the developmental telos of the Bildungsroman but also subverts the narrative of ‘imperial maturity’ central to the city’s own colonial identity. In this way, it aligns Anand’s writing with other modernist fictions from metrocolonial zones. Building on Chapter 4’s analysis, the fifth and final chapter of this book turns to post-independence writing from the urban South Pacific, focusing on the capital of Fiji, Suva, and its association with the birth of Oceanian modernism in the 1970s. Elaborating first on the ‘swamp-to-city’ narrative surrounding the construction of the capital on reclaimed land, I consider the amphibious themes that appear in narratives of gendered walking by writers including the Fijian environmental activist Vanessa Griffen and Indo-Fijian writer Subramani, alongside theory from the Fijian/Tongan writer Epeli Hau‘ofa. Drawing on the critical framework structuring previous chapters, I show how each of these writers interrogates colonial narratives of the Pacific port city by linking the reappearance of its terraqueous past to issues of ecological precarity and the colonial legacies that have exacerbated them. The book concludes by suggesting that if modernist representations of the city dovetail with current concerns among urban theorists, none of the writers under investigation dismisses the idea of development per se. Rather, their visions of the mundane aspects of civic life, technological modernisation, urban collectivity and public works offer an alternative to postmodern urbanism, insofar as the idea of development is not so much rejected as reimagined on reparative and redistributive terms.

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Introduction: The Colonies in Concrete

Consequently, urban writing from beyond the imperial centre is seen to restore certain properly ‘modernist’ energies to the field. Methodologically, this project approaches the particularities of text and context through a comparative postcolonial framework. In doing so, it adopts the technique employed in Jessica Berman’s historicist reading of canonical figures such as Joyce alongside Mulk Raj Anand, which develops a ‘transnational optic’ that compares texts on the basis of their anti-colonial specificity.60 Pushing for a similarly relational-comparative approach, this study takes its cue from efforts by Berman, Jed Esty, Laura Winkiel and John Marx to align modernist literature with the contemporary worldsystem.61 Mindful of the need for a global approach to modernist culture, I consider how shared experiences across metrocolonial locations reveal anonymity to be politically loaded, underemployment rather than Fordist conformity to be the order of the day, and consumer culture to be available only to a privileged minority. This is not to flatten out differences between spaces as diverse as Dublin and Singapore, Suva and Bombay; yet this book pays attention to these cities’ foundational inclusion within an imagined imperial network, noting how the idea that London or Liverpool would (or could) be replicated around the globe is encoded in their very streets, buildings and squares, clubs, department stores, banks, law courts and libraries. Although the idea of replicating a Western modernity was aspirational at best, postcolonial cities continue to bear the traces of their highly uneven patterns of colonial integration, such that ascribing a purely local identity to them risks obscuring the legacy of their imperial enmeshment, or – to borrow a term from Ann Laura Stoler – the kinds of ‘duress’ under which imperial forms live on.62 This risk confronts scholars of the ‘alternative modernities’ paradigm, whose focus on non-European imperial societies has, in literary studies, sparked a number of affirmative attempts to locate ‘planetary modernisms’, from Mughal India to Tang-dynasty China.63 Yet what these accounts risk minimising, in treating modernism as something that arises spontaneously in response to social change anywhere in the world, is modernity’s specific historical association with European colonialism. As Kathleen Davis suggests, the concept of the ‘modern’ is inseparable from the colonial desire to designate the colonised to a pre-modern past, yet this historical narrative came into being through the material consolidation of colonialism and nationalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.64 As Jed Esty explains, insofar as post-historicist inquiry neglects this material history, it threatens to turn ‘comparative analysis into an exotic catalogue of pure differences and it risks an inadequate historical reckoning with the facts

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and legacies of European/Western power’.65 While Esty’s own work articulates an alternative in its return to modernist narratives of uneven development – a framework taken up across this book – some of the most compelling work in postcolonial theory has also re-engaged with the question of universalism from a materialist standpoint. By focusing on infrastructure, for example, Mezzadra and Rahola associate capitalism not with ‘an abstract universality but rather with the concrete universality imposed by colonial violence’.66 In this context, this book’s focus on the colonial city has a certain advantage in its ability to examine nonEurocentric modernisms while retaining a focus on the materiality of colonial legacies. This book’s comparative method is also informed by Walter Benjamin’s materialist approach to urban history, which, in examining the outmoded metropolitan cultures of the previous century, seeks to excavate the prehistories to the present and to understand the ways in which we have arrived at the current moment. This method also aspires towards what Benjamin terms ‘a concept of knowledge to which a concept of experience corresponds’, to repurpose one of his earlier statements.67 While Benjamin’s research on cities in the 1920s and 1930s, specifically Paris but also Marseille, Naples and Moscow, is known for its urban minutiae, his work is peppered with references to other locations. From the London of Marx and Dickens to imagined spaces as diverse as Morocco and the islands of the South Pacific, these locations find their way into the city’s advertisements, spectacles, street names and architectures. What this suggests is that the city is never understandable on its own terms. Not only are cities vitally connected to rural and colonial regions through urban infrastructures, but they also exist as part of imaginative serials. Just as the landscapes of Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg exist in reference to imperial dreams of London and its Crystal Palace, so colonial cities such as Dublin, Singapore and Bombay are constitutively informed by the aspirational architectures, monuments and toponyms of the British metropole. By understanding cities as materially but also imaginatively networked spaces, we see how they are always mirror images of other cities. Yet, by sifting through the details of everyday life in individual locations, literary narratives can confront knowledge with experience, reflecting these mirror images in ways that enlarge their fractures and distortions. By grounding textual analysis in specific but relational urban histories, this book’s method forgoes homogenising theoretical models to instead centre the act of comparison upon the concrete situations to which each text responds.68 Precisely because of this method, it uncovers a set of local

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Introduction: The Colonies in Concrete

specificities that ultimately challenge the assumptions embedded in these cities’ universalising architectural language. Thus, while the basis for comparison is centred on the idea of a shared colonial history, the results reveal how the cities under investigation refuse to fit a universal model of metrocolonial experience. In this way, the uniqueness of individual situations becomes the basis for a new and better mode of comparison, one that aims to rethink difference through connection.69 What this involves in practice is the analysis of specific urban formations alongside a wider appreciation of the world-systemic context in which such formations are framed. To this end, the concept of ‘urbanisation without development’ is used as the basis for careful historical comparison. I draw here on Mike Davis’s contention that where rapid urbanisation in contemporary cities such as Lagos, Mumbai or Mexico City has seen unregulated urban migration exceed the pace of economic growth, this follows a model more analogous to Victorian Dublin than to industrial Manchester. In Dublin, as in the rapidly expanding cities of the Global South that Davis identifies, the development of underdevelopment meant that urbanisation was ‘radically decoupled from industrialization’.70 Thus, when Joyce contends that Dublin offers a window into ‘all the cities of the world’, his comment resonates far beyond his original intention: after a painful process of deindustrialisation in the nineteenth century, Dublin suffered the effects of unemployment, slum housing, mass migration, food and environmental crises, as well as militarised policing and ethno-religious tensions. Although Joyce could hardly have predicted the ‘mega-Dublins’ identified by Davis in contemporary postcolonial regions, his vision of the concrete particularities and divergent trajectories of the colonial city – its incongruous mix of grand houses and shabby tenements, tramways and cattle, modern policing and crumbling infrastructure – speaks enduringly to the complexities of urban modernity today.

chapter 1

Metrocolonial Modernism

Literary modernism has long been associated with the urban centres of London, Paris and New York. From the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, writers in these cities witnessed the transformative effects of new temporalities of speed, acceleration and shock; the changing sociology of crowds and mass consumption; the liberating possibilities of anonymity, cosmopolitanism and gendered freedoms; and the alienating and atomising effects of the urban marketplace. From the flânerie of Baudelaire and Benjamin to the accelerative vitality of imagist and futurist poetry; from the smoggy, aqueous streets of Conrad to the sprawling suburbs of Forster and Ford Madox Ford; and from the ‘street-haunting’ of Virginia Woolf to the epic montages of T. S. Eliot and John Dos Passos, modernists responded creatively to the cultural, sensory and affective transformations of everyday life in the metropolis. Given also the impact of new media and visual technologies on both urban environments and narrative experiments, from the montage to the stream of consciousness, the city was not just a backdrop but also a formative context to the emergence of modernism’s aesthetic preoccupation with subjective impressions and visual uncertainties. If realism recorded the minutiae of specific places and moments – aiming for accuracy of description and emphasising the role of environment on character – and if modernism intensified these settings and accentuated their sensual, experiential and psychological effects, then this process corresponded in part to the growing intensities of modern urban life. As a way of clarifying this narrative of the modernist city, the foggy, amphibious London of Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) can be compared to the equally smoggy and amphibious London of Dickens, whose Bleak House (1852–3) Conrad claimed to have read ‘innumerable times’.1 Although The Secret Agent emulates the random and slippery nature of the Dickensian city, the novel differs at the level of narrative structure. As Franco Moretti suggests, Dickens produces ‘biographical fairy-tales’ of the 25

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city which, in texts like Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, restore a sense of unity by revealing magical blood ties that have the effect of turning London into a ‘coherent whole’.2 By contrast, Conrad dispenses with fortuitous resolutions, turning the events of accidents, bad luck and random disasters into features of the plot as well as the setting. Lacking a unifying biographical and moral organisation of reality, The Secret Agent ends with the suicide of its protagonist as a friendless immigrant, before explaining her death as the result of ‘senseless’ violence. This accords with the novel’s broader conceptual attack on the very idea of coherence through its failed detonation of the Greenwich Meridian, which results in the accidental, violent shattering of one of the main characters’ bodies. This attack is mirrored by the formally fragmented elements of the narrative itself, including its non-chronological structure; its proliferation of voices and perspectives; the multiple meanings opened up by narrative irony; and descriptions of the urban terrain as a place of voids, blanks, nonplaces (‘abroad by a fiction’), darknesses and other semantically unstable signifiers.3 Insofar as each of these is linked to the metropolis – whose dense, jungle-like political and commercial entanglements generate chaotic and uncontrollable effects – The Secret Agent can be seen to confront the novel’s social and narrative structure with the random connections and sensuous particularities of a city that has grown beyond all coherence and intelligibility. Accordingly, Conrad amplifies and intensifies the randomness of the Dickensian city, presenting readers with a space whose complexity exceeds the cognitive and visual capacities necessary to its realist representation. Scholars working on the modernist city have outlined various contextual factors that inform this emphasis on systemic complexity. These include the increasing density and opacity of urban bureaucracy at the turn of the twentieth century; anxieties about threats to insularity sparked by immigration and anti-colonial violence; and the experiences of simultaneity generated by new visual and communication technologies – each of which is seen to produce a more entangled, more disorienting and less representable city.4 Fredric Jameson has claimed that existential experience in the imperial metropolis could ‘no longer be grasped immanently’ by the early twentieth century: ‘it no longer has its meaning, its deeper reason for being, within itself’.5 For Jameson, the structural entanglements of empire produce conditions so abstract and interdependent that they defy the possibility of a knowable community. Building on work by Edward Said and Terry Eagleton, he suggests that modernist writers self-consciously evoked this entangled condition primarily because of their experience as

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(or exposure to) immigrants and émigrés. In this context, the most significant difference between Dickens and Conrad concerns their national identity. For the English Dickens, the empire ‘out there’ is essential to the fortuitous resolutions that facilitate urban prosperity in his earlier novels: in Great Expectations, an English subject has his situation resolved at the end of the narrative by embarking on economic activity in ‘the East’. By contrast, the immigrant protagonist of Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Winnie Verloc, finds herself unable to go abroad to magically transform herself and instead drowns by jumping into the English Channel, an action that symbolically performs the immigrant’s failure to emulate characters like Pip. At the same time, the city itself in Conrad is a porous, highly interdependent and international space, whose foreign flows of people, commodities and ideas threaten the stability, security and certainties offered to its subjects. If the difference between Dickens and Conrad is associated with the latter’s migrant consciousness, the modernist city appears not as the next stage in an intellectual and aesthetic evolutionary process, but as a widening literary geography. While the importance of migrant perspectives to modernism has long been understood, the focus has tended to remain on migrant cultures within imperial metropoles such as London and Paris. By contrast, this chapter considers the role of urban experience at the peripheries of empire, where structural entanglement (or what Jameson calls the loss of immanence, that sense that the city’s meaning lies elsewhere) was already a crucial aspect of urban life. What emerges in cities at the edges of empire, in other words, is an anticipatory awareness of the overwhelming power of external forces, a sense that the flows of capital, commodities, architectural styles and cultural forms arriving from the imperial centre had already produced an entangled and dependent experience of modernity at the level of everyday life. My contention in this chapter, then, is that the elusive, dreamlike and fragmented qualities of the city as imagined by a number of Anglophone modernists – from Conrad to Woolf, Eliot to Joyce – were shaped not only by immigrant cultures in the imperial centre but also by experience in cities with a consciously peripheral relationship to Western Europe. Anglophone writers were, for example, deeply indebted to a nineteenth-century Russian novelist, Fydor Dostoevsky, whose magical and ethereal Petersburg formed a prototype for the ‘unreal city’ of literary modernism. What was it about Petersburg’s modernity, the chapter begins by asking, that produced a model for the modernist city as early as the 1860s? One answer has to do with its self-conscious peripherality, as a landscape of consciously derivative gestures and borrowed forms

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following a fraught process of Westernisation, and the attendant breakdown of national structures of development, coherence and comprehension that this generated. If Dostoevsky articulates these contradictions through an unstable and ironic narrative voice, then similar narratives can be grounded in the experience of other cities at the margins of European culture. From Machado to Conrad, Kafka to Joyce, peripheral urban experience gives rise to an equally complex and conflicted portrait of urban modernity, in which the modernising ideals and universalising aspirations embedded in the built landscape come into conflict with everyday experience on the city streets. Weaving together these diverse examples, this chapter builds towards a theory of aesthetics at the urban semiperiphery, or what I term ‘metrocolonial modernism’. While the result is by no means an exhaustive theory of the modernist city, it nevertheless shows how writers from cities considered economically or culturally peripheral at the height of Western Europe’s imperial dominance – cities such as Petersburg, Dublin, Prague, Shanghai or Rio – transformed the dissonances of urban life at the margins of English culture into the prototype for a new urban aesthetics.

The Original ‘Unreal City’: London, Paris or Petersburg? Studies of the modernist city often begin with Baudelaire’s celebration of everyday urban ephemera in ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863); yet an alternative genealogy is outlined in Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air (1982), which traces the ‘unreal city’ back to nineteenthcentury Petersburg. Berman shows how Russian writers of this period treated universalising narratives with a degree of suspicion, asking if ‘the explosive atmosphere of modernization in the West’, with its attendant social, psychic and cultural transformations, ‘might be a cultural peculiarity rather than an iron necessity inexorably awaiting the whole of mankind’.6 Although Berman deliberates on this idea, he ultimately refuses to abandon a conventional model of modernity as a universalising process that unfolds across the world in a linear sequence. As such, he explains Russia’s alternative trajectory by theorising a split between the modernism that arose in ‘the great cities of the West’ (London, Paris, New York), where the upheavals of modernisation were keenly felt, and areas outside it, where, ‘despite the pervasive pressures of the expanding world market . . . modernization was not going on’ (174, emphasis in the original). This tension is embodied in Petersburg, a city imagined as a window to Europe that represented ‘all the foreign and cosmopolitan forces that

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flowed through Russian life’ (176). Berman singles out the Nevsky Prospect – an ostentatious avenue in the city centre built during the Westernising schemes of Tsar Peter I – which opened up ‘in the heart of an underdeveloped country, a prospect of all the dazzling promises of the modern world’, forming a ‘free zone’ for the display of European goods and giving concrete form to Enlightenment ideas from Europe (195). The promises of modernity on display here, Berman argues, jarred with the despotic politics adopted by Russian leaders and landowners, who, in refusing to modernise their estates, ensured that economic development was ‘held back, just at the moment when the economies of Western Europe and the United States were taking off and surging ahead’ (193, 191). The forms and symbols of an imported modernity in Petersburg, when combined with an aristocratic and despotic Russian political culture, produced an uneven and unbalanced modernity, resulting in a ‘weird’ form of modernism that Berman calls ‘the modernism of underdevelopment’ (193). This modernism of underdevelopment is exemplified for Berman in the mystical, fantastic and elusive landscape of Dostoevsky’s Petersburg, as ‘a mirage, a ghost town, whose grandeur and magnificence are continually melting into its murky air’ (and in Dostoevsky’s words, ‘the most abstract and premeditated city on earth’).7 Berman focuses on Notes from Underground (1864), reading the novella’s formal structure, in which the narrator is driven down from the open streets of the Nevsky to his underground flat, as evidence of a wider contradiction between the images and rhythms of modern life incarnated by the Nevsky and the reality of a Russian ‘caste-bound autocracy that still has the dead weight to push its modern men off the street and drive them underground’ (228). In this way, the narrative is seen to stage a conflict between the modernity on display in the free zone of the Nevsky and the ‘backwardness’ of Russian political culture as it shapes actual urban experience (tellingly, the Underground Man’s attempt to confront his superiors above ground is described by Dostoevsky as a ‘collision with reality’).8 The Nevsky’s imitation of the West is further contrasted with the utopian forces of industry on display in the Crystal Palace, which, according to Berman, is a source of fear and anxiety for the story’s narrator (as well as its author) because of the impossibility of its manifestation in the feudal and despotic climate of Russia.9 The Crystal Palace, Berman suggests, was one of the most compelling of dreams for Russian writers because it offered ‘a specter of modernization haunting a nation that was writhing ever more convulsively in the anguish of backwardness’ (236). If the Crystal Palace represents actual modernisation, the Nevsky constitutes a stage set that offers only an

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illusory promise of it. Dazzling the population with glittering wares, ‘nearly all imported from the West’, this facade of modernity encourages Russian leaders to enjoy Western goods ‘without working toward the Western development of productive forces that has made the modern consumer economy possible’ (230). For this reason, Petersburg becomes an unreal city, parading a spectacle of modernity without generating the productive and political energies necessary for its realisation on a broad societal scale. In this context, a gap opens up between the imported visual cultures of a Western modernity, on the one hand, and the reality of political and economic underdevelopment at the periphery, on the other. It is this gap that distinguishes Dostoevsky from Baudelaire, as Berman explains: The contrast of Baudelaire and Dostoevsky, and of Paris and Petersburg in the middle of the nineteenth century, should help us to see a larger polarity in the world history of modernism. At one pole we can see the modernism of advanced nations, building directly on the materials of economic and political modernization and drawing vision and energy from a modernized reality – Marx’s factories and railways, Baudelaire’s boulevards – even when it challenges that reality in radical ways. At an opposite pole we find a modernism that arises from backwardness and underdevelopment. (231–2)

As with Russia, so with the rest of the Third World; here Berman identifies an arrested modernisation that is forced to ‘build on fantasies and dreams of modernity, to nourish itself on an intimacy and a struggle with mirages and ghosts’ (232). The unreal city thus becomes a proto-postcolonial space for Berman, unlocking ‘the mysteries of political and spiritual life in the cities of the Third World – in Lagos, Brasilia, New Delhi, Mexico City’ and anticipating ‘the issues that African, Asian and Latin American peoples and nations would confront at a later date’ (286, 175). Consequently, peripheral urbanism becomes the precondition for world literature: Russia and Latin America have produced some of the greatest works of literature not despite but because of their underdevelopment, since it is in peripheral spaces that the meanings of modernity are most elusive and paradoxical. One immediate qualification that we might make to Berman’s thesis is that his neat separation of the ‘modernism of advanced nations’ from ‘the modernism of underdevelopment’ overlooks their lines of mutual influence. Despite acknowledging the similarities between Dostoevsky and Baudelaire – with respect to their interest in everyday encounters on the

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city streets – Berman posits a fundamental difference between the two, which is that Baudelaire is a member of a city defined by economic and political maturity (whose population knows how to ‘mobilize to fight for its rights’, 229). Yet, as Walter Benjamin suggests, the French poet’s ironic and detached relationship to this ‘advanced’ modernity is facilitated by his identification with groups at the margins of metropolitan society, including migrant subjects in Paris’s impoverished suburbs.10 In fact, Benjamin’s analysis of urban modernity offers a useful counterpoint to Berman’s insofar as he situates it within the context of an imperial, rather than purely Western, context. He does not, for example, read the Crystal Palace as a straightforward testament to Western industrial innovation; instead, he shows how sensational descriptions of the Palace emphasised its oriental domes and the exotic worldliness of its displays, spreading a fairytale fantasy through Europe that affirmed the benefits of imperial enterprise. Anticipating Fanon’s challenge to the European fantasy of a modernity achieved by its own labours, Benjamin disrupts the magical representation of European commodity culture, noting how the exhibition halls contained not only goods associated with what Berman calls the ‘Western development of productive forces’ but also loot amassed from colonial plunder – including treasures from Beijing’s Summer Palace after it was burned down by French and British troops (187). Attentive to the global geography of European commodity production, Benjamin’s antistagist Marxism paves the way for a more relational picture of modernity that exceeds the logic of self-driven development in discrete national blocs. What, in an age of empire, does it mean to speak of ‘Western goods’, ‘Western productive forces’ or ‘Western emancipation’, as does Berman? And if these categories are unstable, how do we separate ‘Western’ from ‘Third World’ modernism? In literary studies, Berman’s distinction between the two modernisms unravels further in light of what has been described as Dostoevsky’s intrusion into the English house of fiction, as scholars trace his major impact on a range of later modernists, including Woolf, Kafka, Mansfield, Lawrence, Forster, Joyce, Freud and even a reluctant Conrad.11 While Berman finds a critical, self-conscious aesthetics in urban Russia and separates it from the modernism of Western Europe, others have shown how the Petersburg tradition influenced urban aesthetics within the British imperial metropolis itself. In this context, Virginia Woolf is an illuminating example, insofar as she attempts self-consciously to break with the English novelistic tradition by adopting Dostoevsky as a new model. For Woolf, Dostoevsky’s writing resembles ‘seething whirlpools, gyrating

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sandstorms, waterspouts . . . composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul’; ‘not restrained by barriers. It overflows, it floods’.12 Woolf contrasts this maelstrom with the solid architecture of Edwardian novels by Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy, regarding these writers as mundane not only for their materialism but also for the Englishness of their work, which she associates with solid buildings and boring towns replete with ‘public nurseries, fountains, and libraries’.13 In an obvious sense, Woolf’s analysis of a Russian liquid aesthetics unrestrained by barriers suggests a universalising art unconcerned with social questions; yet, more convincingly, this is an art that attempts to break free from national limitations. Accordingly, Woolf’s model, Mrs. Brown, must be ‘set in her high relations to the world’; she is a mobile subject who, travelling aboard a train, observes the ‘changes they’re making in this part of the world’, allowing Woolf to ask: why it is ‘so hard for novelists at present to create characters which seem real . . . to the world at large?’14 As this frequent repetition of ‘world’ suggests, Woolf’s problem with the Edwardians is their lack of worldliness: they are too English, their novels too redolent of the ‘public works’ of a national imagination. She goes on to attribute Russian worldliness to cultural difference and, counterintuitively, ‘national character’; yet we might instead relate it to the context outlined by Berman, as part of the unreal urban experience born from underdevelopment. On the Westernised stage set of Dostoevsky’s Petersburg, it is the world that replaces the nation as a reference point for the elusive modernity of everyday life. As a result, social transformations and events in the city are perceived as mystical and unreal, their causes and effects exceeding or ‘overflowing’ the limits and categories of a knowable, national community. Pace Berman and his division between Western and underdeveloped modernism, what Dostoevsky’s intrusion into the house of fiction suggests is that European modernists were deeply energised by the elusive, contradictory modernity of urban Russia. By tracing a direct line from Dostoevsky’s Petersburg to Woolf’s London, a connection opens up between modernist urban aesthetics – associated with sensuous particularities, subjective experiences and ungraspable causal forces – and the peripheral experience of the Russian city, whose strange importations and unknown causal forces so fascinated Woolf and her contemporaries. This gives a concrete geographical context to what has often been narrativised as an intellectual or aesthetic ‘break’ with realism. One critic suggests that Euro-American modernists ‘broke with outmoded nineteenth-century narrative modes of representation’, as ‘subjective perceptions and their attendant inner responses – predicated on a growing sense

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of restlessness and desire – were being developed by artists as a paradigm for more authentic accounts of everyday life than the rationalizing tendencies of positivist thought’.15 Despite the clear importance of challenges to positivism among early twentieth-century intellectuals, the suggestion that urban modernism arose from the restlessness and desire of artists risks downplaying the influence of nineteenth-century Russian literature on modernists, a relationship that complicates the notion of a decisive break between ‘outmoded’ nineteenth-century realism and modernist subjectivism. In light of the subjective, psychologic urban method that emerged in Petersburg, we see how an intellectual challenge to the rationalising logic of English positivism emerged from the very spaces in which this logic was revealed to be most irrational – that is, from a selfconsciously peripheral city in which the complex, contradictory and partial (rather than positivistic, normative or universalising) logic of modernisation was visibly apparent on the streets. By focusing on the international geographies of modernist influence in this way, the ground is prepared for a social and material history of the modernist city, one that situates the intellectual concepts shaping urban modernism in Britain alongside the non-British historical conditions under which these concepts first became relevant and useful. Rather than explaining the difference between, say, Dickens and Woolf as a result of the latter’s artistic desire for authenticity and subjectivism, we see how this desire was nourished by an earlier turn to urban subjectivism that responded to specific historical conditions. Although Berman prepares the way for this materialist approach by describing Petersburg as the first unreal city, his insistence on a neat separation between a critical, proto-postcolonial modernism and the celebratory, universalising zeal of its Western counterpart downplays the impact of Russian literature on the history of modernism more broadly. Yet if urban modernism is defined according to a break with the universalising claims of the dominant English culture, this critique would emerge most forcefully at that culture’s peripheries.

Europe’s ‘Other’ Cities This narrative of the unreal city arising at the margins of Western Europe shifts the focus away from the imperial centres of London and Paris and towards those locations with a consciously marginal relationship to them. To establish the broader relevance of this move, it is worth considering the literary importance of other peripheral cities: the Irish city, for example, but also those cities at the edges of empires in Eastern or

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Southern Europe. While Woolf views Dostoevsky’s writing as a kind of natural disaster that lifts the roof from the English house of fiction, she also gestures towards the importance of other non-British writers, complaining, for example, that ‘there was no English novelist living from whom [English writers] could learn their business. Mr. Conrad is a Pole’.16 The importance of Conrad’s own metrocolonial experiences will be discussed in Chapter 2 (although for now it is worth recalling T. S. Eliot’s original desire to use lines from Conrad in his epigraph to The Waste Land, as deleted evidence of the Polish writer’s impact on the archetypal city of modernist poetics). In addition to Conrad, Woolf gestures to the role of Irish literature in smashing the house of fiction, viewing Joyce, for example, as a writer who believes that ‘he must break the windows. At moments, when the window is broken, he is magnificent’ (334). As Chapter 3’s study of Joyce acknowledges, the metrocolonial status of the Irish city would have a major impact on the formally asynchronous qualities of urban modernism. Not only was Joyce an admirer of Dostoevsky (whose prose he described as an ‘explosive power which shattered the Victorian novel’), but his writing also extends the Petersburg tradition in its emphasis on the strangely paralysed modernity of Dublin, a city that, in Dubliners, wears ‘the mask of a capital’.17 Fredric Jameson, commenting on the city’s relationship to Britain in the early twentieth century in ‘Modernism and Imperialism’, argues that Joyce’s writing responds to an ‘exceptional situation, one of overlap and coexistence between these two incommensurable realities which are . . . those of the metropolis and of the colony simultaneously’.18 While he associates modernism and its representational crises with the imperial metropole – where individual experience is shaped by the unrepresentable totality of the colonial world-system, at a moment in which ‘the truth of that limited daily experience of London lies . . . in India or Jamaica or Hong Kong; it is bound up with the whole colonial system of the British Empire that determines the very quality of the individual’s subjective life’ – Joyce is regarded as an exception, due to his unique ability to combine the language of the imperial power with the underlying structure of a colonised daily life.19 This is evident in Ulysses, where the discourses, signifiers and symbols of the colonial culture are grafted onto a dissonant local reality, just as the borrowed form of Homer is layered onto the particularisms of local Dublin life. Through this layering of the modern and archaic, classical and contemporary, rural and urban, Joyce transforms the overlapping lifeworlds of the metrocolony into a distinctly modernist style.

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Although ‘Modernism and Imperialism’ posits Joyce as an exception among ‘First World’ metropolitan writers such as Conrad and Forster, Postmodernism offers a more comprehensive definition of modernism as an aesthetics corresponding to historical unevenness: ‘the coexistence of realities from radically different moments of history – handicrafts alongside the great cartels, peasant fields with the Krupp factories or the Ford plant in the distance’.20 Rather than viewing Joyce as an exception, Jameson interprets other texts, such as Kafka’s The Trial, as equally attentive to the ‘peculiar overlap of future and past . . . the resistance of archaic feudal structures to irresistible modernizing tendencies’, which he calls ‘the condition of possibility for high modernism as such’ (309). Jameson’s reading of The Trial in these terms echoes Walter Benjamin in ‘Some Reflections on Kafka’, who begins by invoking the strange modernity that arises when ‘tradition’ meets the big city: ‘Kafka’s work is an ellipse with foci that are far apart and are determined, on the one hand, by mystical experience (in particular, the experience of tradition) and, on the other, by the experience of the modern big-city dweller’.21 For Benjamin, the tension between modernity and tradition in Kafka should be read not in theological or psychological terms but as a response to the historical confrontation of cultural and politico-legal tradition (the vast and nebulous ‘machinery of officialdom’ of a collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire) with the encroachments of capitalist modernity as felt by the modern urban citizen (141). Anticipating Jameson’s claim that unevenness is the condition for modernism, Benjamin situates Kafka’s writing within the hybrid modernity of Prague, a city no longer at the centre of empire, where the dynamism of trains, factories and a Western consumer culture coexists alongside stultifying familial dependencies and strangely feudal bureaucracies. Read in this context, the formal features associated with modernism – its hybrid aesthetics, temporal anachronisms, arrested plot lines, linguistic obscurity and psychic breakdowns – can be mapped onto the uneven landscapes of the peripheral city. In these examples, the urban periphery provides a spatial and historical context for theorising the anachronisms associated with modernist form. For Jameson, the clash of temporalities characterising those spaces defined by overlap and coexistence between colony and metropole informs modernism’s constellation of ‘older’ narrative modes (such as epic, myth, fairy tale or oral storytelling) with realism or naturalism. Extending this historical-formalist reading, Perry Anderson and Harry Harootunian conceptualise the modernist juxtaposition of the classical and the contemporary as part of a response to the ‘spectacle of lived unevenness’ and clash of

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temporalities in early twentieth-century semi-industrial, semi-aristocratic societies.22 While Harootunian focuses on interwar Japan, Anderson considers Eastern and Southern European societies such as Italy, where culturally hegemonic aristocratic or agrarian landowning classes, classical and neo-feudal university systems, forms of cultural patronage and a highly formalised academicism persisted despite the emergence of modern infrastructures and technologies, from the radio to the automobile, prior to the First World War. This coeval modernity is seen to inspire the anachronistic aesthetics of a variety of modernist styles, from the influence of African and Oceanic art in primitivism to the world of peasants and harvests in impressionism and the folk culture of modernist ballet.23 In the field of literature, this context also nourishes the combination of formalist innovation and traditional content at work in the classicism of urban poetics, from Eliot’s turn to Indian philosophy in The Waste Land to Pound’s turn to Tang-dynasty China. Here, the peripheral city is also key to modernist anachronism: in the case of Pound, the avant-garde imagism inspired by London is accompanied by a sense of the unity, order and ritual found in classical cities such as Rome.24 Rome was particularly evocative for Pound and his contemporaries, not only because of the theme of imperial decline haunting Europe but also because its layers of antiquity and modernity drew attention to the presence of history and its continual reconstruction. As Freud suggests in the first chapter of Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), the traces of previous settlements in this city occur not simply in the form of ruined originals but as ruined restorations of former originals after previous fires and demolitions. Freud invites the reader to imagine Rome not as ‘a human dwelling-place, but a mental entity’ and a collage of memory traces, whose returns are not original but always mediated and constituted retroactively.25 This picture of Rome offers a model for reading the city as a palimpsest of layered meanings that are constituted in the act of interpretation. Yet if Freud’s psychoanalytic thought is linked to the social, political and cultural anachronisms identified by Anderson in early twentieth-century semi-industrial societies, we see how modernism’s critical reconfiguration of the past – whose ‘remnants’ do not linger but are actively excavated and preserved – speaks also to the spectacles of lived unevenness on display in the cities of Southern Europe. It is important to note here that describing cities such as Petersburg, Dublin, Prague or Rome as peripheral – whether in terms of their economic status relative to Britain or according to their self-consciously marginal positioning at the height of Anglo-French literary-institutional dominance – is not to imply that they lagged behind on the path to

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modernity in the early twentieth century. Instead, the concept of ‘unevenness’ suggests that modernism did not respond to a specific stage – in which certain societies were partially modernised, as the precursor to a fully modernised present – but rather that it absorbed the logics of coevality and asymmetry that have shaped (and continue to shape) urban modernity worldwide. Picking up on the problematic developmentalism of Berman’s model, Anderson invokes Marx’s mature understanding of capitalist modernity as a complex and differential temporality, which does not unfold across the globe teleologically but is both reliant upon and generative of unevenness.26 The fact that the modern always constructs its own premodern past elsewhere calls into question the universalising narrative of a phenomenon originating in the metropolitan centre and spreading outwards as the peripheries gain access to it. What becomes visible in cities at the edge of empire is not a form of failed or stalled modernisation but the contradictions at the heart of urban modernity’s universalising claims. And this chronosophical challenge is nowhere more apparent than in those partially modernised, semi-industrialised or colonial cities in which temporality itself appears visibly to fragment, clash and coexist. As is revealed in metrocolonial locations from Joyce’s Dublin to Fanon’s Algiers – whose ‘traditional’ quarters are preserved intact under conditions of colonial stasis – the coeval forces of modernisation and regression shaping the urban landscape turn the city into a microcosm for a divided and uneven world-system, offering a direct, visual challenge to the associations of universal expansion and acceleration embodied in structures like the Crystal Palace. Literary accounts of colonial urbanism – whether focusing on scenes of urban decay in Dublin following periods of economic stagnation or recovering the traces of abandoned, formerly thriving regional centres like Surat or Singapura prior to British ‘development’ – can transform visual unevenness into a source of narrative power, complicating urban modernity’s chronological assumptions and illuminating the coeval temporalities that structure its logic in global terms.

Theory at the Semi-periphery: Brazil to Beijing Taken together, the accounts discussed so far suggest that the elusive modernity of everyday life at the periphery was the precondition for the city of world literature, shaping an early, proto-postcolonial urban aesthetics. Dostoevsky, in dramatising the marginality of his urban experience, was one of the first to subject the narrative of a globalising imperial modernity to the visible contradictions of everyday life in the peripheral

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city, a project continued by writers such as Kafka and Joyce. At this point, it is necessary to interrogate the distinction, implicit within this argument, between ideas of urban modernity – or the narratives and discourses granted currency, authority and legitimacy in the centres of political, economic and institutional power – and experiences at the level of everyday life. While it seems problematic to separate experience from the narratives and discourses through which it is mediated, a number of urban theorists have prioritised experience as a category of analysis. Henri Lefebvre, for example, insists on the importance of analysing ‘practices of everyday life’ in the city; Walter Benjamin invites us to read historical and economic shifts through alterations to the ‘human sensorium’; and Frantz Fanon, as seen in the previous chapter, insists that no amount of colonial ‘phraseology’ can ever be a substitute for the ‘reality’ of colonised life.27 For these writers, the sociological, anthropological and phenomenological aspects of daily life in the city are key to the deconstruction of its dominant political narratives. Similarly, in the literary texts analysed in subsequent chapters, the articulation of a gap between the forms (narrative structures, modes of representation) and ideas (modernity, development, Enlightenment, individualism, democracy) with which urban modernity is bound, on the one hand, and the material practices (unevenness, dispossession, enforced stasis) that it has historically involved, on the other, becomes visible only by subjecting these forms to the raw matter of everyday experience. This is not to say that ‘real’ experience can be accessed outside of discourse and history but rather to show how experience can be imagined or discussed in opposition to dominant narratives. In the case of urban imaginaries, this might reveal itself in the ‘official’ colonial representation of a statue – say, of Queen Victoria in Bombay – among British architects and planners, and the incongruous uses to which this statue is put at the local level (as a resting place for the homeless, or a site upon which birds defecate, as we will see in Chapter 4). By embedding ideas within social and material practice, modernist texts can confront organising concepts with local contradictions. Useful to this theorisation of a clash between concepts and their local application – especially as it relates to the culture of the colonial city – is the work of Roberto Schwarz, a literary theorist described as the Brazilian inheritor of the Frankfurt School. In his seminal study, Misplaced Ideas, Schwarz shows how nineteenth-century Brazilian society under Portuguese and British influence was shaped by the material legacy of the colonial latifundia system of landed estates, a legacy kept alive in the harshness of plantation work for free labourers as well as the persistence of ‘favour’ or

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clientism in public life after independence.28 On the one hand, Schwarz argues that society was influenced by the liberal ideals of freedom and equality gaining political and cultural traction; on the other, he shows how these ideals did not significantly alter the structures of wealth, privilege and dependency that were already in place, nor did they challenge the use of force that remained necessary to preserve the unequal and polarised social relations on which the plantation economy was based.29 The result, he suggests, was an ‘emperor’s new clothes’ situation, in which European liberalism championed bourgeois rationalism, universal law, fair wages and the autonomy of the individual, while the system in place – despite endorsing these values – actively maintained the dependence of the individual, exception to the rule, arbitrary working conditions and personal servility. Such contradictions were not the result of Brazilian ‘backwardness’ but existed in relation to European capitalism and its illiberal effects: echoing dependency theorists, Schwarz suggests that Brazil to Europe was not as feudalism was to capitalism but was a function of European capitalism. Crucially, in Brazil, the fact of colonial dependency actively prevented liberal ideas from becoming realities, meaning not only that they were adopted slavishly and ahistorically despite their irrelevance to the majority of Brazilians but also that they were adopted despite the invalidating nature of their colonial contradictions. It was not just that the ideas failed to work in the periphery (or that they ever ‘applied’ properly to Europe itself) but rather that they served their own purposes for the agenda of an emerging national elite. Schwarz suggests that the modern bureaucracy functioned all the better because it appeared to run according to universal principles of objectivity and justice, even while it was completely bound up in relations of dependence in real terms. The result was that these principles ended up compensating for and justifying an illiberal and unjust status quo. This is not to say that the ideas were undesirable, then, but rather that liberalism articulated, in Schwarz’s words, a ‘desire to participate in a reality that appearances did not sustain’.30 It became a kind of ‘ideology of the second degree’ (23), one that did not describe a reality so much as the desire for a reality, functioning as a rhetorical source of prestige whose compensatory effects upheld a system that was – in practice – radically undermining these very same ideals. For Schwarz, the result of this peripheral condition is a sense of disconnect between language and experience, a proliferation of ‘misplaced ideas’ that are strange and jarring in their local setting. As thought loses its footing, things are called by names which they are not (kinship is ‘merit’; privilege is ‘equality’, dependence is ‘independence’) and self-contradictory

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statements or Irish Bulls abound (‘elections must be fair and orderly, but the ruling party must always win’), giving knowledge an ‘ornamental’ character.31 Schwarz visualises this by evoking the European architectural facades imported into nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Here, because architects lacked the resources and techniques necessary to construct the same neoclassical buildings as in Europe, they painted images of colonnades, pilasters and Greco-Roman motifs, and even painted windows with views of Europe onto the surfaces of slave-built walls of earth, creating ‘the illusion of modern interiors, like those of industrial Europe’.32 Yet when this veneer of European modernity eventually peeled away, it revealed the slave-built foundations that it had only papered over. If this serves as an analogy for the ‘desire to participate in a reality that appearances did not sustain’, Schwarz shows how the reproduction of European society in late nineteenth-century fashionable urban homes meant that almost everything had to be imported for the higher social strata, a fact that led to a culture of proliferating stylistic veneers, empty rhetoric and cultural ersatz. In the fashionable homes of Rio and São Paulo, the exaggerated, absurd quality of the cultural imports – of European industrial scenes painted onto the walls in a tropical climate – is key. Even if all ideas are in one sense misplaced due to the gap between signifier and signified, the difference in the colony lies in the unequal context that gives certain ideas more authority, currency or legitimacy than others. European vistas were painted onto Brazilian walls not simply as a cultural curiosity or trend, but because the ‘outside’ signified real economic and political power.33 A helpful addition to Schwarz’s theory, approached from a different context, appears in the work of Chinese political economist Wang Yanan. Writing in early twentieth-century China, Wang showed how attempts by Chinese intellectuals to import theoretical models from the British liberal tradition, specifically Smithian economics, meant divorcing ideas from the history of their own emergence. Writing at a time in which Chinese modernisers were adopting empiricist and developmental models from European and North American intellectuals to conduct ‘objective’ studies of Chinese society – in fields such as economics, sociology and urban planning – Wang showed how importing theory from the West actually inhibited Chinese economic and social development. For Wang, as Rebecca Karl explains, the reliance on what he termed ‘magical concepts’ constituted a form of metaphysical idealism ‘too removed from everyday life and social practice in its insistence on ahistorical categorical absolutes’.34 At the same time, any Chinese ‘reality’ against which the

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material relevance of ideas could be measured had to be understood via structural analysis, and not through a positivist approach to local difference. As with misplaced ideas, the focus is less on whether concepts ‘apply’ to China than on the uneven playing field and level of coercion with which they are imported, mediated and adopted in the first place.35 In a similar manner to Schwarz, ideas are magical not because of their essential or ontological irrelevance to a specific society but because of the unequal historical conditions under which they take hold. Wang’s idea of magical concepts is also relevant to the study of colonial cities. In the treaty ports and foreign concessions of Chinese cities such as Shanghai and Peking in the late nineteenth century, the latest advances in production, commerce and finance were introduced under the direction of Euro-American and Japanese powers that, despite modernising certain sectors, actively supported archaic landholding systems, landlords, officials, militarists and local elites in prolonging existing forms of social organisation.36 The result was a contradiction between the regressive system maintained by local military and colonial powers, on the one hand, and their active promotion of modern ‘civil society’ discourse through the press and university systems – which opposed officialdom and corruption in favour of civil participation, equality and individual liberty – on the other.37 As modern universities, public parks and foreign enclaves sprung up alongside military barracks in the early twentieth century, the contradiction between liberal ideas and colonial realities was woven into the urban fabric. In Shanghai, the green lawns and swimming pools of foreign concessions became prototypes for gated communities; in Peking, medieval markets sprawled beyond the trim hedges and green lawns of the Foreign Legation Quarter, while patchworks of grand palaces and modern universities, craft guilds and factories, rickshaws and railway stations transformed the city into a palimpsest of historical layers. For modernists such as Lu Xun, Yu Dafu and Lao She, the visual immediacy of this urban coevality – with its combination of the modern and traditional, local and imported, manual and mechanical – became a fitting symbol for the experience of an uneven or ‘semi-colonial’ modernity in China. While Schwarz’s and Wang’s analyses are rooted in the local (and colonial) experiences of Brazilian and Chinese history, they carry implications for theory across regions. As Neil Larsen writes, extrapolating Schwarz’s insights to other contexts opens up certain ‘fundamental questions of critical theory as such’, not because he should be lifted from Brazil and ‘installed as still another contemporary oracle of “Theory”’ but because it is precisely his insistence on working through concrete Brazilian

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conditions that allows for a critical departure with genuinely global implications.38 In literary studies, Schwarz’s method has implications for how we theorise the anti-realist trends associated with modernism. The twisting and superimposition of contradictory ideas in Brazil demanded great analytical efforts from intellectuals, among whom Schwarz singles out Machado de Assis for his ability to embrace complexity while avoiding mutually exclusionary imperatives and preserving the antagonisms behind the anachronisms.39 The pervasive sense of disproportion and illassortedness in Machado’s language, Schwarz suggests, echoes that of Russian writers such as Dostoevsky, in whom there is the same divorce between universal values and local conditions, the same ‘firework display of a caricatured universal culture’.40 In both, the conflicted doubleconsciousness and unreliable narrative voice is connected to the anxiety produced by the figure of the moderniser or Westerniser, whose rational egoism and Enlightenment progress are transformed into foreign – and therefore localised and relative – ideas. Russia, Schwarz writes, ‘forced the bourgeois novel to face a more complex reality’.41 Yet the fact that this relativising challenge to Western universalism is observed in both Russia and Brazil simultaneously suggests that it springs from specific locations but also transcends them. The challenge that each writer poses, which is not only a response to the unique experience of Brazilian or Russian modernity but speaks to comparative experiences of peripherality, thus becomes an important feature of world literature as such.

Realism and Modernism in the Metrocolony Schwarz raises the following question: what happens to realism in a peripheral country, ‘where the sequences of European social and literary history do not strictly apply’?42 In response, we might pose a similar question: what happens to realism in a peripheral city, where the sequences of European urban history no longer strictly apply? If idealism focuses on the autonomous power of ideas, in contrast to a materialist method that examines the conditions under which ideas become relevant or authoritative, what Misplaced Ideas suggests is that idealists in Europe imagine a world that may or may not reflect lived conditions but can at least be pretended, whereas idealists at the periphery take part in a wilful, at times absurd, attempt to ignore these conditions (‘a reality appearances do not sustain’). This form of absurd idealism is crystallised in the idea of the replica city. While the idea of Manchester always exists at a remove from any contradictory and multiple ‘Manchesters’ of subjective experience,

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there is a double remove in the ‘Manchester of the East’, where the very economic and political function of the city is tied to forms of colonial deindustrialisation that actively prevent it from developing along the lines of its model. Inhabiting the ‘Manchester of the East’ means inhabiting a space of self-invalidating colonial contradictions. What emerges in literary representations of the replica city, then, as we will see, is less a form of anti-realism than a realist appraisal of the anti-realism of colonial modernity’s claims. This notion of modernism as ‘realism in anti-realist situations’ raises methodological questions about how (and why) we separate the two literary modes. In recent years, scholars have challenged the modernism/ realism and objective/symbolic dyads by showing how elements of both clash and coexist within individual texts. A study by the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) draws together literary texts associated with both modernism and realism by comparing their formal responses to the experiential effects of world-systemic unevenness. Whether reading texts set in Petersburg in the 1870s, Dublin in 1904, rural Mississippi in the 1930s or a village on a bend in the Nile in the 1960s, they show how a range of formally hybrid narratives articulates the incongruities of capitalist modernity at the periphery.43 This allows for the comparison of writers as diverse as Laurence Sterne, Multatuli, Kafka, Mahasweta Devi and Ivan Vladislavić according to their use of techniques such as alienation, timespace compression, surreal encounters, unlikely likenesses, anti-linear plots, metanarratives or unreliable narrators. Rather than viewing these as the expression of a coherently modernist intellectual project or aesthetic style, they are understood as responses to the encroachment of an uneven colonial world-system. While this method might unsettle definitions of modernism, its considerable value for modernist scholars lies in its clear insight that modernism’s essence cannot be grounded in its formal exceptionalism (without a reductive reading of realism), or in any one geographical location. Rather, what the implications of the Warwick study demonstrate is that modernism is best defined by its formal engagement with the contradictions of modernity as they become apparent at the edges of imperial centres – whether in Ireland, Poland, Prague, the American South, India or South Africa (or their urban capitals). If modernism is viewed as a style that makes realism adequate to the contradictions of modernity, it emerges visibly and strikingly in the places in which these contradictions are most urgent. Understood as a transitionary aesthetic between realism and postcolonialism, modernism can be seen to signal the emergence of contradictions

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that complicate the characteristically national narratives of modernity within realism, more specifically. As Jed Esty suggests, the norm of universal development associated with the realist Bildungsroman is predicated on the subject’s entry into national subjectivity, which itself is premised on the nation’s ability to mediate relations between capital and province with reference to a shared political telos. Conversely, modernism’s evocation of a colonial world-system – spanning locations from Joyce’s Ireland to Conrad’s Malay Archipelago and Woolf’s South America – interrupts the narrative structure guiding individual and national development, extending naturalism’s shift away from realist ‘narratives of (at least apparent) class mobility’ towards those of ‘racialized class stasis’.44 Consequently, the facts of colonial underdevelopment disturb the ‘smooth biographical time’ of the Bildungsroman, generating fictions of reverse development and unseasonable youth, anti-linear narratives and streams of consciousness, ‘proleptic fits and retroactive starts’ (2). This reading allows us to see peripheral zones as laboratories for modernist experiments with the nineteenth-century novel, whose underlying structures of personal and national development are interrupted by what Esty calls antidevelopmental fictions set in underdeveloped zones.45 As the proceeding chapters of this book suggest, these zones can be located more specifically in the peripheral city. Here, the interruption of the linear progression to maturity is registered not only through aesthetic and avant-garde challenges to developmental time but also through the stalled movement of urban protagonists, who – if not trapped in bedrooms or basements – wander the streets aimlessly or find their journeys hindered by the task of transporting others. It is this breakdown of urban development that I identify in twentieth-century novels and short stories from colonial cities, whose narratives of laid-off sea captains, advertisement canvassers, rickshaw pullers and unemployed young women juxtapose the visual cultures of colonial modernisation with everyday, arresting experiences of poverty and precarity on the streets. The result, I argue, is a modernist transition from national to global time or – to adapt Esty’s terms – anti-developmental fictions set in metrocolonial zones. At this point, it is worth noting that although modernism here is distinguished from the Lukácsian model of realism and its implicit national limits, and although Lukács is known for separating realism from naturalism and modernism (and critiquing the latter for its psychologistic indifference to societal causal mechanisms and its bourgeois lack of revolutionary purpose), Lukács also invokes a third category: world literature. In a 1943 essay, he singles out Dostoevsky as ‘a writer of world

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eminence’, who, from an underdeveloped country, produces conflicted characters whose ideas (and rejections of those ideas) would illuminate ‘all the deepest questions of that age’.46 Calling Dostoevsky ‘the first and greatest poet of the modern capitalist metropolis’, Lukács argues that unlike Defoe, Dickens, Balzac and Flaubert, Dostoevsky captures the ‘mental deformations’ of urban life in his writing, staging a mental revolt against the ‘obstacles[s] to the development of men’ and, in doing so, illuminating ‘from the darkness of Petersburg misery . . . the road to the future of mankind’ (189, 197). Anticipating both Berman and Schwarz – but without reaching their conclusions – Lukács makes an intriguing connection between the ‘deformed’ modernity of Petersburg and the worldly relevance of Dostoevsky. While the latter’s isolated, psychological revolt eschews the kind of national revolutionary purpose that Lukács favours, this emphasis on Petersburg’s worldliness reveals why certain kinds of urban modernism might entail a political retreat. Not only do they register the complexity of an uneven world-system in which province and metropolis can no longer be united under a shared political narrative, but they do so by drawing on the contradictions of the peripheral city, where, because ideals of universal development clash visibly with experiences of underdevelopment, the modernising telos of the realist novel becomes difficult to sustain.47 If these examples show how developmental narratives are interrupted by fictions from underdeveloped zones, a metaphor for this process appears in the image of the straight roads laid out by urban planners, which are diverted to misconceived and directionless ends at the periphery. While images of roads leading nowhere appear in earlier modernist texts (the half-finished roads constructed in Heart of Darkness, for example, or the implicit references to the ‘famine roads’ in Ulysses), they also appear later in the work of Fijian writers Vanessa Griffen and Epeli Hau‘ofa, both of whom do much to interrogate developmental narratives, as we will see in Chapter 5. In Hau‘ofa’s ‘The Winding Road to Heaven’, the narrator draws on the road as symbolic of a non-linear modern experience in the Pacific: Those who believe that truth, like beauty, is straight and narrow should not visit our country or they will be led up the garden path . . . . Truth is flexible and can be bent this way so and that way so; it can be stood on its head, be hidden in a box, and be sat upon . . . . Most real roads on our islands are very narrow, very crooked, and full of pot holes. Here no second-hand bus from

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Metrocolonial Modernism Suva lasts more than six months. There are a few straight roads with no pot holes, but they are all in the bush where they serve no good purpose.48

The image of the winding road here, while it engenders a playful relativism, is linked explicitly to ‘real roads on our islands’. In a place of potholes and second-hand buses imported from the Fijian capital, the flexibility of concepts and their borrowed nature have a material basis in the condition of postcolonial economic dependency. Straight roads might symbolise progress elsewhere, but here, planted in the periphery, they go astray. Yet this is a landscape whose colonial scars bear testament to ideas whose purposes were never straightforward in the first place – in this case, the roads ‘in the bush’ were less emblems of a planned modernity than structures necessary for the extraction of resources from the interior. By paying attention to the landscape’s strange, lingering presences – its roads and street names, towers, ruins and ill-conceived monuments – Hau‘ofa’s writing satirises the process by which inherently contradictory colonial ideas have been planted onto settings that further invalidate them. As such, his writing extends modernism’s relational and anti-colonial literary project, transforming the contradictions of the perpetually ‘developing’ landscape into a source of postcolonial narrative critique. As the following chapters will show, the structures of development embedded in both colonial and realist narratives are interrupted by fictions from the metrocolony. Instead of character development or urban adventure in the manner of a Dickens or a Defoe, writers craft narratives of delayed movement and circularity, paralysis and physical decline, replacing the dynamics of individual mobility with experiences of aimlessness and immobility, unnatural death or the close of a single day, and forgoing the progressive format of the Bildung for episodic structures, fusions of modern and epic forms and plot lines that record mundane and repetitive movements, familial dependencies and environmental limits. This last point concerning the limits of the environment itself is a feature of all the texts under investigation. From the threat of coastal deforestation in Conrad’s Singapore to Joyce’s river of toxic sludge in Dublin, and from the mudslide forcing workers out of their chawls in Anand’s Bombay through to the submerged Suva of Oceanic writing, the developmental discourse of urban modernisers is brought into conflict not only with its colonial contradictions but also with its ecological ones. Set in port cities whose harbour districts were constructed by the British on land ‘reclaimed’ from the ocean, the texts in subsequent chapters unsettle narratives of development by examining

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the radically ill-suited environments to which they are applied. If this undermines the developmental assumptions embedded in both colonial discourses and novelistic forms, it also transforms them into a source of creative and critical power, producing firework displays of an exploded universal culture that turn the city into their staging ground. As I show in subsequent chapters, twentieth-century texts set in British colonial cities draw attention to the strange incongruities and half-finished importations of the colonial urban environment. In doing so, they undermine the attempts made by administrators, planners and missionaries to graft modern discourses of development onto ill-fitting – and selfinvalidating – colonial settings. Drawing on the ideas discussed in this chapter, each of the following chapters examines the foundational narratives with which individual cities are imagined and narrativised. After considering how administrators used these cities to concretise civilisational, developmental and aspirational ideals, I show how writers from the Edwardian through to the postwar periods drew on the yawning contradictions that such discourses attempted to paper over. The result, as we will see, is a story of the evolution of modernist urban narrative, one that understands the trajectory of the ‘unreal city’ across the twentieth century – from its appearance in early urban impressionism through to ‘high’ modernism and postcolonial urban writing – as a response to the complexities and contradictions of modernity in the metrocolony.

chapter 2

Architectures of Free Trade in Conrad’s Singapore

This chapter considers how the hybrid modernity of the colonial port city helped to shape the narrative techniques associated with urban impressionism at the turn of the twentieth century, focusing on a major modernist writer of the port city: Joseph Conrad. While Conrad’s best-known metropolis is the dense, foggy London that appears in The Secret Agent (1907), Chance (1913) and the opening of Heart of Darkness (1899), the nineteen years that he spent as a merchant mariner took him to port cities as diverse as Marseilles and Amsterdam, Singapore and Sydney, Bangkok and Bombay. Not only does Conrad reflect on his experiences of many of these cities, but these experiences also had a significant influence on the aesthetic and thematic development of his fiction, much of which is preoccupied with the impact of ‘development’ on colonised regions and the contradictions behind ‘civilised’ metropolitan facades. This chapter focuses on Conrad’s representation of Singapore, one of his most frequent ports of call in Southeast Asia and a city that he came to know well during visits between 1883 and 1888.1 Often (although not always) unnamed in his fiction, the city appears recognisably in a range of the Malay works, including Almayer’s Folly (1895), Lord Jim (1900), ‘The End of the Tether’ (1902), ‘The Planter of Malata’ (1915), ‘Because of the Dollars’ (1915) and The Shadow-Line (1917). Despite the region’s long and turbulent precolonial history, Singapore was envisaged by its British colonial founders as a new ‘free port’ and a laboratory for laissez-faire capitalism, whose value lay in its strategic position amid the trade flows linking Britain, India and China. In Conrad’s fiction, the city is depicted as a haunted, spectral and surreal space, full of strange impositions of value that assert authority over material phenomena. Through such depictions, this chapter argues, Conrad goes against the grain of nineteenth-century narratives of the city, confronting its founding fiction of market-led development with the disorder, contradictions and unevenness produced by colonial activity in the region. 48

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Within the world of global trade that Conrad depicts, clear separations of colony and metropole are substituted for a messy combination of peripheral centres with their own peripheries (colonial cities such as Singapore) as well as peripheries within centres (such as East London or immigrant Soho). This decentred vision of empire is informed by the geopolitical complexity of Conrad’s own origins in a region formerly annexed by Russia and today part of Ukraine. Neither wholly ‘colonial’ nor ‘colonised’, this was a territory controlled by both Russian and Prussian states while also exercising power over Ukrainian serfs, a place caught between the political and ideological entanglements of ‘Western’ liberal modernisers and ‘Eastern’ or ‘Slav’ loyalists.2 Conrad’s subsequent professional experience with the British merchant service allowed him to further eschew a monolithic picture of empire from the vantage point of a range of port cities, where he saw how national ascriptions – notably those attached to chartered companies and ships – were adopted and contested according to diverse commercial imperatives. Conrad’s universe is not one of strictly demarcated national territories but of entangled interests, competitive relationships and fraught collaborations, and – as this chapter will argue – this sense of complexity and porosity is particularly apparent in his portrait of Singapore. This chapter contextualises Conrad’s representation of nineteenthcentury Singapore by mapping it onto the city’s discursive landscape as a key node in a British imperial network. Specifically, I focus on a set of economic discourses from the mid-nineteenth century that presented the city as a free marketplace and the symbolic centre of a new liberal British Empire, showing how the rhetoric of the ‘invisible hand’, in particular, served to narrativise its development as the outcome of free-market forces. The chapter links the ways of seeing necessary to the maintenance of this narrative to Conrad’s literary impressionism, which evokes its own spectre of absent causality and in doing so dramatises the text’s spatial and narrative limits. In this way, the chapter contributes to recent studies of the colonial context informing Conrad’s urban impressionism, putting these into dialogue with historical accounts of the discursive and visual regimes organising life in British Singapore.3 In doing so, I show how Conrad’s experience of the colonial port city had a significant impact on the methods of representation associated not only with his urban impressionism, but also – given the influence of his work on collaborators and contemporaries – with the development of urban modernism more broadly.

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Architectures of Free Trade in Conrad’s Singapore

‘Not Territory, but Trade’: Colonial Singapore and the Free Market Conrad’s fiction offers a clear and detailed picture of nineteenth-century Singapore, even if it is not always named as such.4 By the time of his arrival in the city in 1883, Singapore had been formally declared a British Crown Colony, following the initial establishment of a British trading post in 1819 in the territory, which was subsequently incorporated into the British Straits Settlements as a strategic rival to Dutch power in the region. Against the background of British mercantile expansion in China, Singapore emerged as an important junction that specialised in the transfer of cargo and storage of goods. Following the advent of steam power, telegraph communications and the opening of the Suez Canal in the second half of the nineteenth century, an increasing number of commercial houses, trading firms and banks prospered on the island. During this time, administrators celebrated the free-port model in contrast to the allegedly more monopolistic practices of the Dutch. The city’s strategic role as a trading hub was the primary focus of its socalled founder, British governor-general Sir Stamford Raffles.5 To Raffles’ mind, Singapore was to be one of the ‘least expensive and troublesome’ colonies in British possession: ‘Our object’, he wrote in a letter of 1819, ‘is not territory, but trade; a great commercial emporium, and a fulcrum, whence we may extend our influence politically as circumstances may hereafter require’.6 ‘One free port in these seas’, he added, ‘must eventually break the spell of Dutch monopoly; and what Malta is in the West, that may Singapore become in the East’ (19, emphases in the original). This shift from ‘territory’ to ‘trade’ affirmed the idea that Singapore’s principal value lay in its strategic location in the East Indies, between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Imagined as a kind of extension of British India – necessary ‘for making the British Empire in India complete’, in the words of Lord Canning – the city was understood not as an addition to British territory but as a fluid extension of Britain’s sphere of influence in Asia.7 In this way, Singapore became the model for a British colonial policy that favoured an archipelagic empire, reflecting a distaste for acquiring ‘expensive and troublesome’ hinterland. In addition to the city’s strategic role as a centre of British trade and transport (imagined as the ‘Clapham Junction of the Eastern Seas’), Singapore was envisaged as a new hub of consumer culture in the region, which would introduce modern commodities to surrounding islands. As Raffles saw it, the city would operate as a great cosmopolitan

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marketplace where European manufactures could be exchanged for a wealth of local goods, and whose freedom of trade would be protected under the British flag. Alfred Russel Wallace, in his 1869 volume on the region (a book that Conrad reportedly kept by his bedside), described the miscellaneous collection of items on display in the bazaar, where everything from cotton threads to gunpowder and writing paper could be purchased at ‘wonderfully cheap’ prices.8 Echoing this, Conrad depicts the city’s arcades in similarly bountiful terms as overflowing with nondescript merchandise, while nearby Macassar is imagined to be ‘teeming with life and commerce’, caught in trade flows of ‘gutta percha [rubber] and rattans, pearl shells and birds-nests, wax and gumdammar [resin]’ as well as gin, tobacco, ‘Manchester goods, brass gongs, rifles and gunpowder’.9 This emphasis on the plenitude of free-flowing commodities corresponds with Raffles’s emphasis on trade over territory, presenting commercial activity as the main driving force of the region’s development. As Han Mui Ling states, the ‘greatness’ of Raffles consisted less in his actions per se than in the fact that the island’s strategic location enabled it to become the ‘quintessential market-place where Adam Smith’s invisible hand’ could operate.10 The colonial administrator and writer Maurice Collis echoed this view: He [Raffles] had opened the door, he had pointed to the path, he had provided the idea, he had performed the act. Singapore stood. What else was necessary? Born a giant, it was strong enough to come along by itself. So powerful were the dynamic forces, which it unleashed, that, had Raffles lived, he could have done little more than watch it grow at its own astonishing pace . . . . Such were the forces Raffles set in motion in Singapore.11

Having set the wheels of modern capitalism in motion, Raffles could now simply watch as the invisible hand did its work. According to this liberal model of colonial governance, which was presented as a distinctly British one, the role of the government was not to intervene actively but to refrain from impeding market forces, so as to permit ‘natural’ regulation to operate (a theory still applied to Hong Kong as late as the 1970s). Once within reach of the invisible hand, the tendency would be ‘upwards’ and ‘forwards’ for the city, which was now bent towards progress and civilisation. As is evident in Conrad’s Singapore fiction, with its pervasive imagery of wheels, mechanisms and inexorable forces, the commercial and legal mechanisms that the British put in place meant that Singapore would now

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Architectures of Free Trade in Conrad’s Singapore

‘run itself’. Yet, as Han points out, this form of colonial governance served to justify the coercive action of dragging colonial spaces into the invisible hand’s reach. In fact, the contradictory elements of this discourse were highly visible in Singapore, where British foreign policy – with its vast navy, strict taxation, central banking and watertight legal system – proved far from laissez-faire in practice. While colonial policy in the region was directed towards free trade to the extent that local markets and resources were opened up to foreign ownership and exempt from tariffs and taxations, this led to a situation in which a large portion of the local economy was backed, directly or indirectly, by British shareholders, who supplied the bulk of capital for the rubber plantations and tin mines, and whose directors in London managed relations with Singapore agencies and merchant houses. During the global depression that took place in the 1870s and 1880s, the cracks in the free-trade system became increasingly apparent, as Singapore merchants faced a series of bank failures, slumps, stock exchange crashes and speculative panics.12 Against a background of growing protectionism in Germany and the United States, Singapore’s vulnerability to world market fluctuations was keenly felt. This revealed the degree to which colonial economic integration meant that events in one area of the globe could resound in others. Conrad’s fiction, as we will see, takes place within this climate of heightened global volatility, documenting the experience of individuals caught up within it. If the economic volatility of the 1870s exposed some of the contradictions underlying the laissez-faire model, these contradictions were already visible in the Malay region, where – despite Raffles’s ‘trade over territory’ mantra – territory played an integral role. Singapore’s colonial development was inextricably bound to the growth of plantation and mining economies in the archipelago, which, though not legally incorporated into the municipality, allowed the city to prosper from flows of pepper and nutmeg, opium, gambir, pineapples, rice, coconuts, resin, gold, rubber and tin. Nearby botanical experimental stations for pharmaceuticals and chemicals, and plantations for the cultivation of non-native crops such as coffee, sugar, tea and tobacco, were critical to the city’s growth.13 Deforestation for these projects quite literally provided the grounds for urban development, and, insofar as the colonial government facilitated the extraction and cultivation of resources from these regions, its model in Singapore was by all accounts centred on territory as much as trade.

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Although Singapore’s bountiful emporium had its security guaranteed by the British government – ‘thriving and trading, simply because of the presence of English law and under the protection of the British flag’, as one traveller put it – this in practice required a formidable military and naval presence.14 Because of this role of British militarism, a more sceptical view of free trade as a discourse emerges in Kipling’s account of the region. On the one hand, Kipling celebrates Singapore as a ‘doorway of the wide world’s trade’, where ‘God put first gold and tin, and after these the Englishman, who floats companies, obtains concessions and goes forward’.15 On the other hand, he ironically observes the military forts and ‘five solid miles of masts and funnels’ lining his path to the Raffles Hotel (234), noting how developers speak of establishing communications here, consolidating influence there, and Providence only knows what else; but never a word do they breathe about the necessity for increased troops to stand by and back these little operations. Perhaps they assume that the Home Government will provide, but it does seem strange to hear them cold-bloodedly discussing notions that will inevitably demand doubled garrisons to keep the ventures out of alien hands. (237)

Highlighting the material contradictions at work in the city’s free-trade narratives of foundation, Kipling emphasises the role of British troops as a buttress to the abstract activities of ‘obtaining concessions’, ‘floating companies’ and ‘consolidating influence’. Similar tensions underlie the narrative of Singapore’s planning. Lieutenant Jackson’s master plan of the city, developed under the supervision of Raffles and his planning committee in 1822, set the perimeters for Singapore in its modern form, segregating the coastal area into European, Chinese, Indian and Malay sectors (kampongs) and linking them through a network of corridors, avenues, straight lines and grids. Enthusiastic accounts of Singapore in the 1880s and 1890s emphasise the rational nature of these planning efforts. Basil Worsfold’s 1893 report, for example, presents the city as a paragon of modern planning: Here everything was bright and new and English – miles of wharfs crowded with shipping, broad streets, the cathedral spire en evidence, tall warehouses, and handsome Government buildings. Watering-carts replaced the bamboo buckets in the streets, and English iron and stone work the quaint lamps and antiquated masonry . . . . Even the native streets were well

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Architectures of Free Trade in Conrad’s Singapore drained and lighted; for the Englishman shares his civilization with the native races.16

The image of street lighting here serves as a striking metaphor for colonial progress and enlightenment. Worsfold goes on to give glowing descriptions of the town’s club, racecourse and tennis lawns as they resist the ‘insidious languor of the East’, celebrating the ‘splendidly turfed and treeclad esplanade’ and the statue of Sir Stamford Raffles for transforming a previously ‘insignificant fishing village’.17 Similarly, in Conrad’s Singapore, characters reflect on the civilising ideals at work in the palatial ‘white, pillared pavilions surrounded by trim glass plots’ of the Harbour Office, with its gleaming interiors, as well as the Officer’s Home with its ‘suburban looking’ gardens and its ‘governmental flavour’.18 Yet, as we will see, his fiction also presents a more critical perspective on these imported structures and their symbolic power. As Conrad’s work suggests, some observers from the 1880s onwards were critical of urban development in Singapore, viewing this as responsible for an excessive homogeneity and uniformity, the result of a misguided attempt on the part of the colonial government to flatten the region’s characteristics into a carbon copy of England. In 1883, Isabella Bird claimed to prefer the noise and colours of the local bazaar to the ‘dull and sleepy’ European town, which, hiding residents away in ‘roomy, detached bungalows’, was without ‘life and movement’.19 By the interwar period, the idea of Singapore as a copy of the worst elements of British design led to comparisons with maligned areas of England: the lawyer Roland Braddell, for example, described the city as a ‘dull little island’ with ‘almost no character of its own’, a kind of ‘Asian Slough’.20 Other accounts note the disparity between the European and ‘native’ quarters of the city. While the enclaves for Malay, Chinese and other non-European migrants may have appeared ‘well drained and lighted’ to Worsfold’s eyes, other travellers reported inadequate housing, sewage disposal and water supply as well as a severe lack of hospitals and cemeteries. Poverty, disease, malnutrition and overcrowding badly affected the rickshaw pullers, stevedores and manual labourers residing in cramped, unhygienic and dangerous conditions.21 The much-remarked on ‘chaos’ of the Chinese quarter in particular, with its open shopfronts and bazaars lined with hawkers, provided a striking visual contrast to the grandly planned, palm-lined avenues of the European town. Within early twentieth-century accounts of the city, another contradiction appears in the gap between its identity as a cosmopolitan crossroads

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and the segregation of its workforce. Highlighting the city’s cosmopolitanism, one 1912 book (tellingly subtitled ‘A Record of British Progress’), notes how Every variety of colour and costume is to be seen in the streets; it is a constant medley of races and languages. All live at peace and prosper abundantly under the Union Jack, and the statue of Raffles looks down benignantly on a scene so much in harmony with the aspirations and policy of the original founder of the city.22

A similar sense of this cosmopolitanism is evoked earlier by Alfred Russel Wallace, who notes how the mingling of European, Chinese, Malay, Indian, Javanese, Bengali and Parsi residents in the streets mirrors the city’s hybrid architectural landscape, with its combination of ‘handsome public buildings and churches, Mahometan mosques, Hindoo temples, Chinese joss-houses, good European houses, massive warehouses, queer old Kling and China bazaars, and long suburbs of Chinese and Malay cottages’.23 Yet if this hybridity coheres with the cosmopolitan ideals of the city’s colonial founder, it overlooks the planned stratification of residents according to their place in a labour market contingent on the hierarchised differentiation of workers along racial, ethnic, class and gendered lines. Districts separated according to ethnicity, for example, worked to distance the city’s government officials, merchants, planters, soldiers, sailors and police from its fishermen, domestic servants, ‘coolies’, stevadores, prostitutes and rickshaw pullers. The most valuable trade in the city was not in goods but in Chinese immigrants – or sinkeh as they were known – who were bonded to their employer upon arrival in the city as part of a system of indentured labour.24 Because of the economic importance of their labour within the city and in surrounding plantations and mines, their presence gave the lie to the colonial narrative of Singapore’s development as the miraculous outcome of free-market forces. Because they were often perceived as a threat to British competitiveness, they also gave the lie to the city’s identity as the ‘Manchester of the East’, exposing its role as a space for the processing and export of raw materials necessary to British industrial production and an emporium in which to display the products imported back to the region. In other words: they revealed the city to be both the symbolic centre of a Western consumer culture in the region and a site that would ensure this system’s perpetuation. This put the city’s migrant workers in a paradoxical position – at once a crucial yet necessarily invisible part of its identity as the product of free enterprise. Confronting these

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contradictions, a number of Singapore historians have sought to deconstruct the narrative of imperial prosperity within the ‘innocent’ world of trade by revealing how it renders invisible the experiences of those accorded marginal status.25 In this context, what we see in Conrad is not so much an attempt to make visible these experiences as to show the role of selective vision in maintaining the city’s narrative of foundation. If the contradictions underlying Singapore’s identity as a product of free-market forces are tied to a colonial regime of visibility, it is precisely this way of seeing that Conrad explores in his Singapore novella: ‘The End of the Tether’.

Singapore in ‘The End of the Tether’ ‘The End of the Tether’ opens with an impressionistic picture of the ‘swampy coast’ from the sea, described as ‘a mere smudge of darkness beyond a belt of glitter’, enveloped by ‘a dazzling vapour of light that blinded the eye’.26 The opening lines anticipate the theme of blindness in the novella, offering an example of what Ian Watt has termed Conrad’s ‘delayed decoding’, or the method by which the significance of a sense impression unfolds only later in the narrative, placing effect before cause.27 Over the course of the story, the protagonist, the ageing Captain Whalley, loses his savings, his ship and finally his eyesight. Almost brought to ruin by a financial crisis whose ‘rumble of rumours’ he failed to forecast, he comes under increasing pressure to provide for his daughter in Melbourne and resolves to sell his ship (136). After the sale, the solid, bourgeois, oakpanelled interiors of the Fair Maid dissolve into the abstract, dreamlike and ethereal terrains of urban Singapore, where Whalley finds himself adrift as a free labourer in the urban marketplace. Stepping out into the streets, he wanders through the city and is disoriented by its modern transformation. As the narrative continues, the world around him becomes shadowy and indistinct in a more literal sense, due to the deterioration of his eyesight. Eventually, he is caught up in an insurance scam and drowns with the Sofala – by this point completely blind. In staging a crisis of vision, the story invites the reader to anticipate Whalley’s later loss of eyesight in his earlier experience of urban disorientation, connecting his blindness to his cognitive failure to see through the contradictions of the colonial city around him. The first half of the story contains richly detailed descriptions of a port city which, although unnamed, is unmistakably Singapore. Whalley emerges from ‘one of the most important post-offices of the East’ with only a bank draft in his hand – a symbol of his portable

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property and untethered freedom in the global marketplace (139). He surveys the ‘recently opened and untidy thoroughfare’: ‘One end touched the slummy street of Chinese shops near the harbour, the other drove straight on, without houses, for a couple of miles, through patches of jungle-like vegetation, to the yard gates of the New Consolidated Docks Company’ (139). The city appears empty and halffinished, revealing wild patches of jungle and ‘slummy’ shops on the one hand, and grand corporate buildings on the other. The frontages of the new government houses alternate with the blank spaces of vacant plots, while the broad vista is ‘empty and shunned by natives’ after business hours, as if they expected to see a tiger in search of ‘a Chinese shopkeeper for supper’ (139). Tigers were a genuine danger in Singapore, particularly to the Chinese labourers clearing the land, although here they contribute to the more general sense of a lurking threat to the city’s precarious spatial order. As Whalley moves into the European town, he emerges onto an empty, ‘grandly planned street’ and takes in the new Courts of Justice lined by a portico of columns, as well as the pavilion wings of the new Colonial Treasury (139–40). Moments later, this grandly planned modernity evaporates and he is lost ‘amongst the swarm of brown and yellow humanity filling a thoroughfare, that by contrast with the vast and empty avenue he had left seemed as narrow as a lane and absolutely riotous with life’ (140). While the ‘swarming’ crowd of the Chinese town is a stereotypical feature of the environment in colonial narratives, it also suggests the dramatic absence of grand planning.28 The street scene of a ‘bare-footed crowd’, composed of ‘half-naked jostling coolies’ and Sikh policemen, is described as a ‘human stream’, through which the car of the cable tram navigates cautiously ‘in the manner of a steamer groping in a fog’ (141). In contrast to the solid trading institutions of the quay front, the Chinese shops ‘yawned like cavernous lairs; heaps of non-descript merchandise overflowed the gloom of the long range of arcades’ (140). Both goods and people ‘overflow’ within this space of commercial flux, yet just as they threaten to drown Whalley (who is described as solid throughout the text), he emerges ‘like a diver on the other side’ and finds refuge in the shade between the walls of closed warehouses (141). Conrad’s formal replication of the sensory immersion of diving underwater, with its suffocating, blinding and deafening effects, links the theme of sensory failure to the bizarrely polarised experience of the colonial city, which is defined by a dramatic disparity between ‘native’ and European enclaves. The first Singapore is a jungle of tangled vegetation and riotous crowds, while the second, observed from the

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harbour front, is one of ‘unconfined spaciousness’; grand avenues lined with tall trees; neat lawns ‘like pieces of green carpet’; canalised creeks with granite shores; rows of factories and the solid infrastructures of legal courts, insurance companies, banks and libraries (145). Conrad’s picture of a divided colonial city anticipates the world of compartments imagined by Fanon, who separates the settlers’ town of stone, steel and bright lighting from the ‘native town’, which is ‘without spaciousness’ and starved ‘of coal, of light’.29 Although Conrad distinguishes the spacious harbour front from the gloomy, aquatic and crowded Chinese quarters, the boundaries separating the two compartments in Conrad’s narrative become porous and unstable. In the European avenue, the cast-iron gas lamps – with ‘globes of white porcelain atop, resembling a barbarous decoration of ostriches’ eggs displayed in a row’ – cast a phantasmagorical haze over the city (146). Imagined as garish symbols rather than pillars of civic order, these features of the European town of ‘stone and steel’ become curiously superficial, insubstantial and ornamental. The ‘queer white monument’ of the Consolidated Docks Company, similarly, is shown to have replaced the solid ‘public work’ of the wooden pier, while the monumental ‘sacred edifice’ of St. Andrew’s Cathedral appears to offer only illusionary promises, described as a ‘closed Gothic portal to the light and glory of the west’ (149, 151). The Government House, which is pictured as ‘a many windowed, arcaded palace upon a hill laid out in roads and gardens’, is associated with dinner parties rather than the workings of state (152). Conjured like magic, these urban monuments are seen to replace solid public works with a dazzling mirage of modernity. Yet this mirage becomes increasingly nightmarish, sinister and surreal as the narrative goes on. At the deserted quayside, the white obelisk of the telegraph pole stands ‘like a pale ghost on the beach before the dark spread of uneven roofs’, and an ‘army of shadows’ is seen to amass as if waiting to ‘advance upon the open spaces of the world’ (161, 160). The presence of these shadows implies a supernatural force determining the fates of both protagonist and city: just as shadows threaten to dissolve Singapore, so Whalley is pursued by a shadow to his left ‘which in the East is a presage of evil’ (163). The technique by which the colonial town dissolves into nightmarish abstraction has been read in a variety of ways. Firstly, it has been viewed as evidence of a subjectivist approach to urban realism that privileges the act of observation over the phenomena observed.30 This untethering from the constraints of the realist narrative is connected to the disintegration of a nineteenth-century imperial world view. J. H. Stape’s reading, for

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example, shows how the story narrates the demise of a maritime hero whose uncritical belief in ‘the triumph of colonial order and officialdom over primeval jungle’ proves to be an illusion.31 Rejecting the triumphant materialism of colonial narratives, the story systematically undermines the city’s stability by emphasising ‘its newness, its imported and decontextualised self-imaging’ (92). Stape notes how the imported Gothic styles and architectural replicas of the Greek polis imply a colonial society ‘imported whole cloth into an alien setting’, noting how Singapore, with its juxtaposition of porticos and peristyles amid tropical vegetation, lacks authenticity and attempts to repress its past, making it an ‘unreal city’ (91, 93). In the eyes of Conrad’s protagonist and the bureaucrats around him, the modern, brightly lit streets are concrete evidence of colonial progress and a confirmation of the benevolence of the commercial forces driving the city’s transformation. These forces are understood to have brought prosperity and order to a once-sleepy ‘fishing village’, recalled by Whalley as ‘a few mat huts erected on piles between a muddy tidal creek and a miry pathway that went writhing into a tangled wilderness’.32 Yet, as he walks through the streets, the narrative of the jungle’s steady progression from chaos to order is undermined by the uneven spatial composition of the city itself. As elements of disorder creep into the setting, the selectiveness of Whalley’s urban vision anticipates his physical blindness. In many ways, the story narrates the tragedy of the heroic adventurer and ‘aristocratic’ maritime professional (whose father worked for the East India Company) as he is dragged down into the base world of urban commerce. At the same time, it emphasises how Whalley’s credulity, pride and nostalgia inhibit a clear-eyed assessment of his surroundings.33 It is possible to read the spectral landscape of Singapore as a psychic topography that projects the wistfulness and nostalgia of a protagonist whose adventurous past – notably his ‘discovery’ of nearby Whalley Island – has helped to usher in a blindly technocratic commercial system. This is a system in which there is now ‘too much competition’ (157): Whalley is no longer familiar with the men running the corporations and banks; he is unable to make use of the new cable technologies through which the companies communicate; and there is no longer ‘an arm chair and a welcome in the private office, with a bit of business ready to be put in the way of an old friend’ (136). Singapore has become a city in which formerly local firms are now regional: the name ‘Gardner, Patteson & Co.’ is still displayed in the warehouses of ‘more than one Eastern port, but there was no longer a Gardner or a Patteson in the firm’ (136). As this example suggests, the story thematises the decline of the individual trader

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in the face of abstract and bureaucratic commercial forces, which have turned merchant shipping into a faceless, depersonalised and brutally competitive profession.34 Within this climate, Whalley’s trajectory mirrors that of the city itself: both have left behind an era of adventurous, individualist and pioneering trade to enter a new age of technologised and monopolistic commerce. In this modern jungle, only the largest, most powerful shipping firms thrive, which ‘once organised, took the biggest slices out of [the] cake’ and prowled ‘like a lot of sharks in the water’ (157). Conrad’s depiction of Singapore as spectral and ‘unreal’ captures a sense of its colonisation by market forces. As Douglas Kerr suggests, the morphing of the city into a ‘surreal world’, a ‘necropolis’ and ‘ghost of itself’ reveals its sinister afterlife: ‘industrializing and corporate’, ‘lifeless and purely automatic’ and ‘entirely a matter of show’.35 The city, Kerr writes, ‘has lost touch with the virile individualism of its own myths of foundation’, becoming a place of ‘aimless circulation, where no useful work is done, and where fortunes can be made and lost randomly, on the luck of a Manila lottery ticket or the equally arbitrary collapse of a bank’ (40–1). This transformation into a plane of lifeless circulation means that Singapore now operates entirely by way of invisible mechanisms or laws: the port’s Master Attendant, Captain Eliott, insists that the ‘[p]lace runs itself. Nothing can stop it now’.36 The person nominally in charge of running the city, by using this language, defers agency to the abstract, uncontrollable forces that have set the wheels of capitalist development in motion. Far from leading to the kind of order or harmony anticipated by the city’s planners and administrators, however, these forces have shaken the very ground of the region ‘like an earthquake’ (132). The lives of the characters are affected in volatile and unpredictable ways by stock market crashes, exchange rate fluctuations, flows of local credit, foreign capital, insurance pay-outs and losses or wins from gambling, races and lotteries.37 From the initial crash of the Travancore and Deccan Banking Corporation to the shipowner Massy’s lottery addiction and the insurance scam that claims Whalley’s life, each of the characters is subject to the uncontrollable operations of the money market. Many are indebted, contractually obliged, scheming and dreaming of a prosperous future, hoping for a lucky speculation or waiting for the right opportunity to ‘get on’. Singapore runs on debt and credit, as the sailors are likely ‘to owe money to the Chinamen in Denham Road for the clothes on their backs’, while a third of the wages in the port go directly to the lottery (‘It was a mania’) (159, 158). In this mysterious financial universe, modern forms of

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superstition prevail: Whalley believes in the ‘magic power in the round figure’ of his bank draft, while Massy devotes himself with religious fervour to uncovering the secret formula of the lottery numbers (145). It is, in the end, the magic power of insurance – an industry that profits from the possibility of an event rather than its actual occurrence in space and time – that transforms the solid matter of the ship into the abstract figures of its floating policy. Far from a solid, modern outpost of progress, Singapore has become a space subject to the rumours and fluctuations of seemingly supernatural forces. Through these descriptions, Conrad’s city can be seen to anticipate an urban poetics of the ephemeral, the nebular and the ‘unreal’, of the kind associated by Fredric Jameson with the cultural logic of finance capital. For Jameson, the integration of disparate areas of the globe into speculative financial markets works to lift or dis-embed social practices from the immediacies of their local context, appearing to remove them from the capacity of any agency and control.38 The results flatten and ‘hollow out’ urban space: Jameson draws on the interwar construction of New York City’s Rockefeller Center as emblematic of an architectural shift from ‘brick’ to ‘balloon’, the latter of which is defined by an insubstantiality, spaciousness and impermanence that is viewed as the aesthetic equivalent to finance capital, with its expectations of value, abstractions of debt and credit, liquid assets from ground rent and non-productive or ‘fictional’ sources of wealth (43). Jameson traces this aesthetic back to the spectacular glass and iron architectures of late nineteenth-century financial centres, moving from Tafuri’s description of the first skyscraper, built in Chicago in 1885, to the eclectic play of styles on display in the enclaves of postmodern financial cities, where spectacles of collective participation are seen to secure business and financial objectives (notably, Jameson ends his essay in modern-day Hong Kong). These financial landscapes are viewed as a ‘formal overtone’ of capital’s ‘colonization of the future’, evoking its ‘structural reorganization of time itself into a kind of futures market’ (44). The transitory aesthetic of the balloon in this context expresses a kind of ‘planned obsolescence’ that anticipates the ‘impending certainty of its own future demolition’ (43). Here, Jameson draws on Simmel, for whom the same process is already on display in the halls of the Berlin Trade Exhibition, whose architectural ‘lack of permanence’ and ‘lack of solidity’ make the buildings ‘look as if they were intended for temporary purposes’, conjuring a sense of the fleeting and the abstract, the dreamy and desirable, which Simmel connects to the aesthetics of shop windows.39 Walter Benjamin, likewise, writing on the glass and iron architectures of the

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nineteenth-century metropolis, identifies a sense of ‘porosity and transparency’ in buildings that, he claims, have ‘put an end to dwelling’.40 The landscape of Singapore in the 1880s was of course entirely different. Accounts of the grand public buildings, Gothic cathedral, neo-classical styles and monuments juxtaposed with Muslim mosques and Hindu temples, Chinese bazaars and Malay cottages, and the modern street lighting and telegraph cables weaving between them, bring to life a bizarre cacophony of periods and styles. Yet they also indicate a kind of proto-postmodernism, inasmuch as the ‘world cities’ of the 1980s – defined by the flattening or comingling of cultures and styles – have their prehistory in the hybrid and imported architectures displayed across British port cities. The architectural historian Peter Scriver notes the ‘intriguing similarities between the architectural artifice of the British Empire in its late nineteenthcentury heyday and the contrived depthlessness that characterised much of the so-called “postmodern” neo-historicist architecture of the global marketplace, a century later’.41 The importation of styles and materials in contemporary centres of financial or casino culture, with their neoclassical restorations and replicas of global landmarks, reproduce the hybrid and decontextualised architecture on display in colonial urban enclaves. In this context, the very beginning of Jameson’s symbolic demise of ‘brick’ within the enclaves of global finance is anticipated in Conrad’s literary modernism. Although there were no towering skyscrapers in Singapore in the 1880s, Conrad’s staging of the crisis of solidity offers a prescient anticipation of this modern ‘balloon’ aesthetic. The landscape of ‘The End of the Tether’ is visibly hollowed out: the ‘manywindowed, arcaded palace’; the overflowing arcades of nondescript merchandise; the grand, empty spectacle of the cathedral; the glassy orbs lighting the avenues; the pale, ghostlike telegraph poles and liquid pathways of the cable trams – each evokes a nebulous city of glittering, reflective surfaces, dis-embedded from the solidity of its setting by the vast and intangible operations of a global marketplace. The transitory aesthetic of the buildings imagined by Benjamin and Simmel is similarly reflected in the architecture of Conrad’s port city. The whitewashed seafront hotel, based on the Hotel de l’Europe, is a ‘straggling building of bricks, as airy as a bird-cage’, through which tourists (and their capital) flit as ‘impermanent presences, like relays of migratory shades condemned to speed headlong round the earth without leaving a trace’.42 The windows of the Singaporean hospital

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in Lord Jim are ‘always flung wide open’ with the suggestion of ‘endless dreams’, while the residents have ‘the eyes of dreamers. They appeared to live in a crazy maze of plans, hopes, dangers, enterprises . . . . They talked everlastingly of turns of luck’.43 In Almayer’s Folly, the protagonist’s daughter feels that whether she is looking at the muddy riverbank or ‘the Cathedral on the Singapore promenade’, she sees only ‘sordid greed chasing the uncertain dollar in all its multifarious and vanishing shapes’.44 Perhaps Jameson’s idea of the disappearance of brick within regions colonised by capital appears most literally in Heart of Darkness, when Marlow encounters an agent entrusted with the ‘making of bricks’ and discovers that ‘there wasn’t a fragment of brick anywhere in the station’.45 Beneath the agent’s unreal ‘show of work’ with fictitious bricks lies the much more ‘real feeling’ of the abstract percentages made from the ivory trade (66). In such moments, Conrad documents the strange unreality of a colonial landscape in which the work of metropolitan bureaucrats consists of simply tallying up the abstract figures of commissions rolling in from labour and resources elsewhere. If Conrad’s text dramatises the hollowing out of distinctive spatial characteristics by the colonial economy, this is the essence of colonialism for Jameson, who insists that the destructive elements of capitalism that we see in Lord Jim’s Patusan or Nostromo’s Costaguana are not due to ‘conscious planning on the part of the businessmen’, who are neither personally wicked nor self-conscious: ‘Rather, the process is objective, and is impersonally achieved, or at least set in motion, by the penetration of a money economy and the consequent need to reorganize local institutions on a cash basis’.46 Insofar as Conrad’s representation of Singapore captures a sense of this same, highly abstract process in a city imagined as a laboratory for British laissezfaire capitalism – whose ‘planters’ arrived before its ‘planners’ – it does so in a way that strikingly anticipates the concerns of postmodern urban theorists. Indeed, Conrad’s representation of 1880s Singapore anticipates the colonisation of the future connected by Jameson to multinational finance, prefiguring the kind of contemporary urbanism associated with decontextualised architectural styles and private, secure residential enclaves. As we will see, the experiential effects of the dis-embedded city, which is entangled in the global economy and highly subject to its volatile machinations, would make Singapore a formative site for Conrad’s modernist experiments with causality and narrative agency.

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Narrative Agency and the Invisible Hand Conrad’s colonial city foregrounds a modernist theme of visual crisis, which, in ‘The End of the Tether’, is literalised through the protagonist’s onset of blindness. This theme can be connected, in the story, to the representational difficulties posed by the market’s invisible hand as a narrative central to Singapore’s colonial foundation. The narrative of the invisible hand, as Susan Buck-Morss explains, substitutes the market for the will of God assumed in natural theology, which finds evidence of God’s hand at work in the natural world.47 The Scottish economist Adam Smith famously used the phrase when imagining a pin factory as a system in which each individual plays a limited role and, in doing so, unknowingly contributes to the common good: each person is ‘led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention’.48 Here, the market operates as a natural mechanism to balance out the dynamics of production and consumption; yet, for this self-regulating market to function, every individual must act out of self-interest, a fact that confines each to the narrow perimeters of their particular sphere of economic activity. While Smith admits to the potentially stunting effects of this, he maintains that these limits are necessary for the social body to prosper as a whole, arguing that what labourers lose in their narrow and repetitive work they gain through the tangible benefits of the commodities around them. The success of the market is thus measured by way of the material evidence of the process of exchange. As Buck-Morss suggests, the invisible hand holds together a social body ‘composed of things, a web of commodities circulating in an exchange that connects people who do not see or know each other’ (450). Instead of seeing connections, individuals are caught within the orbit of an economic universe that limits their vision to the short horizons of self-interest, operating within a market driven by a ‘desire blind to the whole and ignorant of its effects’ (452). As a narrative, the invisible hand provides a solution to the representational problem posed by capitalism’s relations of interdependency, transforming the mutual influence of individuals into what Marx refers to as an ‘alien social power standing above them’ and ‘power independent of them’.49 While this force is generally harmonious for Smith, it can also be represented as a volatile and uncontrollable force that exceeds all moral limits. Conjuring a Conradian image, Buck-Morss describes the alternative vision of a market-led society as a ‘system that, sublimely out of control, threatens to escape every kind of constraining boundary . . . invisible except in its commodity effects, insensate to human passions, impervious to

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human will’ (452). In Hegel’s words, this is ‘a monstrous system of mutual dependency, an internally agitated life of the dead, which, in its motion, moves about blindly and elementarily’, leading subjects to take ‘blows as from an invisible hand’ (qtd. 458–9). This image of the market as a blind, uncontrollable monster driven by the similarly uncomprehending actions of individuals resembles Conrad’s vision of empire, whose agents, because they understand ‘the nature of their work, but more or less dimly, in various degrees of imperfection’, act blindly and accidentally.50 As critics have noted, Conrad depicts empire as a chaotic system of competing commercial interests and imperatives that govern, in his words, ‘the fates of men who come out here with a hundred different projects, for hundreds of different reasons . . . who come, and go, and disappear!’51 This vision is ultimately truer to nineteenth-century understandings of empire, which, as Stephen Donovan shows, was viewed as ‘a patchwork of diverse administrative models: from Ireland to Sierra Leone to Mashonaland to India’ rather than a unitary ‘colonial project’.52 In this context, the notion of blindness as a state of action allows for a productive reading of Conrad’s Malay fiction, which is interested both in themes of representational crisis and in nineteenthcentury political economy. In fact, a number of Conrad’s works directly invoke the trope of the invisible hand. The events of Lord Jim, for example, are overdetermined by an invisible agent of causality: the protagonist rises slowly ‘as if a steady hand from above had been pulling him out of the chair by his hair’, and the hopes and aspirations of the ship’s Muslim passengers are ‘held by an invisible hand on the brink of annihilation’ (echoing the language in Narcissus, where it ‘was as if an invisible hand had given the ship an angry shake’).53 In Almayer’s Folly, a spectral force acts on the novel’s protagonist, who ‘felt as if an invisible hand was gripping his throat’ and ‘seemed to free his throat from the grip of an invisible hand’.54 At the beginning of Typhoon, the forces driving the British sea captain out to the edges of empire are described as ‘an immense, potent, and invisible hand thrust into the ant-heap of the earth, laying hold of shoulders, knocking heads together, and setting the unconscious faces of the multitude towards inconceivable goals’.55 The spectre of Adam Smith invoked here, as Ross Forman points out, aligns the forces driving people out into the empire with ‘divine forces that similarly shift individuals and populations in inscrutable ways’.56 Commenting on Conrad’s invisible hand in Lord Jim, Raymond Williams views the term as an indicator of the arbitrary and incomprehensible forces of a material and social universe, borrowing the language

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of natural theology to emphasise the absence of individual human cause or control.57 In ‘The End of the Tether’, the workings of nature and the economy are completely fused. The failure of the Travancore and Deccan Banking Corporation is described as a natural disaster – shaking ‘the East like an earthquake’, its distant rumbles heard from Shanghai – in an echo of the financial crash in Chance, where assets vanish ‘as a building vanishes in an earthquake – here one moment and gone the next with only an ill-omened, slight, preliminary rumble’.58 Through this meteorological imagery, economic forces are depicted as natural, inscrutable and unpredictable. The natural terms used to describe the disastrous financial fate of Whalley’s disabled son-in-law – who was ‘perpetually being jammed on a lee shore’ – also bring together the contingent, random workings of biological and market forces (136). The language of ‘The End of the Tether’ is generally suffused with the imagery of wheels, mechanisms and other mysteriously determining forces. Just as an ‘army of shadows’ waits to ‘advance upon the open spaces of the world’ (160), so an invisible force renders Whalley’s body less solid: ‘between the lamps his burly figure passed less distinct’ (163), and he appeared ‘to have given up to a hungry spectre something of his truth and dignity in order to live’ (162). Gothic descriptions of finance as vampiric by nineteenth-century economists such as Marx are echoed in the suggestion that Whalley, after signing over the rights to his labour power to the Sofala, risks being consumed by a spectre, while the question of his employment haunts him ‘as by an uneasy ghost’ (145). At a more literal level, the threat of liquidation in the story comes from his contractual obligation to remain in good health, leading Whalley to identify his own ‘solid carcass’ as a source of capital and a future investment (163) (echoing Marx’s description of the body as a ‘carcass of time’). Afterwards, the stock market crash and insurance scandal bring about the liquidation of both his assets and body, despite his anxious desire to avoid becoming ‘less than nothing’ (143). Even his physical blindness – which is repeatedly described in grand, metaphysical terms as part of the inscrutable will of an indifferent universe – is crudely speaking the result of market forces, given that his eyesight deteriorates because he is unable to visit a doctor without rendering his contract invalid. Just as Whalley is helplessly enthralled to a single piece of paper, waiting passively for blindness to set in, so the colossal solidity of the ship is rendered worthless and eventually liquidated because of the abstract value of its floating policy. In this way, all solid objects in the narrative melt into air under the influence of indomitable, seemingly natural, market forces.

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Whalley’s blindness is in many ways also a metaphor for his inability to navigate his way amid an incomprehensible economic landscape. Approached via Smith, the systemic complexity of the market has transformed him into an atomised consumer whose visual horizons are limited to what is directly in front of him, and who perceives in the evidence of exchange around him a false sense of harmony and order. Conrad shows how a marketplace of things-in-circulation is essential to Whalley’s faith in the prosperity and order created by colonial trade. This is apparent when he visits the tobacco planter, van Wyk, and finds evidence of the market’s success in the imported commodities on display. Van Wyk spends his days filing his nails, putting on eau-de-cologne, drinking tea, looking through papers, playing the piano and hosting drinks parties, while occasionally looking out at the labourers at work on his estate. He wears imported silk socks, patent leather shoes and silken jackets; his home boasts a cottage piano, a walnut étagère, ivory utensils, a little terrier and a profusion of skin rugs; and his coffee table displays a variety of national magazines. Everything in van Wyk’s life is imported, from the soda he drinks to the very ground his house stands on: ‘It was a fact that the very gravel for his paths had been imported by the Sofala’ (210). When van Wyk offers Whalley some tobacco, he gazes at the cigar in his hand as incontrovertible evidence that progress is on its way: ‘A good cigar was better than a knock on the head – the sort of welcome he would have found on this river forty or fifty years ago’ (214). In this way, the cigar works to iron out the antagonisms between colonial traders and producers in the tobacco plantation, serving as evidence for Whalley that the ‘world had progressed . . . in decency, in justice, in order’ (214). The planter puts into question this harmonious vision of the ‘orderly, peaceable . . . prosperous villages’ established by colonial rule, however, suggesting that – although life is pleasant for the select few – the ‘river had not gained much by the change’ (215, 214). Unlike Singapore, which underwent a historical trajectory from planting to planning, van Wyk’s ‘tropically suburban-looking little settlement’ off the coast in Batu Beru acts as a counter-space to Whalley’s vision of urban progress, revealing the regional process of accumulation-by-dispossession upon which the city’s prosperity has depended.59 Metaphorically, the site contains suggestions of the destructive side effects spilling over from the region’s development: as Whalley’s ship approaches the coastline, we see a ‘submerged level of broken waste and refuse left over from the building of the coast nearby, projecting its dangerous spurs’ (185). The site is also marked by traces of disruption: although van Wyk has ‘managed to keep

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an almost military discipline amongst the coolies of the estate he had dragged into the light of day out of the tangle and shadows of the jungle’, the dichotomy between orderly estate and chaotic jungle comes under threat when he fears that the locals have been damaging his neat lawns and trampling on his planted garden (209). The footprints of others with claims to the island foreshadow an unstable future for the Europeans’ imported lifestyles. If Whalley’s blindness speaks to his failure to perceive the contradictions embedded in both city and commodity-landscape, this stands in contrast to the characters for whom blindness has appeared to pay off. The prosperous government official Captain Eliott, for example, responds to Whalley’s observation that ‘[t]he earth is big’ by looking around at the quiet Esplanade around him and remarking that there ‘[d]oesn’t seem to be so much room on it’ (159). The fact that Eliott’s field of vision is comically myopic – his view of the world limited to his immediate surroundings – mirrors the caricature of the bureaucrat provided by Max Weber, who describes the ‘specialist without soul’ as a narrow-minded, bureaucratic cog who clings to a post and strives for a greater one.60 The same narrowness of vision and desperate striving to ‘get on’ can be observed in many of Conrad’s villains, from the perpetually scheming mate Sterne to the opportunistic and conspiratorial engineer Massy. As such, the forms of blindness in the story are by no means limited to the merely physical. In fact, it is Massy’s particular form of blindness that leads to the story’s tragic conclusion. As a paranoid and deranged bookkeeper for whom facts and figures reign supreme, Massy’s tunnel vision is shaped by his urban experience: having survived so far on Singapore’s credit economy and a win on the Manila lottery, he fantasises about ‘walking about the streets of Hull (he knew their gutters well as a boy) with his pockets full of sovereigns’.61 Just as Massy’s eyes during childhood were glued to the pavements in search of small change, so now he is presented as a short-sighted product of the money economy. Having realised that the value of the insurance money is worth more than the iron substance on which he stands, he plans to sink the Sofala. This plan occurs to him on entering a storeroom with iron walls, an iron roof and iron-plated floor, which is littered with pieces of scrap iron and described as a ‘capharnaum of forgotten things’ (238). Connecting the useless matter of the room to the useless matter of the ship, Massy fills his pockets with the scrap iron, which he then uses to render the ship’s compass ‘untrue’ and crash into the rocks. This room with iron walls, ceiling and floors can be read as an instantiation of Weber’s ‘iron cage’, a space in which subjects are conditioned by the capitalist ethos,

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obliged to prosper and privilege order above all else, and instructed to pay their debts on time and present themselves as industrious and trustworthy (all traits that Whalley continually exhibits). Literally translated, Weber’s stahlhartes Gehäuse is not an iron cage but a ‘shell’ or ‘light cloak’ ‘as hard as steel’.62 Rather than evoking a space that constrains thought, vision and action, the image of the iron shell suggests an item of clothing that encases and weighs down the subject, compelling their submission to the overwhelming power of the capitalist ethos. Likewise, by filling their pockets with scrap metal, both Massy and Whalley (as well as numerous other Conradian characters) wear iron as clothing (Massy to sink the ship, and Whalley to drown himself as the ship goes down), showing how the abstractions of value have claimed full power over inanimate matter (the ship) and life (the human body).63 In this way, Conrad symbolically enacts the process by which Weber’s bourgeois self-made man submits to the destructive logic of market forces. If Massy appears as the Weberian cog, Whalley resembles the ‘solitary economic man’ epitomised for Weber by Robinson Crusoe, whose pioneering spirit is overtaken in the nineteenth century by big business, monopolies and finance capital. By suggesting that blindness and navigational failure literally pay off for the short-sighted Massy, the final shipwreck attests to the total dominance of abstract value over matter, confirming the physical destructiveness of blind market logic.

Colonial Blindness and Invisible Hands Read in this way, the narrative of blindness in Conrad’s text is connected to a broader historical crisis of agency produced by the uncontrollable effects of market forces. Yet the blindness motif can also be read in such a way as to critically illuminate the fallacies of the invisible hand narrative in a colonial context, showing how narratives of causality that attribute agency to abstract mechanisms – even when detached from the idea of orderly growth – depend on racialised modes of seeing. In other words, while Conrad’s story of blindness emphasises the unpredictable effects of market forces, his Malay fiction can also be seen to expose the invisible hand narrative as something that relies on the erasure of the ‘invisible hands’ producing value in the region. Whiteness and blindness are repeatedly linked throughout ‘The End of the Tether’. The blind Whalley is white from head to toe – from his ‘untanned’ face, ‘silvery’ hair, ‘snowy’ eyebrows and ‘linen always of immaculate whiteness’ (144), to his beard like a ‘silver breastplate’ (163), while van Wyk and Sterne are so ‘[g]host-like in their white clothes they

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could not distinguish each other’s features’ (228). The white-haired Captain Eliott is myopically focused on the task of removing the ‘white wreckage’ from the Sailor’s Home – working men unwilling to give up their relative privilege in the colonies who are viewed as ‘less’ white than their superiors – while Massy ‘calls himself a white man . . . but if so, it’s just skin deep and no more’ (155, emphasis in the original). Similarly, in the port city of Lord Jim (also based on Singapore), the fact that the sailors enjoy working among ‘large native crews [with] the distinction of being white’ reveals the racialised mechanisms by which the realms of production and consumption are organised and stratified in the colonial port.64 At the bottom of the hierarchy are the non-white ‘coolies’ and lascars. The Malay Serang employed by Whalley to take over as his eyesight fails is ‘slight and shrunken like a withered brown leaf blown by a chance wind under [Whalley’s] mighty shadow’ (167), mirroring the other non-white figures in Conrad’s Asian fiction who disappear and materialise, ‘vanishing out of existence rather than out of sight, [in] a process of evaporation’, ‘ghostlike in their detachment and silence’ and ‘less substantial than the stuff dreams are made of’.65 The fact that it is a Malay Serang who ends up taking the place of Whalley’s eyes adds significantly to the economic dimension of the blindness trope, revealing the necessity of invisible non-white labour within a racially hierarchised economy. Not only is Whalley’s blindness suggestive of the systematic devaluation of an invisible workforce, but it also implies that colonial narratives of the region gain legitimacy only by erasing their agency from the picture. The ‘discovery’ of Whalley Island is telling: On that dangerous coral formation the celebrated clipper had hung stranded for three days, her captain and crew throwing her cargo overboard with one hand and with the other, as it were, keeping off her a flotilla of savage war-canoes. At that time neither the island nor the reef had any official existence.66

Malays with a claim to the island are here bracketed off and reduced to background noise as a flotilla of savage war canoes surrounding a reef that, prior to Her Majesty’s survey, did not officially exist. Whatever claims to the land this population may have had are dismissed in the face of what Whalley regards as the divinely sanctioned ‘superior knowledge’ of colonial powers (215). Yet this superiority is undermined when the ghostlike Malay Serang takes the place of Whalley’s eyes. Tellingly, the Serang’s vision is superior because it is mediated by local knowledge: ‘A pilot sees better than a stranger, because his local knowledge, like a sharper vision, completes the

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shapes of things hurriedly glimpsed . . . . He recognises because he already knows’ (88). By connecting Whalley’s blindness to the selective vision of the region’s ‘discoverers’, Conrad shows how vision is mediated by systems of knowledge that are necessarily blind to the local environment. In this way, the story connects the problem of blindness to the decontextualised modes of seeing necessary to the region’s colonisation, revealing how partial vision is conditioned by a specifically colonial logic. At the same time, ‘The End of the Tether’ can be seen to mitigate the tunnel vision of its own characters by engaging in a larger mapping project, one that follows the flows of capital from the city to the wider region and beyond. If the story is full of blind and short-sighted characters who equate the scenes in front of their eyes with the world at large, and who fail to anticipate consequences beyond those relating to their immediate career progression, this stands in contrast to the textual geography charted by the story as a whole. While the second half of ‘The End of the Tether’ moves out of urban Singapore and into surrounding regions, the story ends in Melbourne, where Whalley’s daughter, the landlady of a boarding house, opens the letter that will notify her of her father’s death and the insurance pay-out to come. In this way, the narrative arc follows the movement of capital – from Whalley emerging out of the Singapore Post Office with a bank slip in hand to this liquid capital hitting the solid ground of real estate in the settler city – effectively following the money from the volatile and violent capitalist enterprises of the Malay Archipelago (with its ‘airy’ and porous buildings, through which capital and people ‘flit’) to the solid architecture of colonial Melbourne. Conrad imagines the capital acquired through extracting commodities from plantations and mines (or, in Whalley’s case, the logistics of moving them) as lifeblood flowing to the metropolitan centres: in Lord Jim, traders ‘left their bones to lie bleaching on distant shores, so that wealth might flow to the living at home’.67 Even Singapore’s bureaucratic architect, Captain Eliott, reveals that his future is not invested in the city, hoping to return home and ‘[build] himself a little house in the country – in Surrey – to end his days in’ (154). In tracing the financial flows linking Singapore, Batu Beru, Melbourne and Surrey, the story situates the city’s development within the context of a networked colonial economy. In doing so, it imagines a relational urban history that opens up connections to the locations from which value is extracted and to which it is delivered, complicating the colonial image of the city’s selfdriven development by invisible mechanisms. Additionally, Conrad’s story can be seen to undermine its characters’ own short-sightedness through self-conscious allusions to spaces that are

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invisible in the text. The language in ‘The End of the Tether’ invites closer examination of the traces of violence written into the landscape and in doing so gestures to aspects of the past that have been eclipsed by narratives of colonial urban development. The coastline displays a ‘ragged opening, as if torn by the flight of a cannon-ball’ (193), for example, and descriptions of the jungle carry traces of histories pre-dating the island’s ‘official existence’: rocks ‘squat like Martello towers; over the pyramidal heaps like fallen ruins’ (183) and rocks resembling ruins ‘reflected together upside down in the unwrinkled water, like carved toys of ebony disposed on the silvered plateglass of a mirror’ (185), in a region apparently ‘forgotten by time’ (182). These images of ruins beyond the city’s borders generate a reverse view of the region’s development, gesturing towards a longer history and hinting at the processes of reverse development that have been set in motion in places along the coastline from the British port. Read historically, the images of anachronistic ruins at the Malay periphery offer textual reflections on the erasure of spaces and histories beyond the immediate visual horizon. In gesturing towards the limits of its own urban vision, Conrad’s prose transforms the ways of seeing necessary to the maintenance of colonial narratives into an impressionistic literary method. Insofar as this reveals the blind spots of the story’s own characters – for whom the city serves as visual evidence of colonial progress and order – it reveals how colonial narratives are predicated on a blindness to those other spaces upon which urban development depends. At the same time, by staging a crisis of vision and orientation that starts in the city but moves to its nearby plantations, ‘The End of the Tether’ reveals the extractive, volatile and predatory nature of colonial markets that, contra Raffles, rely on territory as much as trade. The coastal peripheries thus work as counter-spaces to confront fantasies of inevitable development with a revelation of their limits. Viewed in these terms, the classic Conradian method of ‘delayed decoding’ is not just a formal device for insinuating future narrative events but also a guideline for reading the city as such – one that warns against taking its scenes of prosperity and order at face value. As with spaces, so with subjects: in Conrad’s Malay fiction, it is not only the coastal peripheries but also their inhabitants that are described as invisible and unrepresentable. While this means that the stories of Asian characters are not told in ways that are adequate or sensitive to their experience, the fact that they are represented as absent or invisible – the shadow-like Malay Serang, for example, who takes the place of Whalley’s eyes – is suggestive insofar as it speaks precisely to this process of erasure. In Almayer’s Folly, the ‘grip of an invisible hand’ is felt several times by the

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protagonist, yet this is juxtaposed with the invisible force that he fails to observe, but which is noticed by the narrator, who describes how ‘the tops of the banana plantation, visible above the bushes, swayed and shook under the touch of invisible hands’.68 Here and across the Malay fiction, with its ghostlike and ‘evaporating’ Asian subjects, the invisible hand of the urban marketplace is confronted with the invisible hands of local and migrant workers. What transpires in Conrad then is a sense not just of the invisible forces acting on subjects within a vast and intangible global marketplace, but also of the colonial deficiencies of vision that have been necessary to this market’s imagination and justification.

Remapping Urban Impressionism What are the implications of this chapter’s reading of Conrad’s colonial city, both for theorising his urban impressionism and for assessing its influence on modernism more broadly? If critics have suggested that the mingling of imported and local architectures in Conrad’s Singapore makes it another precursor to the anachronistic unreal city of literary modernism, this idea might be tested by considering how the conventions of urban representation that emerge in ‘The End of the Tether’ are developed more fully in Conrad’s later work, particularly in the anonymous and anarchic London of The Secret Agent, where themes of visual uncertainty and unintelligibility are equally pervasive. In the imperial metropolis represented in that novel, the forces transforming events in London come from outside in the form of foreign political ideas, imported goods and migrant subjects. Echoing early twentieth-century anxieties about immigrants and political refugees from the continent, the novel highlights the external forces threatening the insularity of national identity within the urban body politic, as Christina Britzolakis shows, staging a breakdown in narrative continuity and representability that draws on the fragmented, labyrinthine and porous form of London itself.69 For Conrad as for his collaborator, Ford Madox Ford, London has become unmappable and ‘illimitable’ – more of an abstraction than a town – and a place imaginable only in fragmentary impressions.70 The urban impressionism that Ford and Conrad develop and define together, which generates what Britzolakis terms a ‘modernist rhetoric of the image’ – ‘foregrounding the isolated moment of visual perception at the expense of its overall narrative context’ – can thus be understood as a self-conscious response to the systemic complexity of the imperial

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metropole, one that emphasises its porosity, unnavigability and susceptibility to the overwhelming power of unknowable external forces.71 As discussed previously, Fredric Jameson puts a similar argument forward by associating literary modernism with the self-consciously fragmented and partial perspective of the imperial metropolis. To suggest that modernism articulates the absence of empire is not, however, to say that empire was invisible in early twentieth-century London. Rather, modernism for Jameson grasps a sense of empire’s structural entanglement: the degree to which no individual experience is enough to include the ‘radical otherness of colonial life, colonial suffering, and exploitation, let alone the structural connections between that and this, between absent space and daily life in the metropolis’.72 Precisely because texts such as Howard’s End or The Voyage Out are conscious of the difficulties involved in mediating daily experience across vast yet interconnected distances, they respond by prioritising the image over its context. The effects of this, Jameson argues, work to neutralise and depoliticise content for consumption on a purely aesthetic level. In The Political Unconscious, this same aesthetic of the image is identified in Lord Jim as well as ‘The End of the Tether’, where, Jameson argues, the imagistic space of the ocean is divorced from its context, leaving the conditions of ‘working life at sea’ to operate only as a textual unconscious.73 As we saw previously, this leads Jameson to separate ‘First World’ metropolitan modernists such as Conrad and Forster from the exceptional Joyce, whose uniquely hybrid perspective from colonial Dublin allows the underlying structure of a colonised daily life to break into the surface of the metropolitan text. Yet, by associating ‘The End of the Tether’ with the ocean alone, Jameson overlooks Conrad’s own metrocolonial setting. In shifting our attention to it, we instead see how the dissonant aspects of colonial experience had already broken into the surface of the metropolitan text long before the innovations of Ulysses. Contra Jameson’s privileging of Joyce, this chapter has read Conrad’s Singapore as an early example of metrocolonial modernism, one that confronts the perspective of the metropolis with the visual deficiencies of this perspective as they become apparent at the periphery. ‘The End of the Tether’ is an illuminating example of this metrocolonial method: by telling the story of a Crusoean protagonist whose development is arrested via unnatural death at the hands of spectral market forces, Conrad formally inverts the colonial adventure story and its sense of narrative purpose, arresting the development of city, protagonist and text alike. This chapter has read this anti-developmental modernism historically in relation to the contradictions at work in Singapore itself, whose precarious and uneven

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modern landscape unsettles colonial narratives of the benevolence of market forces. While Conrad is known to have adopted a ‘policy of concealment’ when it came to naming places (with Singapore often, although not always, described vaguely as an ‘Eastern port’), and while he explained this on the basis of maintaining mystery and suggestiveness for aesthetic reasons, he was nevertheless explicit and detailed in his descriptions of areas in Southeast Asia and of Singapore specifically, as we have seen.74 This chapter’s effort to rename the city thus acknowledges this historical specificity, examining the region’s unique impact on Conrad’s allusive and impressionistic literary style. Given how the complexities and contradictions of Singapore’s modern landscape reflect and reinforce Conrad’s theme of visual crisis, the visual and causal uncertainties of his urban modernism might be seen to originate in the Asian port city, where, more so than London, the sheer proximity to colonial plantations allows for disruptive moments of colonial incursion. Here, the racialised bodies labouring beyond the urban frame are liable to interrupt and trouble the narrative of a self-driven European modernity; indeed, because the colonial city relies on an extreme form of blindness, its exclusionary modes of vision are harder to sustain. This makes the colonial city a uniquely modernist space. For Conrad, its contradictions contributed to an enduring preoccupation with the formal problems of urban representation and the limits of urban vision. And, as I show in the next chapters, this would resonate with the work of later metrocolonial writers.

chapter 3

Synchronising Empire Time in Joyce’s Dublin

If Chapter 2 made the case for reading the colonial city as a laboratory for urban impressionism, this chapter highlights its equally formative impact on the ‘high modernism’ of the 1920s, focusing on the role of colonial Dublin in the work of James Joyce. Although it now seems difficult to separate Joyce’s modernism from the city of Dublin, there has been a tendency to assume that his work emerged despite, rather than because of, its Irish background.1 Having left Dublin at the age of twenty-two, Joyce wrote about the city while living in a number of other European metropolises, including Zurich, Trieste, Pola (now Pula), Rome and Paris. His decision to leave Ireland, and his much-cited account of Dublin as ‘the city of failure, of rancour and of unhappiness’, led some critics to dismiss the Irish capital as a space of ‘paralysis’ and a ‘backwater’ from which the young writer was fortunate to escape.2 It is worth noting, however, that even if Joyce did sometimes describe Dublin in these terms, his work emphasises the political and historical factors shaping the region’s experience of decline. In the revisionist history outlined in his 1907 lecture ‘Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages’, for example, he notes Dublin’s long and cosmopolitan past as ‘a large city for over twenty centuries’ yet suggests that the invasion of the English had a paralysing effect on Irish intellectual and cultural life.3 If Dublin succumbed to a state of ‘paralysis’ under these conditions, Joyce implies that this was a function of colonial modernity rather than the result of cultural parochialism or geographical insularity. Because of these complexities, Dublin has been regarded as a formative space for modernist aesthetics. For Jameson, as previous chapters have shown, the city’s hybrid identity as both metropolitan centre and great village – characterised by the coeval landscapes of tramlines and carts, dazzling shop windows and mundane poverty, imperial monuments and toxic sewage – inspired Joyce’s stylistic layering of the classical and contemporary, rural and urban, traditional and modern. Similar readings have shown how the visual unevenness on display in the city, whose imperial 76

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spectacles and symbols were grafted onto landscapes of colonial exclusion and dispossession, allowed Joyce to interrogate English facades, to ridicule English discourses and to ‘pulverize’ English literary conventions.4 While these readings present Dublin as a laboratory for modernist aesthetics, they also allow for a proto-postcolonial reading of Joyce, whose innovations are linked to the radicalism of Dublin’s political culture as a hotbed of antiEnglish resistance and sabotage. One study, for example, connects the armed resistance taking place in the city during the War of Independence to the ‘shock tactics’ of Joyce’s modernism, echoing earlier descriptions of Ulysses as a work of treason and ‘an attempted Clerkenwell explosion in the well-guarded, well-built classical prison of English literature’.5 Just as the strangely superimposed culture of the British colonial city is understood as a formative background to Joyce’s stylistic layers, so Dublin’s conflicted political landscape is seen to inspire his proto-postcolonial attack on English literary traditions. Notably, this reading of Joyce as a kind of urban saboteur echoes studies of Conrad, and specifically his novel The Secret Agent. Here, in the author’s preface, Conrad defends himself against charges of perpetrating a ‘gratuitous outrage’ in his reconstruction of an attempted bombing, the context of which was not only continental anarchism but also a campaign of dynamite attacks by Irish Fenians, who targeted various London landmarks in the 1880s.6 Despite the novel’s ambiguous politics and its conspicuous removal of this Irish context, critics have read its planned attack on the Greenwich meridian as an affront to British imperial power, noting how the meridian’s global imposition of abstract coordinates of space and time is contrasted with, and denaturalised by, the novel’s own anti-linear, fragmented form. Along similarly formalist lines, Ulysses has been read as a modernist attack on the English canon: Andrew Gibson calls the text (and the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode in particular) an act of cultural defacement and a ‘sly corruption of the [English literary] tradition as promoted by the anthology and its supposed historical shape’.7 In these examples, both Joyce and Conrad appear as saboteurs from the peripheries, whose novels explode the coherence and universality of imperial narratives, turning temporal and historical instability into defining features of their urban modernism.8 Given that – as this book argues – the complexities of metrocolonial experience were generative of modernist formal innovations, to what extent does this experience also shape literary experiments with narrative time? How, for example, is the space of the colonial city important to imperial efforts to unify, synchronise or universalise time? And how does

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this space make visible the contradictions and failures of such efforts? Taking up these questions, this chapter examines Joyce’s modernism in relation to a set of urban discourses surrounding the idea of synchronisation in the early twentieth century. While Joyce’s Dublin has been aligned with nationalist planning efforts in the period leading up to independence, I focus on his engagement with Anglo-Irish urban discourses from the period in which the novel is set.9 These discourses, by combining philanthropism and pastoralism with an emphasis on pageantry and public festivities, aimed to synchronise the cities of empire, situating Ireland within a network of cities from Vancouver to Wellington. Exemplifying this was the Empire Day movement, whose key promoter, the Anglo-Irish politician Lord Meath, aimed to inspire pride and participation among colonial subjects through a day-long celebration. In Ireland, one of the first of these events was held on the commemoration of Queen Victoria’s birthday, 24 May 1904 – only a few weeks before Ulysses is set – and the event subsequently became a source of nationalist and anti-colonial contestation.10 This chapter begins by linking the Empire Day movement to wider discourses of unity, harmony and imperial participation in turn-of-the-century Dublin, before considering how scenes from Joyce’s ‘Wandering Rocks’ confront participatory urban spectacles with experiences of exclusion, asynchronism and nonparticipation. Noting how the temporal structure of the episode itself also resists efforts at readerly synchronisation, the chapter shows how Joyce’s text questions the universalising ideals embedded in Dublin’s landscape, ideals which – in anticipating a Commonwealth imaginary – would prove enduring both in Ireland and across a network of postcolonial cities.

Synchronising the Second City: Dublin and Empire Day Dublin in the nineteenth century was a city whose built landscape expressed a commitment to Anglo-Irish unity while also revealing its colonial contradictions. In one sense, the urban landscape, replete with Georgian townhouses, tree-lined squares, neoclassical buildings, ornamental bridges and imperial monuments, attested to the discourses of paternalism, civilisation and ‘improvement’ at work in the iconography of the so-called Protestant Ascendency.11 During the wave of civic improvements of the late eighteenth century, English-trained architects designed buildings and bridges modelled on originals in London, while Dublin’s Wide Streets Commission enforced aesthetic principles of ‘Order, Uniformity and Convenience’ in an effort to create – in the

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words of one British journalist – ‘so splendid a metropolis for so poor a country’.12 As architectural historians have noted, this aimed to present a benevolent view of the English conquest of Ireland, smoothing over early forms of forced acquisition with more aspirational, inclusive and persuasive colonial strategies.13 In the wake of the Anglo-Irish parliamentary union of 1801, the theme of the ‘Union of Empire’ was embellished in neoclassical buildings like the iconic new Customs House, whose decorative carvings and statues depicted ‘the friendly Union of Britannia with Hibernia, with the good consequences resulting to Ireland’.14 This was further cemented through the erection of monuments and commemorative statues, including the famous Nelson’s Pillar (1808–9).15 At the time of Queen Victoria’s highly choreographed visit in 1849, Dublin was described as ‘a very fine city’ and the ‘Second City of the Empire’.16 Despite the emphasis on unity and its mutual benefits, the departure of members of Parliament from Dublin following the Act of Union resulted in a public sense of disunity and abandonment, as symbolised by the oncegrand but subsequently vacated Irish Parliament building. Towards the mid-century, accounts circulated of Dublin’s poverty, overcrowding and inadequate sanitation: Friedrich Engels, visiting the city in 1856, remarked that ‘the poorer districts of Dublin are among the most hideous and repulsive to be seen in the world’.17 A combination of mid-century famines, changes to property taxes and the flight of wealthy families meant that poor migrants arriving in the city often took over newly vacated grand homes, generating contradictory images of symbolic wealth alongside material deprivation.18 These spectacles mirrored the broader social and economic tensions at work in the city, where the opening of a brewery was concomitant with both increased employment and the rise of chronic alcoholism, where developments in social welfare came hand in hand with scandalous housing standards, and where the prison was both a tool of oppression and a sanctuary from starvation.19 The city’s regional role as a major port and centre of consumer culture meanwhile endured despite the decentralising and deindustrialising effects of British control. Touching on these contradictions in her history of the Shelbourne Hotel, Elizabeth Bowen notes how Dublin retained a certain glamour despite these processes: ‘Her institutions and buildings remained impressive. Though not a factory, she was a shop-window – and had, as such, irresistible drawing-power’.20 Imagining Dublin as a shop window rather than a factory, this description delinks consumer culture from industry in the city, echoing Berman’s reading of Dostoevsky’s Petersburg as a ‘stage

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set’ in which imported consumer spectacles of modernity are divorced from the economic conditions necessary to its realisation on a broad societal scale. The contradictions at work here, between the imported symbols of modernity and the impoverishing effects of colonial dependency, were thrown into sharp relief in the late nineteenth century, when nationalists waged war on the city’s topography by erecting their own monuments and attempting to remove structures like Nelson’s Pillar. Within this climate, the government espoused a rhetoric that continued to emphasise mutual benefit even as this rhetoric became increasingly divorced from conditions on the ground. While Gladstone famously preferred informal economic control in Ireland – attempting to combat nationalism through policies of ‘improvement’ that would build consent and cohesion – the subsequent Conservative governments of Salisbury and Balfour (1895–1905) updated liberal policies by devising a ‘constructive Unionism’.21 Speaking of the need ‘to kill Home Rule with kindness’, they promoted ideas of ‘simultaneity’, ‘equalization’ and a ‘sympathetic imagination’ between England and Ireland, which, as Gibson shows, mixed coercion and conciliation through the rhetoric of a ‘union of hearts’.22 Yet despite some progressive legislation, British colonial policy in the years surrounding the Second Boer War exhibited a new militarism and aggressive imperialism rather than any notable ‘kindness’; this, as Gibson notes, made some Irish observers wary of constructive Unionism’s rhetorical myths and attentive to the irreconcilable differences that lay behind conciliatory appearances. Such conciliatory discourses also circulated among imperial urbanists in the late nineteenth century, some of whom saw urban beautification and development schemes as the means for promoting similar ideals of unity, harmony and the ‘sympathetic imagination’. Among these figures was Reginald Brabazon, Earl of Meath (1841–1929), an Anglo-Irish aristocrat best known as the promoter of Empire Day (1902–1958; now Commonwealth Day), which took place on the anniversary of Queen Victoria’s birthday in cities and towns across Britain, Ireland, India, Canada, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Gibraltar and other regions. Cities were crucial sites for the consolidation of imperial identity according to Meath, who commented favourably on the tendency among colonial governors to establish themselves in ‘palatial’ buildings ‘beneath the shadow of Nelson’, as a way of making colonial subjects ‘proud of their capital and of their position as citizens of the British Empire’.23 In addition to promoting development through urban monuments and buildings, Meath drew on the discourses of urban pastoralism, insisting on the need to

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preserve parks, gardens and grand historic houses, and advocating the clearance of ‘squalid and uninteresting streets’ and ‘brick boxes which call themselves houses’.24 Similar ideas underscored his approach to the Empire Day movement. Consisting of parades, ceremonies, patriotic singing and school festivities, this event aimed to build loyalty to the empire by harnessing a sense of public belonging, unity and pride. Meath’s agenda was espoused by the protestant Church of Ireland – which described his crusade in 1904 as an attempt ‘to realise in the British Empire righteousness, peace and joy, which are fundamental principles of the Kingdom of God’ – as well as by Unionists in Belfast, who associated the 1904 event with ‘the priceless memory and heritage of the past’, seizing on the occasion to urge loyalty to ‘the great Empire of which we are a part and of which we should be so proud’.25 Critics have focused on the way that Empire Day attempted to legitimise British authority and cement its social hierarchies; yet, the movement also espoused aspirational, inclusive ideals that relied on affective manipulation. Meath continually stressed the importance of imperial ‘sentiment’, using the slogan ‘Unity, Responsibility, Duty, Sympathy and Self-Sacrifice’ and emphasising ‘feeling’ over force.26 If the object was to forge a ‘sympathetic bond’ between four hundred million imperial subjects, his strategy of harnessing the affective potential of a shared British identity would prove useful in the transition from empire to commonwealth. Indeed, it anticipates contemporary events such as royal visits and international sporting events, as they continue to promote a shared sense of Britishness while also influencing urban design in former colonial cities (as Jamaica Kincaid notes when commenting on the lack of potholes on the roads taken by the Queen’s car in the capital of Antigua).27 In telling language, The Spectator described Empire Day in 1908 as part of a post-Boer ‘sane imperialism’, better able to ‘bind us all with closer but gentler bonds’.28 Central to Meath’s notion of an imperial bond was the imaginative placing of individual cities within a network bound by a shared sense of space and time. The fact that Empire Day took place on Queen Victoria’s birthday suggests that it worked to standardise and synchronise time itself, unifying experiences of empire through moments of celebration in much the same way as clock towers, gun salutes and flag-raising ceremonies. As time and space were synchronised within (and between) the cities of empire, these spaces were inserted into the developmental telos of an aspirational colonial modernity. Meath, who espoused a form of Social Darwinism and believed that the enhancement of social conditions would improve bodies and national efficiency, echoed a wider belief in the

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evolutionary process of colonial development. While this was one of the guiding principles of imperial intellectuals and politicians, it also offered a modern spin on the mentality of missionaries. As J. A. Hobson noted, Empire Day resembled a religious celebration and reflected a quasireligious attachment to the imperial project, replacing God with the secular faith of empire.29 While Meath’s ideals were predicated on a faith in the project of unification, they necessarily overlooked the way that imperial participation might mean different things to individuals in different locations. For this reason, it has been suggested that Empire Day was largely ‘unsuccessful in inculcating an imperial sentiment’.30 A 1906 report from Wellington’s Evening Post records a distinct lack of enthusiasm: ‘the flags are lying limp on land and sea in honour of the Empire . . . [and] the popular sentiment is as listless as the bunting’.31 The major differences characterising experience between cities meant that Empire Day was invested with variable and contested meanings, a fact that became particularly evident when ideals of participation, inclusion and unity were imposed onto citizens divided by the colonial exacerbation of ethno-religious cleavages, or when pastoral ideals were inscribed onto visibly run-down and militarised landscapes. In such situations, events like Empire Day became jarring and even parodic, and in the militaristic aftermath of the Boer Wars and the First World War, they became ‘an arena of passionate contestation’ whose overt politicisation actually disrupted their own hegemony, as one historian suggests.32 This was particularly apparent in nationalist and anti-colonial strongholds. Although Empire Day was celebrated in Ireland as early as 1903, a parliamentary refusal to officially recognise it met with loud cheers from Irish Nationalists in 1908.33 If the commemorative events staged in colonial cities aimed to foster a sense of shared social identity, they generally failed to reconcile the contradictions between imperial universalism and national interest. This tension between imperial ideas and their reception in the colonies (which we see in accounts of Empire Day as it actually transpired in colonial locations) mirrors a contradiction at work in a number of the episodes in Ulysses, where imperial ideas and discourses clash with the Irish realities they describe. Across the novel, the progressive ideals imported and adopted through ubiquitous English discourses – from imperial science and bardolatry to the floral niceties of women’s magazines, as Gibson shows – are oddly misplaced amid the streets, pubs, brothels and sewage-strewn mudflats of Dublin. The tension between English niceties and Irish realities appears, for example, in ‘Nausicaa’, where the ideals of

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femininity and romantic love written into Gerty’s voice are underscored by the discursive formations of Irish womanhood imported from English magazines, which clash with the mundane, limited realities of her everyday life as a disadvantaged Irishwoman.34 These contradictions are also embedded in the episode’s setting: initially romanticised by Gerty as a picturesque beach illuminated by the sunset, this is shown in Bloom’s mind to be a forlorn landscape of scarred rocks and rubbish, beset by an ocean containing vomit, food waste and fatal levels of toxicity. If we associate Gerty’s perception not with her character or gender but with the set of imported English discourses that the episode satirises, a visible contradiction opens up between English rhetoric and Irish reality, between the observable situation and the language used to describe it. In central Dublin, a similar contradiction appears when the imported English symbols and facades inscribed onto the urban landscape jar with the local uses to which they are put. This occurs not only when characters ‘misuse’ the city’s monuments but also when these monuments are themselves oddly placed (for example, by being situated above urinals or by commemorating Roman military victories despite the absence of a Roman invasion).35 This sense of a strangely superimposed situation in colonial Dublin can be seen to inform various surreal moments in the novel, from the stone horses of the statue of King William III merging with the real hooves of the viceregal cavalcade, to Bloom magically suspending himself from Nelson’s Pillar using only his eyelids. Read as forms of ‘magical urbanism’, such moments emphasise the strangely derivative symbols of the colony and attest to the alienating effects of Dublin’s reliance on an external, distant source of authority.36 For similar reasons, the city’s homegrown monuments tend to be curiously half-finished (the ‘Five tallwhitehatted sandwichmen between Monypeny’s corner and the slab where Wolfe Tone’s statue was not’ in ‘Wandering Rocks’, for example, 10.377–8), a phenomenon to which Joyce attests elsewhere, when expressing anger over the city council’s failure to erect a statue of the Irish writer James Clarence Mangan. Complaining that a statue, even of a popular man, ‘very rarely advances beyond the laying of the foundational stone’, Joyce contrasts the normal public unveilings of buildings in ‘serious, rational countries’ to the irrational affairs in Ireland, a country that he claims is destined ‘to be the eternal caricature of the serious world’.37 In such moments, the half-finished importations and domestic imitations on display in the metrocolony produce a crisis of meaning and rationality. Yet despite Joyce’s frustration, it is this sense of Dublin as a ‘caricature of the serious world’ that allows him to magnify the contradictions beneath

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English facades. Read historically, in the context of the literal importation of monuments, replicas and aspirational symbols of unity, Joyce’s method reveals the cracks in imperial universalisms as they hit the ground of the Irish city.

De-synchronising Empire Time in ‘Wandering Rocks’ This idea is prominent in the ‘Wandering Rocks’ episode, which exposes some of the contradictions at work in the rhetoric of colonial urbanists and, through its formally asynchronous narrative, undermines their project of synchronising the cities of empire. Situated at the heart of Joyce’s novel, the episode is composed of nineteen short fragments that drift between various individuals, groups and objects as they move across the city, constructing both an urban panorama and a labyrinth of interweaving journeys and missed connections. The fact that the episode’s minisegments are bookended by the representatives of church and state – beginning with Father Conmee’s journey to Clongowes school, and ending with the Earl of Dudley’s ride through the city as part of a viceregal cavalcade – affirms the centrality of the mechanisms of religious and colonial rule within this urban totality, as critics have noted.38 In ‘Wandering Rocks’, this authority is solidified in the city’s public buildings and churches, military presence, crowd control measures and panoptical mechanisms of surveillance, to which Dubliners offer up gestures ranging from compliance to indifference and irreverence. The structuring event of the viceroy’s journey past the major monuments and institutions of empire (echoing visits made by Queen Victoria in 1849 and 1900) is met with misrecognitions, accidental gestures and displays of hostility to the spectacle of colonial authority (displays that come even from the city itself, whose river Poddle sticks out its ‘tongue of liquid sewage’, 10.1197). As the episode unfolds, a gap emerges between the ideal of public unity to which the event aspires and its distinctly un-unified reception in the streets of Dublin. The fact that ‘Wandering Rocks’ opens and closes with acts of philanthropy – Father Conmee is en route to secure a place at Clongowes school for the orphaned Dignum, while Lord-Lieutenant Dudley is on his way to open a bazaar to raise funds for Mercer’s Hospital – evokes the context of early twentieth-century conciliatory discourses of unity, sentiment and the ‘sympathetic imagination’. Specifically, Lord Meath’s emphasis on philanthropy and urban beautification is reflected in Father Conmee’s (questionably) philanthropic mission and pastoral nostalgia, while further

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parallels emerge between Meath’s emphasis on urban pageantry and the developmental aims of the Earl of Dudley – a Conservative and philanthropist within the Salisbury cabinet – as he proceeds to the hospital. Yet the fact that Dudley is received in anything but a unified way in Joyce’s text exposes a gap between principles of imperial participation and experiences on the ground, recalling the dissonant reception so often recorded in actual accounts of Empire Day. Similarly, the other mini-segments of ‘Wandering Rocks’ confront imperial rhetorics of pride, unity and participation with local experiences of shame, disunity and exclusion, cultivating a strategy that – much like the Nationalists jeering at Empire Day in the House of Commons – rejects and ridicules their universalising assumptions. ‘Wandering Rocks’ begins with the idea of time as orderly (or ‘nice time’), as Father Conmee embarks cheerfully on his journey across the city, having ‘reset his smooth watch in his interior pocket as he came down the presbytery steps. Five to three. Just nice time to walk to Artane’ (10.1–3). With the time perfectly calculated, Conmee sets out to arrange, through personal connections, a school place for the bereaved Master Dignam, recalling the request made by Mr Cunningham on the boy’s behalf: ‘Oblige him, if possible. Good practical catholic: useful at mission time’ (10.5–6). Although Conmee acts the philanthropist, the episode inserts him into a network of favour (in which Dignam relies on Cunningham, who relies on Conmee, who plans to get a favour in return) that lends a certain irony to his subsequent refusal to give alms to the begging sailor or compensation to the small boys whose labour he enlists. If Conmee’s philanthropic ideals fail to filter down to the level of the street, his ideals of urban reform are equally selective and superficial: he wonders vaguely why there is no tramline cutting through the North Circular Road area (‘there ought to be’, 10.75) and relies on visual filtering to enjoy his surroundings: Conmee saw a turfbarge, a towhorse with pendent head, a bargeman with a hat of dirty straw seated amidships, smoking and staring at a branch of poplar above him. It was idyllic: and Father Conmee reflected on the providence of the Creator who had made turf to be in bogs whence men might dig it out and bring it to town and hamlet to make fires in the houses of poor people. (10.101–6)

Conmee cognitively transforms the environment around him into a rural idyll, such that urban poverty becomes part of a natural and harmonious social order: while the text notes how he purposely avoids the ‘dingy way

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past Mud Island’ (10.114); it satirises the mental acrobatics necessary to his maintenance of a misplaced romanticism in bleak surroundings. His idyllic ruralism is sentimental to the point of absurdity: he ‘walked and moved in times of yore’ (10.174), taking pleasure in the road names and their ‘old worldish’ charm, wistfully invoking the ‘old times of the barony’ (10.159– 60) and imagining ‘smiling noble faces in a beeswaxed drawingroom, ceiled with full fruit clusters’ (10.176–7). This fantasy of participating in the English aristocracy allows Conmee to take the place of lord and master (he notes that his ‘reign was mild’ when arriving at Clongowes, 10.188); yet, the episode’s attribution of titles (the ‘superior’ and ‘Don’ John Conmee) works to comically overplay his assumption of authority. Conmee’s eagerness for inclusion is parodied by the dissonance between his perception of the surroundings and their description: the process by which he turns Dublin into a harmonious rural community not only relies on his purposeful avoidance of inner-city poverty, but it also requires that he invest inanimate objects with an ability to participate. Conmee walks in ‘the treeshade of sunnywinking leaves’ (10.16–17) and finds cabbages curtseying to him as servile subjects, displaying their ‘ample underleaves’ (10.181). While such animated objects appear across the episode (and novel), in this passage they parody Conmee’s fantasy of a participatory audience. The reference to cabbages also echoes Joyce’s account of Queen Victoria’s first visit to Ireland, where spectators ‘had the wicked idea of mocking the Queen’s consort . . . greeting him exuberantly with a cabbage stalk just at the moment when he set foot on Irish soil’.39 The mundane vegetable thus becomes a tool with which to parody imperial sentiment through forms of mock participation. If Dublin in the opening of ‘Wandering Rocks’ is at odds with Conmee’s mental vision of a harmonious Anglo-Irish rural community, the following sections contrast ideals of participation and pride with inner-city experiences of disempowerment, exclusion and shame. Among the nineteen fragments, Joyce depicts a one-legged sailor begging for alms; the undertaker’s assistant, Corny Kelleher, acting as police informant; Stephen’s sisters preparing a donated pea-soup dinner and planning to sell his books; a group of men discussing horsebetting tips; Stephen’s sister Dilly trying to extract money from her father; his extricating a friend from debt collectors; Cunningham attempting to raise funds for the orphan Dignam; and Dignam thinking of his father’s death. The episodes are filled with begging, informing, donating, extracting secrets, giving tip-offs and making personal appeals, revealing the Dubliners to be wholly reliant on personal

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connections while nevertheless forced to maintain appearances that suggest otherwise. A vivid example of this conflict between appearances and experience, participation and exclusion, pride and shame, appears in the fragment on the commercial traveller, Tom Kernan: Mr Kernan halted and preened himself before the sloping mirror of Peter Kennedy, hairdresser. Stylish coat, beyond a doubt. Scott of Dawson street. Well worth the half sovereign I gave Neary for it . . . John Mulligan, the manager of the Hibernian bank, gave me a very sharp eye yesterday on Carlisle bridge as if he remembered me. . . . Mr Kernan glanced in farewell at his image. High colour, of course. Grizzled moustache. Returned Indian officer. Bravely he bore his stumpy body forward on spatted feet, squaring his shoulders. (10.742–7; 755–7)

The man in the crowd here is emphatically not the anonymous urban flâneur of the modernist metropolis: every aspect of the environment is connected to individuals known personally to Kernan (the hairdresser, the tailor, the seller of second-hand clothes, the bank manager), while his desire to acquaint himself with the bank manager reveals the power of personal connections within Dublin’s economic system. Because personal recognition can mean the difference between financial support and poverty, appearances take on a crucial importance; yet, Kernan’s pride in his appearance jars with the details of his second-hand clothes. The idea that he resembles a ‘returned Indian officer’ due to his ‘high colour’ establishes an ironic tension between his sense of pride in an imperial identity and the shame that the high colour implies (with a reference to his alcoholism suggested several lines later). This sense of a frustrated desire for imperial belonging is then symbolically enacted as the anglophilic Kernan misses the viceregal cavalcade at Pembroke quay. While he imagines the tasteful appearance of the outriders, ‘leaping, leaping in their, in their saddles. Frockcoats. Cream sunshades’ (10.794–5), he is distracted by the appearances he is compelled to maintain and is therefore excluded from the imperial spectacle: ‘His Excellency! Too bad! Just missed that by a hair. Damn it! What a pity!’ (10.796–8). This tension between spectacles of participation and experiences of exclusion, between performances of pride and the shame-inducing realities of dependence, unfolds across the episode, where every character, from Conmee to the orphaned Dignum, calculates their small advantages.40 In some respects, this anticipates Roberto Schwarz’s definition of favour – discussed in Chapter 1 – as a structuring principle of postcolonial societies,

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whose economic legacies perpetuate a form of dependency that goes by other names, forcing subjects to rely on acts of charity, personal connections and the greasing of palms while nevertheless compelling them to maintain the appearance of a modern urban identity nominally characterised by the abstract equality and freedom of the individual. The real perils of anonymity in Dublin occur to Bloom during his final meditations in Ulysses: Poverty: that of the outdoor hawker of imitation jewellery, the dun for the recovery of bad and doubtful debts, the poor rate and deputy cess collector . . . sandwichman, distributor of throwaways, nocturnal vagrant, insinuating sycophant, maimed sailor, blind stripling . . . . Nadir of misery: the aged impotent disfranchised ratesupported moribund lunatic pauper. (17.1936–47)

The fact that Bloom has come close to being many of these things (ad canvasser, thrower-away of newspaper, night crawler) suggests that he walks a fine line between maintaining the connections necessary to financial survival and slipping into dangerous anonymity. Enda Duffy has argued that Bloom’s precariousness and outsider status set him apart as a kind of postcolonial flâneur who politicises the meaning of the pleasure of the crowd, noting how all the second-hand coats, books and boots on display in Ulysses reveal the ‘fundamental differences between flânerie in colonial Dublin, Cairo, or Calcutta as opposed to such wandering in London, Paris, or Vienna’.41 What might be considered freeing anonymity (for some) in the imperial metropole is, in Dublin, dangerous isolation; at the same time, the familiarity of the city works to Bloom’s disadvantage as a Jewish subject accorded outsider status. In the segment in which Lenehan, Lyons and M’Coy discuss the Ascot Gold Cup race, Bloom is believed to have access to the results, following the comic misinterpretation of an earlier ‘throwaway’ comment. In assuming that Bloom has access to shadowy, elite networks of organisation in the city, the men associate urban power with disempowered outsiders. The ensuing altercation in ‘Cyclops’ suggests that while the Dubliners are reliant on immediate connections, they are by the same token more liable to turn against perceived others close at hand. In contrast to ideals of abstract unity and harmony, the narrative stresses the Dubliners’ dependency on the local and the familiar, highlighting the immediate forms of conflict and confusion generated among them at the level of everyday life. These confusions are magnified by the episode’s structuring sequence, in which Earl and Lady Dudley are driven through the streets on their way to

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the inauguration of Mercer’s hospital. As the Dubliners observe the procession, their responses reveal a comic lack of unity. At one end, there are characters who refuse to participate: the anonymous Macintosh man, for example, passes ‘swiftly and unscathed across the viceroy’s path’ (10.1272), while Parnell’s brother consciously avoids attempts at affective manipulation by refusing to look up from his game of chess (a ‘mass of forms darkened the chessboard whereon John Howard Parnell looked intently’, 10.1225–6). There are also those whose failure to observe the cavalcade speaks to the dangers of distraction (when ‘the foreleg of King Billy’s horse pawed the air Mrs Breen plucked her hastening husband back from under the hoofs of the outriders’, 10.1231–3).42 Then there are characters who try but fail to participate, as the city throws up obstacles to prevent the consolidation of a united body of spectators: Gerty, for example, ‘knew by the style it was the lord and lady lieutenant but she couldn’t see what Her Excellency had on because the tram and Spring’s big yellow furniture van had to stop in front of her on account of its being the lord lieutenant’ (10.1208–11). Finally, there is the confusion created by the spectacle’s mediatisation, which is suggested through the passive, authoritative style of reportage epitomised by the gazette, as Gibson shows.43 This reportagestyle narrative informs us that ‘Above the crossblind of the Ormond Hotel, gold by bronze, Miss Kennedy’s head by Miss Douce’s head watched and admired’ (10.1197–9); yet, the fact that Kennedy and Douce were actually admiring a nearby man’s clothing, as is later revealed, creates a gap not simply between what participants are supposed to be looking at and what they are really interested in, but also between what is reported and what (we think) is actually taking place. The mediatised nature of the event in this way further complicates its meaning, suggesting a gap not only between what the Dubliners are supposed to be doing and what they are actually doing, but also between what they are doing and how this is represented. In this case, non-participation is represented as participation through a relatively official discourse. In combining the real time of the procession with the diverse times of its reception among Dubliners, as well as the time of its transmission through reportage, ‘Wandering Rocks’ creates a multilayered temporal schema that openly clashes with the synchronised, planned and ‘public time’ enacted through the procession itself. If these kinds of choreographed events impose a sense of ‘empire time’ on the colonial city – whose clock towers, observatories, gun salutes, monuments and memorials all served to reinforce the public time of a united and synchronised proto-commonwealth – these ideals are disrupted through the novel’s frequent temporal

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breakdowns. Across Ulysses, numerous problems with timekeeping occur: the clock that the Blooms receive as a wedding present (‘A timepiece of striated Connemara marble’, 17.1335) stops working in ‘Ithaca’; the stopped wristwatch in ‘Nausicaa’ is linked to the moment of Molly’s infidelity; and the clock in the pub in ‘Lestrygonians’ runs five minutes fast. In ‘Wandering Rocks’, events begin with Father Conmee resetting his ‘smooth watch’ in his pocket; yet, the structure of the episode frustrates his projections of a smooth-running time through frequent narrative interpolations and missed connections. The episode’s temporal unity is also unsettled by the distractions of simultaneously occurring events: as the viceroy makes his way to the charity bazaar at Sandymount, another equestrian event is taking place – a horse race at Ascot Heath in London – which diverts the attention of Rochford, Flynn, M’Coy, Lenehan and Lyons to the time of the imperial metropole. As with the procession, the time of the race is a future-oriented, forward-moving competitive one, but the outcome is uncertain and anticlimactic. As in ‘After the Race’ in Dubliners, this sense of delay and failure evokes the pressures and frustrations of an aspirational modernity at the periphery, emphasising complexities, obstructions and repetitions.44 Echoing other works of urban modernism (notably Conrad’s The Secret Agent, whose anti-chronological fragments unsettle the global universality imposed by the Greenwich meridian), Joyce’s novel interrupts the smooth progression of empire time by subjecting it to the dissonant temporalities of Irish experience.45 At the formal level, this is mirrored by the novel’s efforts to replace coordinated time with alternative durations – the fragment, the cycle, the stream of consciousness – as they emphasise the local rather than the universal, the situational rather than the synchronised. In ‘Wandering Rocks’, ideas of coordinated or developmental time are disrupted by the formal asynchronism of the narrative itself, whose frequent interpolations compel a non-linear reading process. Although critics have commented on the accuracy of the timings of individual segments, the events in the episode do not unfold straightforwardly over the space of the hour; rather, the points of overlap between journeys become clear only as the episode continues, requiring readers to continually retrace their steps. Scholars attempting a live enactment of the episode during Bloomsday have affirmed these difficulties of timing. Assuming that events take place from approximately three until four in the afternoon on 16 June, and taking contemporary changes to Dublin’s topography into account, Hans Walter Gabler recalls an attempt among Joyceans to act out the different

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roles and chart their intersections.46 The group found that everyone missed each other and no one could make it on time to watch the other performances, which led them to conclude that if the episode creates a unifying experience, it does so only through acts of readerly participation. This chimes with the Greek myth of the episode’s title, according to which Jason, commander of the Argo, survives only by navigating the spaces between rocks and carefully timing their asynchronous movements. In this context, the demands that ‘Wandering Rocks’ place on the reader might be read as a similar invitation to refuse easy claims to temporal development, favouring a careful reading of the multiple temporalities and locational complexities shaping both the city and experiences within it.

Postcolonial Dublin? The multiple temporalities of Ulysses have been connected to its status as both a modernist and a postcolonial text. As previously discussed, the concept of anachronism is a focal point in Jameson’s reading of Ulysses, which maps the novel’s modernist constellation of modern and classical forms onto colonial Dublin itself. For Jameson, the early twentiethcentury Irish city ‘anachronistically permits the now archaic life of the older city-state’, where, like a classical city or medieval burgh, familiar encounters are still expected despite the presence of a modern consumer culture.47 Noting the familiarity of the characters in Ulysses, Jameson argues that imperialism condemns Ireland to ‘an older rhetorical past’, substituting oratory for action and freezing the city into ‘an underdeveloped village in which gossip and rumor still reign supreme’, even as it inscribes an imported imperial history onto the urban fabric: ‘the occupying army is present; it is perfectly natural for us to encounter its soldiers, as it is to witness the viceregal procession’ (63). This combination of the arresting and modernising effects of the English occupation of Dublin is seen to inform the novel’s stylistic combination of myth and gossip with modern documentary and media reportage styles, facilitating its unique blend of objective and subjective modes of urban representation. If Jameson connects the multiple temporalities imposed on the city through its colonial occupation to Joyce’s hybrid style, a similar idea appears in Franco Moretti’s reading of Ulysses. Although he radically downplays the novel’s colonial context, Moretti suggestively links its formal anachronisms to those of other modernist texts, from Eliot’s The Waste Land to Kafka’s The Trial, as ‘veritable stylistic deposits, in which techniques from different epochs outcrop from one another like so many geological strata’.48

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Defining modernism according to heterogeneity and polyphony, Moretti highlights the genre’s disruption to the developmental telos of the nineteenth-century European Bildungsroman, mapping its disintegration of the unitary individual onto a broader crisis in the national cultures that sustained it. If Ulysses draws on the temporal complexities defining Dublin life, with its carts and tramlines, it similarly freezes the development of its subjects, inserting them into a montage of urban collective life that emphasises municipal bonds over individual journeys. While, for Jameson, this technique responds to the specific context of the early twentieth-century colonial city, for Moretti it takes part in a longer literary tradition of ‘modern epic’ stretching from Goethe to García Márquez, whose developmental interruptions respond to the asynchronisms of the world-system at large. This connection between the multiple temporalities of Ulysses and its role as a bridge between modernist and postcolonial literature is echoed in recent readings of the novel’s setting as one that spans two time periods. As Enda Duffy argues, Joyce’s novel ‘double-times’ its readers by encompassing both the Dublin of 1904 and the Dublin of 1922, juxtaposing the periods of pre- and post-independence Ireland and weaving together visions of Dublin’s past with those of its future.49 Although set in 1904, Ulysses was published in the year of the establishment of the Irish Free State and can be read as an early work of postcolonial literature. Approached as such, scholars have connected Joyce’s Dublin to nationalist attempts to forge a collective consciousness at the birth of Irish independence. By focusing on themes of urban planning, transport, public electricity and water initiatives, for example, they show how the totalising aspects of Joyce’s city cohere with, rather than simply critique, pragmatic efforts at nationalisation in a newly postcolonial Ireland.50 Equally, in bridging colonial and postcolonial periods, Joyce’s novel can be seen to highlight the durability of the imperial legacy, warning of the difficulties involved in dismantling the material, institutional and commercial infrastructures established over centuries of colonial rule.51 The novel’s plethora of references to other colonial or semi-colonial spaces, including settler colonies, plantations and areas of Irish imperial involvement – from South Africa and Palestine to Gibraltar, China and Australia – situates Dublin within a global network united by imperial trade. In one sense, this networked vision of the city affirms the difficulty of extricating it from its wider political, economic and cultural entanglements, revealing it to be so materially enmeshed in the webs of colonial markets that notions of

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autonomy and authenticity are manifestly impossible, rather than simply undesirable. Showing how both city and nation, cut off from earlier transcultural routes, have been transformed by global commodities, labour migrations, economic reforms and technologies like the transAtlantic telegraph cable, Ulysses attests to the city’s full if uneven integration into an Anglophone empire (caught, as Stephen puts it, between ‘the Saxon smile and yankee yawp. The devil and the deep sea’, 9.139– 40). Importantly, these global connections create an expanded sense of time, allowing the novel to combine a single-day narrative with a sense of the way that time itself unfolds differently across hemispheres (at the very end, Molly thinks of the ‘unearthly hour’ and supposes that ‘theyre just getting up in China now’, 18.1540–1). Through its multiple temporalities, Ulysses imagines a new kind of universal characterised by unevenness and asynchronism rather than synchronised development, offering a materialist antidote both to fantasies of Irish insularity and to projections of imperial universalisation. While the text forges connections among colonial contexts, the fact that Dublin is manifestly different from cities in Asia or Africa, due to Ireland’s specific relationships with Britain, Europe and the Anglophone world, complicates the narrative of Joyce’s city as a postcolonial one.52 Despite this, however, Dublin’s relevance to other postcolonial cities becomes clear when viewed through a historical lens. As discussed previously, Mike Davis views Victorian Dublin as a precursor to the new megalopolises of the Global South, which he calls ‘mega-Dublins’ due to the fact that urbanisation and migration have accelerated despite a degree of structural exclusion from the global (wage) economy. For Davis, the Irish slums described by Engels emerged from a similar process of urbanisation ‘radically decoupled from industrialization, even from development per se’.53 Thus, when Joyce contends that Dublin offers a window into all the cities of the world, his comment inadvertently foreshadows many of the disruptive effects of urbanisation-withoutdevelopment, from deindustrialisation and unemployment to slum housing, mass migration, food crises, environment pressure, militarised policing and ethno-religious tensions. Joyce’s attention to the divergent trajectories and multiple temporalities of the Irish city, in this context, continues to have a certain relevance outside contemporary industrial centres. Moreover, because Joyce’s Dublin combines the fact of belonging to a distinct, colonised culture with a special inclusion in the Anglophone world, it reflects the modes by which contemporary cities in Africa or Asia are themselves enmeshed in the culture of the

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(post)imperial centre through institutional linkages and compensatory cultural affiliations, anticipating the legacies of their own metrocolonial histories.54 The same emphasis on the city applies to Joyce’s literary influence. As Ariela Freedman notes, ‘Joyce’s placement of Dublin at the centre of world literature has served as inspiration for writers who have put Istanbul, St. Lucia, New Delhi or Tokyo as their own centres’, illuminating lines of connection that draw attention to international writers, rather than overshadowing them.55 While writers associated with postcolonial literature, such as Mulk Raj Anand, Derek Walcott, Gabriel García Márquez or Salman Rushdie, have been celebrated for a local specificity redolent of Joyce, it is important to note that calling Joyce anticipatory or influential is not to say that writers in other locations produce ‘late’ or derivative works. Rather, it is to show how other writers might engage with the similarities and differences characterising their own urban situations, in dialogue with texts from Dublin. As the next chapter will show, writers adopting radically different styles have explicitly taken up Joyce as a model – not to emulate him but rather to affirm a similar commitment to the local and, in doing so, to build towards an alternative universalism grounded in the specific but systemic complexities of peripheral experience. Importantly, this method is locally grounded at all points: Joyce admitted that he was more interested ‘in the Dublin street names than in the riddle of the Universe’; yet, it is the very minutiae of his portrait of the city – famously produced using the Thom’s Directory and a Dublin street map – that allows his work to speak to other locations in which the sequences and conventions of European history have failed to adequately ‘apply’ at the level of everyday life.56 As the chapters of this book suggest, the connections between modernist and postcolonial writers are not simply a matter of aesthetic influence but spring from the common context of the metrocolony. In the next chapter, I outline specific historical parallels between the Irish and the Indian city, exploring the comparable colonial context linking Irish and Anglo-Indian modernisms.57 By comparing contexts rather than styles, Joyce’s model of local universalism can be brought into dialogue with writers in 1920s and 1930s India, whose own literary experiments would articulate to a specific but relational metrocolonial experience.

chapter 4

Anglo-Indian Crises of Development

‘Except for the Marabar Caves – and they are twenty miles off – the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary’.1 With these opening words, E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) distinguishes the ‘extraordinary’ caves from the ordinary, unremarkable Chandrapore, a fictional city based on the colonial administrative town of Bankipur at the edges of Patna, which Forster visited for several weeks in 1913. Mirroring the novel’s own tripartite structure, Chandrapore is divided into three distinct, ethnically demarcated zones. The first of these includes the low ground at the riverside, which is inhabited exclusively by Indians and blighted by poverty and refuse, an area ‘scarcely distinguishable from the rubbish it deposits so freely’ (5). Here, the narrator claims, the winding streets and bazaars contain no signs of culture – ‘no painting and scarcely any carving’ – since the ‘zest for decoration stopped in the eighteenth century’ (following the onset of East India Company rule) (5). ‘The very wood seems made of mud, the inhabitants of mud moving’, writes Forster, and ‘Houses do fall, people are drowned and left rotting, but the general outline of the town persists, swelling here, shrinking there, like some low but indestructible form of life’ (5). Presented as the swampy, stagnant antithesis of the modern city, the riverside is shaped by cycles of natural disaster rather than the march of urban progress. Yet, although Forster’s description of this primordial life at the riverbank might imply a form of Galtonian, evolutionary racism, it also highlights the geographically ‘low’ position of the district as well as its social designation at the bottom of the colonial hierarchy, where inhabitants are left to ‘rot’ and ‘drown’ from the slow violence of poverty and environmental vulnerability. Notably, it is not nature but the ‘outline of the town’ – and thus the structural violence inflicted by its colonial planning in the 1770s – which is described as ‘indestructible’. By contrast, the higher ground near the railway station offers the prospect of a more orderly organisation of human life: the narrator describes an ‘oval Maidan, and a long sallow hospital’ in the 95

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midway zone occupied by part-Europeans or ‘Eurasians’ (5), while at the top of the pyramid lies the ‘sensibly planned’ British civil station, with its red-brick club, right-angle streets, cemetery and magnificent view, which ‘has nothing hideous in it’ and ‘shares nothing with the city except the overarching sky’ (6). From the heights of the colonial hill station, the poverty of the riverside is rendered invisible, its viewers observing only the romantic mirage of ‘a city of gardens’ and ‘a tropical pleasance, washed by a noble river’ (6). In sketching out the structure of the colonial city in this way, Forster shows how urban planning practices have cemented racial segregation and defined the field of vision itself, preventing empathy and understanding. Not only are European spaces like the Club off limits to the Indian characters, as we see later in A Passage to India, but the inability of Europeans to understand Indian society from the heights of their hill station leads them to idealise and romanticise Indian poverty. Selfconsciously foregrounding the partition of the visible from the outset, the novel encodes its own thematic failure of cross-cultural understanding into the city’s spatially segregated form. At the same time, as Douglas Kerr has suggested, the grammar of the opening line (‘Except for the Marabar caves’) emulates the rhetorical style of the guidebook insofar as it reserves or brackets off the exceptional caves as the primary object of interest for the tourist (and reader).2 As in travel brochures, the local part of the city does not simply evade the European gaze but is dismissed as uninteresting; hence, after dwelling briefly on the limited view from the hillside and the disillusionment encountered upon leaving it, the novel abandons the city for the mystery of the caves. Although A Passage to India begins with a perceptive view of the social inequality carved into the fabric of the Indian city following the arrival of the East India Company, its decision to shift the reader’s eyes away from this built hierarchy and towards the unknowable caves ultimately reinforces the limited, naturalising perspective afforded by the European hill station. Despite this, Forster recognised the limits to his vision of the Indian city and this awareness would inform his professional efforts to cultivate alternative perspectives by helping to promote Indian writers. In a letter of support for Mulk Raj Anand’s novel Untouchable (1935), he commended the author’s ability to take European readers on a journey ‘“the wrong way” in an Indian city . . . a way down which no novelist has yet taken us’.3 Anand’s novel, by taking the reader into the ‘untouchable’ or ‘outcaste’ quarters of a fictional Indian town, examines the same themes of cultural and spatial divides; yet, it does so from the perspective of the Indian sector

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only observed from a distance in Forster’s novel, where it shows how class and caste divides are entrenched by both the British military cantonment and the practices of segregation associated with ‘tradition’. Anand’s second novel Coolie (1936) takes up these themes again but adds a new level of complexity through its representation of colonial Bombay as a city characterised less by formal segregation than by hybridity and cosmopolitanism. Tying together the fates of both city and protagonist, the novel stages the rupturing events of ethnically motivated riots, ecological disasters and immobilising migrant labour, ending with a pessimistic foreclosing of the possibility of reconciliation through the premature death of its rickshawpulling protagonist. While critics have read the novel’s anti-developmental ending as a postcolonial challenge to the Bildungsroman, this chapter shows how this challenge is grounded in the contradictions of the colonial metropolis itself. From the late nineteenth into the early twentieth century, Bombay’s colonial planners and architects employed discourses of ‘imperial maturity’ and ‘development along native lines’ to distinguish the city from rural India, yet Anand’s novel shows how the city’s hybrid architecture conceals and compensates for enduring inequalities. By confronting conciliatory symbolic landscapes with structural antagonisms, the novel draws on the contradictions of the metrocolonial setting to subvert the assumptions of imperial maturity at work in colonial and liberaldevelopmental narratives. Just as the city becomes an important context for Anand’s challenge to the novel of development, so it helps to frame his relationship to modernism. Reading his work in dialogue with that of Forster and alongside other texts that he references, from Kipling’s Kim (1901) to Aldous Huxley’s Jesting Pilate (1926), this chapter shows how Anand’s focus on modern Bombay – where difference is an organisational feature of the metrocolonial economy rather than the product of culture or tradition – enables a critical departure from his contemporaries. Building on the analyses in previous chapters, I show how this aligns his work with other metrocolonial modernists: despite stylistic differences, he also turns the metrocolony into the stage for a proto-postcolonial literary intervention.4

Anand, Joyce and Bloomsbury Although well known as a writer of Anglo-Indian realist fiction, Anand was associated with modernist circles including the Bloomsbury Group in the 1920s and 1930s, and his writing from this time offers a sustained, anticolonial engagement with British modernism.5 His politics emerged from

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his early experiences: born in Peshawar in 1905 to a Hindu family, the son of a clerk in the British Indian Army, he attended cantonment schools and later studied in Amritsar, where he recalls being politicised by the 1919 massacre and taking part in the 1921 civil disobedience campaign. Leaving for London shortly after this, he went on to study for a PhD in philosophy at University College London between 1925 and 1929, where he became an active socialist and vocal supporter of the General Strike, whose violent repression he compared to British policing in India.6 Towards the end of the 1930s, his writing became more militant in its opposition to British imperialism and was less well received.7 After spending the Second World War working as a scriptwriter for the BBC, where he encountered divided loyalties over Indian politics, he became disillusioned with Europe and returned to Bombay, focusing on his role as a founding member of the AllIndia Progressive Writers’ Association. In the post-independence era, he continued his involvement with modernism but focused on the fields of architecture and urban planning, lending his voice to Nehruvian planning schemes, interviewing Le Corbusier and helping to host exhibitions in the modernist city of Chandigarh. If Anand’s interest in architectural modernism was framed by a political commitment to national decolonisation in India, his engagement with literary modernism was similarly underpinned by a project of anti-colonial critique, one that sought to expose and address the marginalisation of Indian perspectives. Anand’s memoir of London life in the 1920s and 1930s, Conversations in Bloomsbury, places him among writers such as Leonard and Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Arthur Waley, T. S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley. Recalling encounters with these writers, the memoirs express Anand’s disillusionment upon realising that so many of their progressive opinions were confined to European concerns. The book describes failed attempts to bring up the subject of imperialism among a literary elite who – while politely interested in Hindu culture – finds the discussion of Indian politics and the mention of British imperialism distasteful. At several points, Anand recalls being urged to think of the benefits of empire: ‘the British did give you roads – and justice!’ Yet, he fails to be convinced and concludes that most of his acquaintances ‘had not been east of the Suez’.8 Although many prove eager to broach the subject of untouchability (Julian Huxley reportedly condemns the Hindu failure ‘to evolve’), Anand records how his various attempts to compare Indian problems to class inequality in England were met with awkward silences (32). Reflecting on these experiences leads him to contend that writers such as Eliot and Woolf remain ‘enclosed in their precious worlds, without guilt

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about their status as aristocrats having been achieved by the labour of generations of industrial workers in Midlands and the colonies’ (viii). Nevertheless, he finds allies among left-wing writers including Leonard Woolf, Nancy Cunard and George Orwell, as well as E. M. Forster, whose response to Untouchable helped to secure its publication after multiple rejections. Despite these exceptions, however, Anand’s memoir suggests that the majority of English intellectuals thought of India as at best a primitivist antidote to the excesses of European modernity, and at worst an ungrateful beneficiary of imperial paternalism. In response to the attitudes recorded in Conversations in Bloomsbury, Anand makes a claim for the strategic necessity of countering imperial world views on Europe’s own terms. He finds that his literary heroes, Iqbal and Tagore, are considered passé (recalling that Eliot and Bonamy Dobrée find them too mystical and simple, while Virginia Woolf apparently prefers the vision of India offered by Kipling) and consequently turns to Anglophone modernist texts – primarily A Passage to India and Ulysses – as a way of combining anti-colonial critique with aesthetic prestige. When Dobrée praises Kipling for revealing that Indians ‘have a long way to go’, Anand and his fellow students recommend A Passage to India for its subtler and more sympathetic portrait of their homeland (4). When the conversation shifts to Joyce, Dobrée’s belief that the Irish writer had no ‘political attitude’ is juxtaposed with their radical suggestion that Joyce’s sympathies lie with the IRA (5). In this way, battles over politics are waged through debates over the meanings of modernist texts. Inspired by an anti-colonial aesthetics identified in (some) modernist literature, Anand describes Joyce’s writing, specifically A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses, as a model for his own literary project: ‘an Indian like me recognized myself in the hero of the portrait’; ‘I too wanted to face the actual realities of my experiences’ (7). Identifying connections between Irish and Indian experience, Anand finds in Joyce an alternative to the universalisms embraced in Bloomsbury. Recalling an argument with Clive Bell, he asserts: ‘I was inclined more and more towards concrete realities and did not wish to generalize my feelings into universal significance’ (116). He identifies these ‘concrete realities’ in the alternative modernist tradition pioneered by Joyce, whose detailed local references and graphic, corporeal language, he claims, gave him license to experiment with his own language, using Anglo-Indian words and borrowing from his mother’s fragments of ancient Indian mythology and epic to better capture a sense of everyday Indian life (93). Anand also cites inspiration from the temporal structure of Ulysses, admiring the

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‘simultaneous action, with no past or future’ of the single-day narrative (7). He would go on to replicate this structure in his first novel, Untouchable, which tells the story of a single day in the life of a latrine sweeper (and which he worked on while visiting the Irish capital near Stephen’s Martello tower at Howth Bay). Anand’s novel faced significant obstacles to publication, with as many as nineteen publishers reportedly rejecting the manuscript on account of its subject matter.9 Although Forster’s preface addresses these concerns by insisting that the book seems ‘indescribably clean . . . it has gone straight to the heart of its subject and purified it’, the imagery of sewage, filth and excrement was apparently too graphic for English readers.10 Again, there are parallels with Ulysses, which Forster himself described (albeit positively) as ‘a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud’, and which Woolf dismissed in her diary as an ‘underbred book’, the ‘raw’ and ‘nauseating’ work of a ‘self taught working man’.11 Just as Joyce was critiqued for his morbid and scatological imagery a decade earlier, Anand’s portrait of the city’s latrines and refuse tips was seen as an affront to bourgeois decency. Given Anand’s frustrations, this affront might be read as a deliberate attempt to confront the Bloomsbury set with the unpleasant realities of working life beyond the metropolitan centre.12 As Anand’s comments suggest, Joyce helped to provide the model for an intensified realism that would confront imperial universals with colonial specificities. In his reading of Joyce, Anand formulates a model for embedding the universal subject in the material and social life of a colonial society which, due to its colonisation, proves inimical to that subject’s personal development.13 The result is an alternative to the universalising tendencies of Bloomsbury intellectuals, whose societal attitudes about individual autonomy and self-development are no longer understood as the product of an English cultural and intellectual heritage – separate from the culture of India – but are viewed as the result of national and imperial privilege. Embracing a materialist method to explain locational differences and transferring this method from Ireland to India, Untouchable and Coolie situate the universal representative subject within the concrete specificities of colonial contexts, confronting the developmental desires of protagonists with the messy, concrete terrains of their settings. In Untouchable, this setting is described as ‘a group of mud-walled houses that clustered together in two rows, under the shadow both of the town and the cantonment, but outside their boundaries and separate from them’.14 The seclusion of the district, which is both ‘outside’ and ‘separate’ from the town, is linked to the caste-allocated occupations of

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its inhabitants. Housing various cleaners, leather workers, barbers, washermen and latrine sweepers, the colony functions as a septic fringe that absorbs the waste and pollution produced by the town and cantonment that enclose it. Within this divided setting, the central conflict of the novel occurs when the ‘untouchable’ Bakha accidently brushes a Hindu Brahmin while absent-mindedly enjoying the sights of the bazaar, ‘dragging his boots in the dust, where, thanks to the inefficiency of the Municipal Committee, the pavement should have been but was not’ (41). Just as the development of the town itself appears stalled, Bakha’s own desire for social mobility is frustrated by his class and caste designation. Because he is expected to announce himself audibly as he walks, he is unable to enjoy the anonymity of the crowd and finds his freedom physically curtailed: after momentarily forgetting his station, he is beaten for ‘defiling’ a passer-by. In this way, Anand draws on the forms of segregation internal to Indian society to symbolically and literally interrupt the protagonist’s progress. While the emphasis here is on Hindu customs, Anand frames these within a wider colonial context. Frustrated by the local hierarchies that inhibit his development, Bakha turns to the British soldiers in the military barracks, from whom he has acquired a taste for second-hand English clothing and the social mobility that it signifies. Yet, once he has pieced a few items together, Bakha finds that they fail to translate into a liberated modern subjectivity, and he comes to be equally wary of the threat to his mobility posed by the British (‘great was the fear attaching to the persons of the sahibs, like the dread of pale-white ghosts . . . because they were rumoured to be very irritable, liable to strike you with their canes if you looked at them’).15 After showing how both local and colonial power structures impede the protagonist’s social mobility, the novel stages a final narrative intervention that lays out two alternative paths. The first appears when Bakha attends a speech by Gandhi; the second occurs when he learns of the existence of the modern flush toilet. While both inspire Bakha, the latter comes to provide a kind of counter-narrative to Gandhian (as well as Bloomsbury) denunciations of ‘machine civilization’, perhaps instead echoing B. R. Ambedkar – an important social reformer, scholar and campaigner for Dalit rights – in its emphasis on the abolition of caste through socio-economic development and initiatives in public health and hygiene. By identifying Bakha’s problems with the absence of flush toilets, Anand associates the difference perceived as psychological, cultural or moral by Bloomsbury intellectuals with social, technological and economic disparities. By invoking the flush toilet, Untouchable gestures (albeit

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ambivalently) to the possibility of lessening the effects of caste distinctions through modernisation in rural regions, making the novel a not entirely anti-developmental fiction. By contrast, Anand’s novel of the following year, Coolie, is firmer in its rejection of developmental possibilities. Although Anand was a lifelong socialist who refused to abandon the idea of development altogether, this second novel ends on a decidedly pessimistic note with the sudden death of its rickshaw-pulling protagonist. While Untouchable offers up a glimmer of hope through its invocation of municipal infrastructure, Coolie emphasises the enduring class, caste and religious divisions that frustrate the possibilities for development on an individual and societal scale. While this ending met with critics’ accusations of fatalism, such criticisms overlook the extent to which Coolie undermines universalist narratives of emancipation, class struggle and national development through its attention to the metrocolonial complexities of the Indian city.

Imperial Maturity and Architectural Hybridity in Bombay Mapping a diverse range of urbanised and urbanising locations, Coolie follows the journey of a migrant worker, Munoo, from his village of Bilaspur on the edge of the Himalayas to the nearest town, Sham Nagar, and from the small city of Daulatpur, via New Delhi, to Bombay. Residing there for the majority of the novel, Munoo takes in the city’s magisterial architecture and sleeps on the streets, finds work in a British cotton mill, loses his home in a mudslide, attends a union meeting that breaks out into a communal riot and on fleeing is struck down by the motor car of an Anglo-Indian lady, who subsequently enlists him as her personal rickshaw puller. In staging these disruptive and debilitating experiences, Anand contrasts the exclusion and immobility experienced by migrant workers with the city’s symbolic landscapes of modernity and mobility, dramatising these contradictions in ways that undermine the assumptions of development at work in both urban discourses and novelistic forms. In the complex and colossal Bombay represented in Coolie, it is hybridity that defines the social environment, rather than the strict segregation observed in Untouchable. Describing the city as ‘strange, hybrid, complex, cosmopolitan’, Anand echoes the long history of its popular imagination as a cultural melting pot and gateway to the West.16 A Portuguese-British port and the site of the East India Company headquarters in the late seventeenth century, the city expanded following the reclamation of the ocean surrounding its original seven islands and came under British rule to

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function as a major financial centre and hub for the warehousing of goods such as cotton, opium and dyes (a role that, as with Singapore, increased in importance after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869). Dubbing Bombay the ‘Liverpool of the East’, the city’s colonial administrators celebrated its modern landscape of docks and warehouses, mills, banks, telegraph and postal offices, law courts, public gardens, grand railway terminus, clock tower and Gothic university, viewing these as monuments to the successful importation of a British modernity. In 1867, the city’s governor, Sir Henry Bartle Frere, claimed to be looking ‘forward with utmost confidence to the time when we shall hear that Bombay has taken her place among cities, owing as much to art as she does to nature and position’.17 The stated goal, taken up by the city’s architects in the 1860s, was for Bombay to stand out from the rest of India as a symbol of modern worldliness. It famously became the location for a ‘battle of styles’ among Victorian architects, who created, as one travel writer notes, a dazzlingly eclectic landscape of ‘Swiss timbering, German gables, Dutch roofs, Tudor casements, French Renaissance turrets, Romanesque arches, Early English vaulting, touches of Olde Englishe’, all embellished with ‘obscurely defined orientalisms’.18 As the British Raj’s public face, the city was imagined as a site not only of historical progress but also of the benevolence of British attempts to synthesise the cultures of ‘East and West’: despite the importation of various European styles, architects expressed a preference for cosmopolitan cultural accommodation over direct imposition.19 This preference for accommodation and synthesis was exemplified aesthetically by the mixture of Victorian neo-Gothic and Islamic-Mughal architecture that characterised the Indo-Saracenic Revival, as displayed in public buildings like the Victoria terminus and Taj Hotel. Theorised as a marker of ‘imperial maturity’, this exoticist style aimed to showcase the British ability to evolve and adapt to the local environment.20 Given the cosmopolitanism of Bombay’s architectural landscape as well as the diversity of its population, literary imaginaries of the port city have tended to emphasise its hybridity and ‘messy elusiveness’ in contrast to the reliance on stable categories, binaries and order associated with both colonialism and nationalism.21 Yet while hybridity has understandably been celebrated for its political force as a bulwark against nativist politics, a number of architectural historians have sought to interrogate and contextualise the meaning of the term. Richard Harris, in his discussion of British colonial cities, reflects on the assumption that ‘hybridisation threatens the powerful because it undermines the coherence and legitimacy of their worldview’, making hybridity ‘terrifying to colonialists’.22 Refusing

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to assign a positive or negative character to the term, he calls for its contextualisation within the hybrid and variegated geographies of British colonialism, showing how cultural commerce occurred at every scale and how hybridity was ‘so common as to be a defining characteristic of the colonial city’ (23). At the turn of the twentieth century, this discourse was aligned with the policies of ‘development along native lines’ that emerged across diverse regions of the British Empire, from Nigeria to Fiji. The colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain had claimed that Britain was obligated to promote the ‘development’ of colonial resources and the welfare of colonised populations, a view that would inform the doctrines of ‘trusteeship’ and ‘native development’ in a number of colonial port cities, including Bombay, whose City Improvement Trust was established in 1898.23 Although these doctrines contributed to some progressive legislation, they supported already existing hybrid arrangements between colonial powers and local capitalists and landlords. While it has been common to oppose cultural hybridity with modernity’s ‘insatiable appetite to erase all differences’, this downplays the extent to which hybridity was compatible with a late colonial policy that codified difference rather than erasing it.24 Bombay’s hybrid architectural landscape in certain ways served to reinforce the city’s identity as a site of ‘imperial maturity’ in contrast to the rest of the country. Rudyard Kipling appeals to this exceptional maturity, for example, when suggesting that Bombay, the city of his birth, had ‘achieved a mental attitude several decades in advance of that of the raw and brutal India of fact’.25 Kipling contributes to a paternalistic imperial discourse by invoking the trope of childhood, imagining Britain as the parent, India the child and Bombay the older sibling (a trope frequently evoked among writers seeking to defend British rule in India, as Uday Singh Mehta points out).26 For Kipling, the time lag separating Bombay from the rest of the country indicates the need for a strong military presence across the rest of the subcontinent: he urges traders and financiers to look beyond ‘uncomprehending cities’ like London, Bombay or Calcutta before questioning the need for military expenditure.27 Yet while this narrative of imperial maturity serves to justify militarism across those spaces deemed insufficiently mature, it overlooks the highly unstable and cyclical nature of Bombay’s development in historical terms. Although the cotton boom of the 1860s brought capital flooding in from Lancashire, the end of the American Civil War saw shares plunge, banks collapse and companies go into liquidation; as a result of the region’s vulnerability to the fluctuations of global commodity markets,

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the food crisis of the 1870s triggered devastating famines and prompted migrants to crowd into the city in search of work. The response of the governor, Sir Richard Temple, was to apply freemarket principles and block government spending, a situation that, not dissimilar to Ireland’s two decades earlier, had catastrophic results. As grain was stockpiled at the city’s railway stations for export, it became clear to social commentators both in Britain and India that those structures promising development had in fact exacerbated regional polarisation and poverty for the Indian majority.28 These divisions and inequalities were highly visible within the city. As early as 1869, a Scottish missionary visiting the city noted, ‘as to the native town, no Irish village of the worst kind has a look of greater poverty, confusion, and utter discomfort’, perceiving in its open drains and low huts ‘a most remarkable contrast to the wealth and luxury of the neighbouring city’ – particularly the large ‘Swiss cottages’ on Malabar Hill.29 Although attempts were made to blame ‘dirty native habits’, Bombay’s vast, warren-like tenements (chawls) were built specifically for the working classes by the colonial government, while the slum of Dharavi in the south of the city – originally an area of fishing villages and mangrove forests – expanded in the 1880s after the eviction of Dalits from the Bombay peninsula.30 The lack of alternative housing led to the proliferation of informal shanty towns, whose unsanitary and overcrowded conditions bred diseases such as cholera, dysentery and typhoid, while thick black smoke from the coal-powered mills aggravated respiratory diseases such as tuberculosis. After almost a century of laissez-faire urban development, in which land and buildings functioned primarily as resources for capital accumulation, landlords and private interests maintained an indomitable grip on the municipal process and the city’s development initiatives continued to have limited outcomes. If this meant that the city’s grand hotels, law courts and railway terminus jarred with the everyday conditions facing the urban majority, to those commentators with a transnational perspective, such as Anand, these conditions clashed still more with the visible strides made in urban planning, sanitation, infrastructure and municipal democracy in imperial London in the early twentieth century. As historians have shown, despite all the ‘improvements’ of previous decades, as urban planning emerged as a profession, the colonial state’s refusal to democratise the municipality eclipsed the possibility of a uniform or sanitary building code of the kind seen in European metropolises of the same period.31

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In this way, the development of underdevelopment at work in Bombay’s newly created slums put into question the narratives of maturity espoused by the city’s planners. Similarly, the ethnic and class divisions exacerbated by the city’s differentiated workforce clashed with the hybrid symbolism written into its public buildings. In the 1920s, these contradictions were obvious even to travellers visiting India for the first time. A sense of the depthlessness of the colonial architecture is recorded, for example, by the modernist writer Robert Byron, who criticises the British desire to combine ‘Swiss châlets, mosques, and Gothic spires carved with Hindu ornament’ into ‘a Wembley of reminiscence’.32 Similarly, Aldous Huxley (who, like Byron, stayed at the ‘fabulously expensive’ Taj Hotel) begins with a sweeping denunciation of the cityscape in his 1926 travelogue Jesting Pilate.33 Noting how many of Bombay’s buildings were designed between 1860 and 1900, ‘the darkest period of all architectural history’, he claims that architecturally ‘Bombay is one of the most appalling cities of either hemisphere’.34 In a satirical rewriting of the guidebook, Huxley highlights the city’s comic anachronisms: The University Hall (completed 1874), which is ‘in the French Decorated style of the fifteenth century,’ rubs shoulders with the ‘Early English’ Law Courts (opened in 1879). The University Library, harking back to an earlier century than the Hall, is ‘in the style of fourteenth century Gothic.’ The Old General Post Office ‘was designed in the medieval style by Mr. Trubshawe.’ (Mr. Trubshawe was cautiously unspecific.) The Telegraph Office (date not mentioned, but my knowledge of architectural fashions makes me inclined to a rather later epoch) is ‘Romanesque’. (8–9)

While this mocks the bizarre incongruities and anachronisms at work in the city’s ostentatious buildings, Huxley contrasts these with the ‘long tentacles of suburban squalor’ extending out from the coast, lined by mills, low huts and grey tenements. Taking in the view from the comfort of his motorcar, he admits to carrying the ‘privileges of comfort, culture, and wealth in perfect safety’ and contrasts this with the experience of the cart pullers around him, who carry great weights because it is ‘cheaper in this country to have a waggon pulled by half a dozen men than by a pair of oxen or horses’ (12, 20). The practice is justified abstractly by ‘the owners of motor-cars, the eaters of five meals a day, the absorbers of whisky’, who hasten to assure him that the workers ‘feel things less than we do’ (22). In this way, the chasm dividing the urban populace is justified according to cultural difference, while the ‘less fortunate majority is carefully educated’,

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Huxley claims, in the value and prestige of Europe (11). Key to upholding this regime of value in Bombay is the architecture itself, which, through its suggestion of both an imported European modernity and a harmonious reconciliation of cultural difference, creates a fragile fiction that both conceals and compensates for the city’s social inequalities. Anand – who read Jesting Pilate prior to meeting Huxley, as his memoir reveals – draws on similar contrasts in his own representation of Bombay in Coolie, which establishes a tension between the city’s visual landscape and the lived experiences of those without portable privileges. At the beginning of the novel, Munoo is struggling to make subsistence wages as a ‘coolie’ in the local market of a north Indian town, having escaped a previous abusive situation as a domestic servant. As he passes the ‘imposing architecture of Madan Lal’s theatre’, he observes a sign advertising a world-famous performer who ‘goes to Bombay tonight en route for England’.35 Recalling a friend’s claim that Bombay ‘was truly a wonder city’ (with higher factory wages), he decides to migrate to ‘the new, the wonderful world of a big city, where there were ships and motors, big buildings, marvellous gardens’ (140, 145). The city is not only a desirable destination in itself but a point of departure for the West: ‘I will go to Bombay . . . . I might earn enough there to go beyond the black waters’ (143). Associated with cars, ships, travelling celebrities and international migration, the city offers in its images of mobility the promise of escape from the confinement and forced mobility that have so far characterised Munoo’s life as a rural migrant. The ‘strange, hybrid, complex, cosmopolitan Bombay’ to which Munoo subsequently migrates is framed by the wider textual geography of the novel as a whole, which links the city’s visual unevenness to that of India as a nation. In visualising India from the train window, the narrative highlights the multiple temporalities embedded in its landscape, contrasting ‘ruined fortresses, castles, shrines and mausoleums’ with ‘the prim redbrick buildings of Sir Edwin Lutyens’ New Delhi’, and juxtaposing these with scenes of peasants ploughing the desert earth and the occasional collections of huts from which men, leaning on staves, salute the train (147). As Munoo travels south, landscapes of rural poverty are combined with the richly cultivated fields of princely states, where he sees the ‘special train of the Maharaja, painted white, and reflecting the gloss of a polish which shamed everything beside it’ (150). As the journey continues south, the train speeds past more pockets of prosperity and poverty, passing a blur of mosques and spires, mills and mansions, graveyards and stone yards, fishdrying sheds and dyeing grounds with miles of coloured silk. Viewed from the train window, the nation becomes a panoply of co-existing modernities

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and ruins, a collage of different time periods, architectures and modes of production from modern factories to subsistence farming. As a microcosm of this uneven landscape, Bombay from Victoria Station is imagined as a place of extreme sensory confusion: Munoo sees a ‘medley of colours and shapes and sizes’, hears the sounds of motor horns and tram bells clashing with ‘the babble of many tongues which he did not know at all’, and inhales a mixture of ‘damp and sticky sweat, dust and heat, musk and garlic, incense and dung’ (153). He observes the cosmopolitanism of the populace yet frames this in competitive terms, noting how the Europeans ‘rubbed shoulders’ with Parsis; the saris of Parsi women ‘vied with’ the garments of Hindu women; and these ‘put to shame’ the veils of the Muslim women (153). As the phrasal verbs suggest, Bombay is a place of competition as well as hybridity, a space where different groups mix with but also vie with, compete with and put to shame their rivals. This atmosphere of competition is also reflected in the buildings, whose grand domes and minarets are ‘vying with each other to proclaim the self-conscious heights attained by their Gothic-Mughal architecture’ (153). Bombay’s ‘massive, stately edifices’, its towering statue of Queen Victoria and ‘boulevards of civilization’ (155) impress Munoo but also leave him feeling ‘[o]ppressed and overcast’ (153). In one Joycean image, he observes a marble statue of ‘the short, stocky, broad-bottomed Victoria with a scroll in her hands and a crown on her head, on which a blue-black crow cawed defiance to the world as it danced and fluttered after relieving itself’ (153); yet despite the abundance of monuments, the city is characterised by an oppressive lack of public space. Munoo observes a ‘coolie’ huddled, ‘shrinking into himself as if he were afraid to occupy too much space’ and learns that ‘[y]ou have to pay even for the breath that you breathe’ in the city (155, 152). He scans the bazaar for a charity water stall or communal pump only to see his reflection in the glittering glass windows of shops. The fact that he is frequently denied occupancy and told that he cannot sit down (in restaurants, at work, even in the hospital waiting room) suggests that the city’s narratives of inclusivity and civility operate primarily at the visual level. For all its hybridity, the metropolis betrays an implicit racial hierarchy: Munoo is dazzled by the English signs and images plastered on the walls, observing beautiful European women on the covers of magazines and the ‘huge, wonderful, coloured picture of Marlene Dietrich which stared down at him’ (157). Yet, as he steps in to observe the ‘milk-white body’, the city stages a Joycean interruption and he is obstructed by ‘the loud bellowing of raucous motor horns, the tan-tan of tramway bells, the angry yells of phaeton drivers and shouts of “dem fool,” “black man, where are you

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going?”’ (157–8). In such moments, the text juxtaposes the city’s cosmopolitan visual culture with actual experiences of racialised exclusion.36 This contradiction is further emphasised in the novel’s following chapters, which reveal a widening discrepancy between the city’s glamorous modernity and the privations endured by the migrant populations that form its condition of possibility. Emerging from the ‘vast masses of Western big business houses’, Munoo enters ‘the coloured eastern world of Girgaum’, a district known for its Parsi establishments and cinemas, where throngs of people pass the narrow streets, rickety buildings and bazaars.37 Cultural ersatz and playful contrasts characterise the district, whose houses are ‘decorated by façades of floral designs and arabesque reliefs, plastered and whitewashed in imitation of the European style’, and where huge posters outside the cinemas are ‘illuminated by bulbs of coloured glass’ (162). Yet the area is transformed as night falls, when Munoo notices how ‘[t]he bodies of numberless coolies lay strewn’ on the doorsteps of shops and on the pavements outside the locked iron gates of mansion doors (162). After stumbling over ‘a heap of patched quilt that half enclosed the rotting flesh of a leper’ (163), he inhales the ‘sickly, foetid odour of ghee, sandalwood, urine, sour milk, fish and decaying fruit’ (165), hearing disembodied groans, sighs, curses and the chants of incantations, as if ‘magic formulas would charm away all misfortunes’ (163). Amid the decomposing fruit and flesh, Munoo hallucinates a pavement lined with corpses, and the ‘glistening black bodies’ and disembodied limbs of the workers turn into a living, decomposing mass (163). The scene’s oppressive uncanniness – redolent of the ‘grove of death’ sequence in Heart of Darkness – is linked to the height and grandeur of the architecture: ‘the gigantic proportions of these colossal stone buildings which shadowed the narrow bazaars made the dark bodies of coolies seem out of place’ (165). Confronting the district’s whitewashed buildings with the ‘dark’ bodies of its migrant workers, the image exposes a gap between the signification of the city’s architecture and the misplaced bodies of those who fill its streets. The sense of disillusionment that this experience generates is written into the cityscape the next morning, when the ‘ostentatious splendour of the jumbled styles of architecture was realizing the significance of its garish stupidity’, as if waking from a night of intoxication (168). In a process of disenchantment, Munoo ventures into the industrial suburbs, where, echoing Huxley’s journey, he passes ‘rows of vast grey tenements, with thousands of low straw huts at their feet, hiding the rents and the holes in their sides with ragged, jute cloth hangings’ (169). The pathetic fallacy at work in these images dramatises the city’s failure to conceal its own waste,

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exposing choking alleyways suffused with black soot, sewerage farms, festering marshes and slimy green pools topped with thick layers of scum, rubbish tips piled with broken bricks and glass, heaps of coal, cakes of cow dung and people relieving themselves. Amid this toxic landscape, Munoo moves into one of the huts outside the St. George White Cotton Mills, but a landslide soon afterwards washes his dwelling away during the monsoon rains. Forced to move to a friend’s chawl, he spends his days wading through rivers of sewage and inhaling the fumes ‘of tanning hides, of carcasses of dead dogs and cats on rubbish heaps, the odour of decaying dung which lay in the fields and in fissures and folds’ (209). The abject and scatological language in this sequence widens the gap between the city’s glamorous visual modernity and the privations endured by its workforce. Echoing Untouchable (and in some respects also Joyce’s Dublin, with its toxic river and sewage-strewn mudflats), Anand draws on images of waste to confront metropolitan imaginaries with their own polluting effects. At the same time, by narrating the events of landslides, flooding and toxic dumping, he gestures to the socially produced environmental vulnerability faced by those who perform this labour of concealment. These contradictions culminate in a final sequence in which the textile workers organise a strike in the cotton mill, only to have it derailed by a group in the pay of the mill owners, who initiate a riot by spreading false rumours about the kidnapping of Hindu children by Muslims. As communalist violence erupts across the city, Bombay’s narratives of hybridity implode: ‘Bombay, land of cruel contrasts, where the hybrid pomp of the rich mingled with the smell of sizzling grease in black frying pans; Bombay, land of luxury and lazzaroni, where all the pretences of decency ended in dirt and drudgery . . . the earth of Bombay was, that evening, engulfed in chaos’ (237). The susceptibility of the workers to the kindling of factions sends a wave of violence crashing through the city, washing away its ‘pretences of decency’ and ‘hybrid pomp’. In this way, a parallel emerges between Anand’s representation of Bombay as a city of ‘cruel contrasts’ – in which different groups vie with their competitors in the migrant labour market – and historical accounts of the labour force of the colonial city as generative of both cultural hybridity and ethno-racial tension. While crosscultural contact and commerce were standard features of precolonial trading centres port cities under British colonial rule were more typically characterised by labour markets that profited from the exploitable labour of a cosmopolitan but racially differentiated and hierarchised force of competing local and migrant workers.38 There is a strong sense of this combination of cosmopolitanism and competition in Anand’s novel,

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where the riot takes the form of an ethnic conflict due to the antagonism generated by those with a stake in maintaining divisions among the mill workers. According to Huxley, the solution to Bombay’s inequalities and tensions was that the Indians should cultivate a ‘public spirit’, yet Coolie shows how the deliberate exacerbation of ethnic divisions by the city’s property owners and industrialists prevents such a public spirit from unfolding.39 In this way, Anand anticipates the perceived dissolution of Bombay’s status as a cosmopolitan centre (what Arjun Appadurai calls its ‘decosmopolitanization’ and Rashmi Varma calls its ‘provincialization’) during the anti-Muslim riots of 1992 and 1993.40 As Varma points out, while some critics have emphasised the connection between modernity and rationalism, or accused the nation-state of rationalism, abstraction and of having ‘repressed or “denied” ethnic and religious difference’ as part of universalistic national imaginary, others suggest that sectarian violence was always a key component of India’s experience of capitalist modernity.41 Insofar as Coolie makes this history clear, the rupturing event of the riot serves as a metaphor for the novel’s own suspension of the city’s developmental narratives and teleological assumptions. Responding to the racialised stratifications undergirding the metrocolonial economy, the riot enacts a symbolic destruction of the city’s identity as a site of imperial maturity.

Collisions with the Bildungsroman If Anand’s novel dramatises the contradictions of development from the terrain of the uneven city, it also arrests the journey to maturity associated with the structure of the European Bildungsroman. After fleeing the riot, Munoo climbs the palm-lined avenue to Malabar Hill, where he observes the mansions of the wealthy and the ‘unearthly beauty’ of the island city; yet, his reflections are cut short by the incursion of the city’s traffic as a vehicle collides with his body: ‘The loud honk of a car – and, before he could jump aside, he was knocked down’ (249). Failing to contemplate the city from a position of mastery, Munoo’s journey to Malabar Hill is cut short by the motorcar of the Anglo-Indian Mrs Mainwaring, who subsequently enlists him as her personal rickshaw puller. In the brief and final section of the novel, Munoo relocates from Bombay to the northern colonial capital of Shimla, where he finds rickshaw pulling to be ‘not altogether an unskilled occupation’ and begins to suffer the physical consequences, ultimately contracting tuberculosis (263). Despite enjoying the work’s small, visual compensations – spotting wealthy Europeans in their rickshaws, for example – the job exhausts his energy and accelerates

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his decline. From the car accident to Munoo’s death as a rickshaw puller, the novel’s final sequence creates a fatalistic sense of the protagonist’s destiny as an object rather than a subject of the colonial-capitalist machinery. From beginning to end, we see how his development is characterised not by physical or social mobility but – whether as a forced migrant, ‘coolie’ porter or rickshaw puller – by the debilitating role of providing mobility to others. Significantly, the novel ends at the beginning, in terms of both plot development (Munoo is incapacitated by Mrs Mainwaring, who becomes a suffocating mother-figure) and literary geography (he returns to the northern Indian hills). The death itself occurs in cycles of delirium and lucidity: Mrs Mainwaring, in her ‘complacent hypocrisy’, comforts Munoo and assures him that he will get well again, while Munoo believes before each haemorrhage that he might recover and looks ‘forward to testing his powers for the journey to Bombay by a long walk’ (281, 282). Unlike in Kipling’s Kim (a novel that Anand planned on rewriting), this epic walk across the nation never comes to fruition.42 Nor does Munoo’s death, unexpected and quick as it is, lead to a state of heightened consciousness, moral epiphany or religious conversion (he only briefly contemplates going to the temple at one point, because ‘They give free food at the shrine’, 131). Munoo dies alone, disoriented, with no thought of home or family, and there is little to render his journey meaningful in a progressive sense. Rickshaw pulling leads to a lonely, untimely death; although he dreams of being the hero of his own epic journey – as indicated by the novel’s intertextual links to writers from Dickens to Kipling – he finds his passage to adulthood brutally cut short. Despite the novel’s Dickensian format, Coolie diverges from the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman and its narrative of self-development. As Jessica Berman shows in her study of Joyce and Anand, both writers cultivate strategies of social embeddedness and linguistic disruption that subvert developmental tropes. Berman builds on Jed Esty’s suggestion that modernist Bildungsromane ‘subvert what seems to be the most salient component of the genre – development’, often through the debilitating status ascribed to the protagonists.43 She sees Coolie as offering a similarly antidevelopmental fiction that brings the Bildungsroman into the zone of uneven development, depicting a hero who ‘cannot even dream of development’.44 More specifically, Coolie could be seen to engage with the personal and collective problems of development in a colonial urban context. While Munoo fails to develop physically or emotionally in the various towns and

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cities in which he finds himself, these locations are themselves failed by development initiatives due to their colonial entanglements. The subject of urban planning emerges in Daulatpur, for example, when the wealthy babu Sir Todal Mar writes to the public health officer, Dr Edward Marjoribanks, to complain about smoke emissions from a neighbouring factory. Sir Todal addresses his letter: ‘To Dr Edward Marjoribanks, Esq., MA, DPH, LRCP, MRCS and F. (Oxon)’ and proceeds by reminding the officer of his donation of ‘twenty thousand rupees to His Excellency the Viceroy’s war fund’ (83–4). We learn that ‘Unfortunately the Health Officer ignored this letter’ (84); Marjoribanks briefly recommends a new chimney, only to rush ‘away to play polo at the gymkhana’ (100). In one sense, the plot development is quite literally interrupted by the officer’s departure for a game of polo, the diversions of the colonial setting thereby stalling the municipal health initiative. In a wider sense, the incursion of colonial management interrupts and stalls the development of the Indian city, insofar as a colonial government whose interests have little to do with public wellbeing actively hinders progressive efforts at social redistribution, public planning and environmental regulation. Faced with the difficulties of implementing progressive or redistributive policies, local authorities become more concerned with their career progression and assimilation with colonial power. Sir Todal supports the viceroy’s war fund both for personal gain and in an attempt to overcome his racial disadvantage, fantasising about ‘driving through the bazaars of his native city next to an Englishman . . . with the implied prestige it would bring’ (86). In this colonial context, all efforts at collective development are diverted to private ends. Anand also emphasises the role of language in frustrating developmental goals. In the case of Sir Todal’s failed appeal for regulation in his letter to Dr Marjoribanks, his recommendation to reduce pollution is not taken seriously because it has been sent to someone without a long-term stake in the local environment, and this sense that local concerns have become strangely delocalised is reflected in the absurd density of the language. While Sir Todal’s letter is ‘ignored’, it is also prefigured by a hyperbolically dense list of initials (‘MA, DPH, LRCP, MRCS and F. Oxon’), a trope that is repeated at other points in the novel – for example, when Munoo observes signs around him advertising doctors, such as ‘Dr Hira Lal Soni, MB, BS (Punjab), LRCP, MRCS (Eng.), DTM (Liverpool), DOMS (Bristol)’ (71). These initials invest the speaker with the distant authority of the imperial (and metrocolonial) centre, invoking a vast, hierarchised system of institutional power that renders the urban environment strangely

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illegible. As the names of cities such as Oxford, Bristol and Liverpool are inscribed onto India’s linguistic landscape, a dual regional and national alienating process takes place: the initials are disorienting not only because of their institutional complexity but also because their claims to modern knowledge and professional authority are fundamentally tied to the distant, originating locations of the institutions that give them meaning. Not only are these locations that Munoo can barely imagine, but they are also ones whose names are in English and hence illegible. The fact that Munoo is semi-literate and non-English speaking – as Anand repeatedly suggests by pointing out his inability to read the signs around him – adds an extra layer to this sense of an alien landscape.45 When Munoo tries to read the inscriptions written onto the sacks of grain he is delivering to the railway station, the narrator tells us that he is unable to decipher them, just as he is unable to understand the laws of political economy governing wheat exports from India to England. Getting on with the narrow, logistical task at hand, Munoo instead rolls the name of the company on his tongue with ‘a taste for its melody and strangeness’ (122). This sense of linguistic alienation plays out elsewhere across the novel through the eccentric onomastics of European surnames (Mainwaring, for example, which is pronounced ‘Mannering’, and Marjoribanks, which is pronounced ‘Marchbanks’) as they exclude non-English speakers. While critics have read the playfulness and musicality of Anand’s language as a subversion of the notion of a singular, authoritative language and unitary national community, these qualities also capture a sense of how the complex laws and illegible languages of the colonial setting defy the comprehension of the novel’s own characters.46 If Coolie launches a modernist challenge to the developmental telos associated with the European novel, it also subverts the national-linguistic clarity associated with the genre by drawing on the lack of clarity and failure of communication produced in colonial environments. In doing so, it shows how a vast linguistic and social distance separates the people claiming to develop these environments from the people actually inhabiting them. One under-examined aspect of the novel’s anti-developmental structure concerns the vehicle through which Munoo’s developmental crisis occurs: the rickshaw. Unlike Untouchable, whose ending gestures ambivalently towards the possibility of collective development through municipal waste disposal, Munoo’s death following the highly individualised labour of rickshaw pulling offers little possibility for development in the future. While, at the time of Anand’s writing, rickshaw pulling was frequently viewed as an Asian cultural relic and symbol of

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feudalistic backwardness to be overcome by motor power, Coolie describes it as ‘an improvement on the jampans and dandis’ and makes no mention of the kind of technology that might replace it (261). Originally from Japan and imported to East and South Asian cities in the late nineteenth century, the device was seen as a faster and more convenient alternative to the sedan chair and the horse and cart, due to modern technologies such as inflatable rubber tires, ball bearings and metal springs. Yet, over the next decades, the spectacle of sweating and wheezing pullers was viewed by social reformers as a visual embodiment of class exploitation: George Orwell, for example, described rickshaws and gharries as ‘very poor luxuries’ that afford ‘a small amount of convenience, which cannot possibly balance the suffering of the men and animals’.47 For some, the rickshaw reinforced orientalist assumptions about the barbarism and cruelty of an Eastern ‘rickshaw civilization’; for others, it was a symbol of the ‘backward’ and ‘primitive’ nature of capitalist exploitation in Asia.48 Despite the similarities between the rickshaw puller and the European factory worker – both of whom were seen as cogs in the machine – the fact that the rickshaw relied more directly on the exploitation of human energy was viewed as evidence of Asian ‘abnormal development’.49 Such critiques, however, failed to take into account the degree to which ‘normal’ development in the European factory was always contingent on physical labour undertaken in the colonies, from the mineral extraction for cogs to the rubber cultivation for wheels. In this context, the rickshaw was less a symbol of Asian abnormal development than of the durability of physical exploitation within colonial and semi-colonial regions. Given that pullers were frequently rural migrants who fled the countryside following land dispossessions and in periods of military, economic and environmental upheaval, the device spoke to the precarious, informal and unwaged labour that was both a product of and a necessary (albeit unacknowledged) logistical component to colonial capitalism. (And we could say the same for Munoo’s informal work loading grain sacks, which Anand maps onto the broader terrain of the global economy.) As such, the device’s hybrid appearance – its fusion of the modern and archaic, mobile and immobile, foreign and domestic, manual and mechanical – offers a striking visual symbol of uneven development in this colonial context. In Coolie, the rickshaw enacts a literal and metaphorical challenge to development: by dragging the protagonist back and exhausting his

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energy, it brings an untimely end to his journey to maturity and, consequently, to the narrative arc of the novel itself. It also offers a symbol of stalled development at the national level, when, towards the end of the novel, India’s own future is imagined: ‘India was the one place in the world where servants still were servants . . . . One could hire a rickshaw for four pence an hour . . . here were all the luxuries and amenities of the West at the knockdown prices of the East, so that even Golders Green and Ealing lived like Mayfair and Piccadilly’ (267). In suggesting that even those from the poorer districts of London can migrate and live upper-class lifestyles in India, the novel emphasises the experiential difference between the two as a matter of the former’s international mobility and the latter’s immobility, both of which are determined by location of origin.50 While new labour-saving technologies might transform metropolitan life in cities such as London and Bombay, those designated immigrants find that their energy continues to be valued less than that of machines (or fossil fuels).51 By ending with the image of the durability of physical labour, rather than hinting at the potential of technological change, Coolie makes rickshaw pulling illustrative of an uneven modernity marked by persistent class, rural and caste disadvantage as it continues to divide mobile citizens from immobilised migrants.52 Anticipating a set of stubborn factors that undermine the possibilities of a democratic modernisation process that would include subjects like Munoo, the novel’s anti-development ending articulates a set of postcolonial themes that differentiate Coolie from its predecessor. In place of the stasis and segregation of the Indian city in Untouchable, the epic scope of Coolie evokes a complex metrocolonial setting in which forcedly mobile individuals are subject to racialised hierarchies that devalue migrants at regional, national and global levels. Through its depiction of modern Bombay, the novel anticipates the exacerbation of ethnic tensions by a racially and nationally hybrid elite class, as embodied by Munoo’s metropolitan Indian and Anglo-Indian employers, within this context. The fact that development is stalled in the novel thus reflects the complex intersections of race, ethnicity, class and nationality; yet, this complexity is indicative less of the setting’s local specificity than of what Arindam Dutta, discussing the appropriation of unwaged labour as menial or artisanal in colonial India, terms the ‘self-perpetuating asymmetry that characterizes cheap, informal labor as the hallmark of colonized and ex-colonized countries’.53 Speaking to the kinds of informal and precarious labour

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undertaken by rural and foreign migrants not just in India but also across contemporary global cities, the novel transforms the colonial asymmetry inscribed in both city and rickshaw into a powerful, protopostcolonial diagnostic.

Rickshaw Modernism This chapter began by outlining Anand’s engagement with Forster, and more specifically with the themes of spatial and cultural segregation that appear in A Passage to India. Returning to this, the ending of Coolie is worth comparing to that of Forster’s novel, which Anand recalls discussing with the author.54 In the final paragraphs of A Passage to India, Fielding and Aziz go for a horse ride together and Fielding affectionately asks Aziz: ‘Why can’t we be friends now?’55 The narrator insists that friendship was not wanted by the horses: ‘the horses didn’t want it – they swerved apart’, while the environment itself (the temples, jails, palaces) are also seen to affirm the many physical, social, cultural and political differences dividing the two individuals. After Fielding weakly defends British rule, Aziz expresses his desire for Indian independence; as he does so, the narrator observes that Aziz ‘rose in his stirrups and pulled at his horse’s head’. Throughout his speech, ‘his horse did rear’; ‘he rode against [Fielding] furiously’; ‘in an awful rage [he] danced this way and that’, making ‘his horse rear again’ (305–6). As Aziz talks passionately of driving, blasting and moving forwards (threatening to ‘drive every blasted Englishman into the sea’), his emphatic agency is reinforced by his mobility on the horse. If Forster leaves readers with a final picture of Indian mobility and power, Anand’s decision to end Coolie with the death of Munoo as a rickshaw puller emphasises immobility. Rather than simply representing the subject as a victim, though, this brings into relief the fact that Mainwaring depends on his labour and energy as a structural condition necessary to her own progress. If Forster depicts two individuals for whom political equality is necessary before a friendship between them can be established, Anand represents a situation in which Mainwaring expresses sympathy for Munoo despite having depleted his energy and caused his death. For this reason, her displays of sympathy and even her tears, while Munoo suffers a number of haemorrhages, are not simply ineffective but acts of ‘complacent hypocrisy’, in Anand’s words, due to the direct and immediate contradiction caused by her structural reliance on Munoo’s exploitation. The narrator admits that ‘She was really being kind . . . she did suffer qualms of conscience . . . . But she was not allowed to be kind or good’ (281). In

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this metatextual moment, the narrator does not simply suggest that her final attempts to establish sympathy and friendship are too little too late, but rather he shows how these displays serve to compensate for and conceal her complicity with his exhaustion (and in this respect Anand anticipates Susan Sontag’s observation that ‘[s]o far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence’).56 In choosing to end with the figures of rickshaw puller and rider, rather than of two riders side-by-side, Coolie implies that it is not only independence but also the abolition of the exploitation of Indian labour, energy and resources that is necessary for Anglo-Indian reconciliation. Read in dialogue with Forster, Anand’s use of the rickshaw as a narrative device can be seen to offer both an antidevelopmental challenge to the Bildungsroman and a materialist check on the liberal-developmental structures at work in European modernism. If, through the puller-rider relationship, Anand creates a metaphor for an imperial relationship built not just on political oppression but also on structural exploitation, his Marx-inspired polemic, Letters on India (1942), goes a step further to show how conciliatory recognitions of difference can conceal exploitative relationships. He takes issue, for example, with the liberal identification of ‘two distinctive and unique civilizations, Asia and Europe . . . with two different histories and geographies, with a boundary line beginning somewhere about Suez’.57 Anand suggests that unlike outright imperialists, who believe in ‘the strong-hand-and-no-damnednonsense’ school of thought (‘We didn’t conquer India for the good of the Indians’), liberal defenders of empire (whom he calls ‘Messrs. FacingBothways’) construct ‘ingenious hypotheses to salve their consciences’, claiming that it was ‘the impact of the “restless, sceptical” civilization of the West on the “unchanging, static, contemplative” civilization of the East which brought India under British rule’ (17). Through this ‘clash of civilisations’ narrative, cultural and psychological differences are held responsible for India’s political and economic situation, effectively ‘covering up the naked facts of the exploitation of India’.58 In contrast to the assumptions of difference that these conciliatory narratives presuppose, Anand emphasises the similarities between India and Britain, showing how the imperial centre can learn from the experiences of the colonial periphery. Significantly, the city becomes a model for this project. Before Anand left London to settle in Bombay, his position became more radicalised and precarious in conjunction with the political climate of the 1940s. In ‘London As I See It’, a radio talk broadcast by the BBC in February 1945, he recalls his feelings of alienation as ‘a colonial, an

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outsider in this metropolis of the Empire’, yet proceeds to sketch parallels between London and the Indian cities of his fiction.59 He pays attention to the British city’s uneven landscapes, contrasting the ‘beautiful’ Bloomsbury area with the derelict Thames riverside, whose embankment is ‘a kind of dung heap’, and noting how grandiose statues tower over homeless people huddled on benches (19). He imagines himself as an ‘impatient modernist, reacting against the amorphous beehives of India’s cities’, yet he also rejects spectacles of the past in London, criticising the city’s military statues and describing the guards outside Buckingham Palace as a ‘childish survival’ (20). While this focus on London’s unevenness subverts the city’s own claims to developmental maturity, the upheavals and regressions of the Second World War further complicate this selfimage. Reflecting on the damage caused by the Blitz, Anand imagines fascism as the encroachment of colonialism into the heart of the European metropolis, writing that ‘we saw the ugly face of Fascism in our country earlier than the writers of the European countries, for it was British Imperialism which perfected the method of the concentration camp, torture and bombing for police purposes’.60 In London, the detonation of bombs and cry of sirens are seen to bring ‘shocks to the sensibility of the first forties’; yet, these bombs, Anand claims, ‘had already fallen in Shanghai, Addis Ababa, Madrid, Barcelona’.61 Observing the scarred face of London, Anand suggests that the war inflicted a peripheral condition on the British metropolis, cultivating collective rather than individualistic sensibilities and creating ‘a new kind of place which gapes out in sympathy to Leningrad, Moscow and Chungking and Calcutta’ (21). Just as this situation bring ‘shocks’ to the city’s sensibility, so Anand’s own project for the Anglo-Indian novel might be viewed in similar terms. By confronting metropolitan narrative assumptions with the difficulties and complexities of peripheral experience, his work reconfigures the materials of European modernism.62

chapter 5

Ecologies of Empire in Oceanian Modernism

The previous chapters have shown how literary narratives from colonial cities can unsettle the ideals inscribed onto their monumentalised settings, confronting the promises of development made by colonial architects and planners with the asymmetries of everyday life on the city streets. In the chapter that follows, this definition of metrocolonial modernism is extended to encompass the ecological questions posed by writers from the urban South Pacific. In Suva, the capital of Fiji, a group of writers associated with the wave of creativity that emerged in the 1970s imagined the landscapes of the island port city in ways that further complicate narratives of colonial development.1 By staging a conflict between developmental aspirations and colonial ecologies in Oceania, their work can be seen to take part in a relational and anti-colonial literary project, one that highlights the environmental contradictions at work in the perpetually ‘developing’ landscape. This chapter considers the relationship between the ecology of the colonial port city and the rise of modernism in Oceania, focusing on the discourses surrounding the foundation of Suva in the 1880s as the British capital of Fiji. Locating ecological anxieties in Suva’s ‘swamp-to-city’ narrative, I show how the issue of climatic vulnerability is acknowledged but also sublimated as it appears both in colonial narratives and in modernist stories of gendered walking in the city. While novelists and playwrights produced realist portrayals of Suva in the 1970s – focusing on issues of urban poverty, crime and ethnopolitical tensions in the aftermath of British rule – others have staged personal, psychic conflicts in Suva’s streets, hinting at the pervasive fragilities characterising the city’s past and present.2 Exemplifying the latter, ‘One Saturday Morning’ (1977) by the Fijian writer and environmental activist Vanessa Griffen and ‘Kala’ (1988) by the Indo-Fijian writer and academic Subramani can be read as works of Oceanian modernism, in dialogue with the challenge to development imagined in Tales of the Tikongs (1983) by the Fijian/Tongan writer 120

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and theorist Epeli Hau‘ofa. Griffen’s urban fragments, Subramani’s layering of Hindu epic and modern flânerie and Hau‘ofa’s retrospective reading of the landscape can each be aligned with a literary tradition that extends back to the colonial modernisms of writers such as Mansfield and Joyce. This is not to imply that they emulate Irish and New Zealand writers but rather that they in effect extend these literary projects: to compare them is not to position them as derivative but to place them in dialogue. This dialogue highlights the specificity of Oceania’s modernity in the colonial world-system even as it generates critical implications that resonate beyond the region. By focusing on writing from Oceania, this chapter introduces an ecocritical dimension to the book’s previous analyses, making visible the precarious environments shaping modernist urban narratives.

Colonial Ecologies and Oceanian Modernism Central to the oceanic trade networks of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, colonial port cities were spaces that generated nature-defying forms of coastal construction. In cities such as Dublin, Bombay, Singapore, Hong Kong and Suva, the expansion of colonial ports involved significant environmental disruptions, such as land reclamations, deforestation and the construction of deep-water harbours. Due to trade imperatives, the choice of coastal construction sites often resulted in a structural vulnerability that exposed port cities to environmental threats including tide swells, tsunamis and cyclones, while the paving over of rivers and waterways increased the likelihood of flooding as well as water-borne disease. Given that these threats resulted from coastal deforestation and the selection of unsustainable construction sites, colonial port cities might be viewed as sites of socio-ecological rather than natural vulnerability. Not only was their experience of modernity shaped by coastal and cultural interconnectedness, but it also responded to the socially produced vulnerabilities initiated through colonial urbanisation, including the susceptibility of growing populations to natural disasters and extreme weather events. Because British port cities such as Bombay, Chennai, Singapore and Hong Kong – as well as older colonial cities such as New York, Charleston and Boston – were selected for their proximity to oceanic trade routes within imperial networks, planners tended to prioritise short-term economic objectives over long-term environmental sustainability. The Indian novelist and anthropologist Amitav Ghosh has highlighted an example of this logic in the East India Company’s construction of a new port on the banks of the Matla River in the mid-nineteenth

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century, as a proposed alternative to Calcutta and Singapore. Despite warnings that the Matla – a name which means ‘crazed’ or ‘intoxicated’ in Bengali – was unsafe due to the probability of storm surges, Port Canning was duly constructed on an extravagant scale, only to be struck by a cyclone three years after its inauguration and abandoned four years later.3 If this example speaks to the short-sightedness of colonial development, the same imperative of coastal urbanisation resulted in the displacement of millions of people to dangerously exposed locations. A key example here is the British expansion of colonial Bombay to low-lying and reclaimed islands: while the city’s growth redirected trade flows away from the Mughal port of Surat, the failure of colonial planners to anticipate the site’s ecological vulnerabilities (as Anand’s narrative in the previous chapter also suggests) increased the potential of devastating consequences for the city’s residents – a fact that, Ghosh argues, has today left some 18 million at risk from cyclones, flooding, resource shortages and attendant civil unrest. Critics were in some respects aware of these ecological implications in the nineteenth century. The naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, for example, noted how the rapid deforestation taking place in regions surrounding British Singapore would have irreversible implications for species diversity.4 Because high levels of deforestation and soil exhaustion were experienced in the coastal cities of the British Empire, due to urbanisation as well as experimental forms of colonial botany and plantation agriculture, these locations witnessed some of the earliest effects of modern colonial capitalism’s anthropogenic reorganisation of natural environments. Consequently, as Ghosh argues, colonial cities were ‘drivers of the very processes that now threaten them with destruction’ and ‘their predicament is but an especially heightened instance of a plight that is now universal’ (55). The fact that the cities ‘brought into being by processes of colonization’ are ‘now among those that are most directly threatened by climate change’ leads Ghosh to assert that ‘[t]he Anthropocene has reversed the temporal order of modernity: those at the margins are now the first to experience the future that awaits all of us’ (37, 62–3). From this perspective, instead of being derivative of ‘original’ metropolitan sites of modernity such as London, colonial port cities are viewed as sites of modernity par excellence; far from the belated or backward spaces imagined by the planners of replicas like the ‘Liverpool of the East’, they are the modern sites upon which our world prehistory is mapped. As such, the port cities of the late British Empire function as sites of an anticipatory

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ecological awareness, offering insight into today’s systemic environmental vulnerabilities and their colonial origins. This sense of anticipatory crisis has already emerged in the colonial cities discussed in previous chapters, where writers stage anti-developmental disruptions caused by financial disasters (Conrad’s Singapore), urban poverty (Joyce’s Dublin) and riots and landslides (Anand’s Bombay). As we saw in Chapter 1, Mike Davis also presents the colonial city as a site that anticipates contemporary urban crises in his thesis on ‘mega-Dublins’, or cities formed by a process of ‘urbanisation without development’. For Davis, the uneven modernity of Victorian Dublin anticipates the divergent paths taken by the megacities of the contemporary Global South, where urbanisation and rural-to-urban migration have continued apace despite a lack of the kind of economic, industrial and political power that concentrated in the cities of the imperial centre. While Davis usefully outlines an alternative trajectory for the unplanned, informal urbanisms of Southern cities, his narrative could be extended through an analysis of the ecological factors limiting urban development in these spaces – not only as they affect the ‘slum’ cities of his study but also as they impact all cities shaped by empire’s coastal imperatives. Examining colonial port cities in this context extends Davis’s ‘mega-Dublins’ thesis to include ecological underdevelopment, or – to adapt his own words – urbanisation without environmental development. Just as elements of Victorian Dublin foreshadow contemporary mutations in the growth of postcolonial cities for Davis, so the nineteenth-century colonial port city anticipates the climatic threats faced in cities across the global coastal zone today. For this reason, as this chapter will show, cultural and narrative responses to these threats are both anticipatory and global in the scope of their implications. If ecological vulnerability was a feature of British urban expansion in the nineteenth century, then the port cities of Oceania – the region encompassing the islands of the Pacific Ocean – offer particularly striking examples of the environmental disruption that this process entailed. As Sudesh Mishra has pointed out, Oceania was never subject to the largescale technology-driven industrialisation of Europe or Asia; instead, the arrival of sandalwood, bêche-de-mer and whaling trades in the nineteenth century, and the encounter with Christian missionaries and the printing press, led to a modernity defined by European conquest and settlement, plantation agriculture, forced and indentured labour and the foundation of port cities including Apia (Samoa) in the 1850s, Port Moresby (Papua New Guinea) in the 1870s and Suva (Fiji) in the 1880s.5 That the growth of these cities had transformative effects on social and cultural life has been widely

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noted. One historian calls these port cities the modern conduits of the Pacific islands, describing the new capital of Suva, for example, as ‘a recognised koro vavalagi or foreign village’ that produced new forms of contact, commerce and culture.6 Yet, because the violent impact of colonial conquest and invasive disease significantly altered human demographics and local ecosystems in the region, the experience of modernity in Pacific port capitals was defined by cycles of growth and stagnation, construction and dilapidation, migration and depopulation. Responding to the jarring effects of social and ecological disruption in both the plantations and the port cities, writers in Oceania, as Mishra shows, have tended to imagine modernity as a process of rupture and discontinuity, rather than acceleration or development (5). While literature from Oceania has remained relatively marginal within global anthologies, narratives from the region anticipate some of today’s most prescient ecocritical themes. Although literature may not offer quantitative data on environmental change, it is well positioned to speak to the sensory affects, values, meanings and knowledges with which environmental transformations are experienced and understood. Writers in Oceania have long been attentive to forms of environmental disruption: not only were original ‘South Seas’ authors such as Herman Melville, R. L. Stevenson and Somerset Maugham sensitive to the changes generated by plantation agriculture, maritime resource extraction and extreme weather events, but the Pacific writing that emerged following decolonisation in the 1960s and 1970s also developed formally innovative ways to capture the region’s experience of environmental transformation. There are a number of reasons for the ecological current to Oceanic literature: the struggle for indigenous land rights, the alienation of indentured labourers from the land, the colonial and neocolonial forms of extraction and ecocide from logging to nuclear testing experienced in the region, as well as the vulnerability of low-lying atolls and coral reefs to rising sea levels, for example, have each had a major impact on Pacific societies. This impact is evident in works such as Albert Wendt’s Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979), Patricia Grace’s Potiki (1987) or Subramani’s The Fantasy Eaters (1988), to name just a few examples. Oceania has also been the site of numerous NGO-led development initiatives since the 1970s, many of which focus on agricultural, maritime and conservationist policy and planning (see, for example, Vincent Eri’s The Crocodile [1970] or Hau‘ofa ’s Tales of the Tikongs). Yet although critics have interrogated these ecocritical themes in Oceanic literature, the role of the Pacific port city has not been a point of focus, and Suva in particular has remained relatively absent in studies of

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Oceanian modernism. While scholars have identified the city as the movement’s birthplace in Fiji – noting, for example, its place in the establishment of institutions such as the University of the South Pacific (USP) in 1968; as well as the Fiji Writers’ Association; the journal Mana Review; and the creative activities of formerly Suva-based academics such as Albert Wendt, Vanessa Griffen, Subramani, Sia Figiel, Vilsoni Hereniko and Epeli Hau‘ofa – this chapter highlights the city’s role in narrative engagements with ecologies of empire in the Pacific.7

‘A Swamp Becomes the Capital’: Colonial Narratives of Suva Although Suva’s origins can be traced back to an early Melanesian settlement in Fiji, its colonial history officially began in 1882 when the British government relocated from the old trading capital of Levuka. Prior to this, indentured Indian and Pacific Island labourers were engaged in land clearance and reclamation, construction, drainage and road-building works, and surveyors from the Royal Engineers were employed to design a city plan. What emerged was a colonial town laid out against a panoramic harbour front, replete with streets, parks and buildings commemorating figures such as Sir Arthur Gordon, Benjamin Disraeli, Queen Victoria, Lord Carnarvon, William Des Voeux and John Macarthur. Following the construction of the transPacific cable in 1902 and the Grand Pacific Hotel in 1914, Suva was described as a ‘booming’ colonial centre.8 Like other cities in the British Empire, the architecture was characterised by the obligatory white arches, pilasters and neoclassical ornamentation, as evident in structures such as the Suva Town Hall, Carnegie Library, Government House and the clock tower in the Thurston Botanical Gardens. Remarking on the white-arched colonnade built along Nabukalou Creek, commentators went so far as to describe the city as ‘Venice in the South Seas’, an image that (notwithstanding the hyperbole) carries some inadvertent environmental implications.9 As a result of the land reclamations necessary to the harbour’s expansion, Suva’s transition from Fijian village to capital city has been described by historians as a battle waged against nature. Detailing the original land clearances, Albert Schütz shows how the creation of a ‘bastion of Colonial architecture, with white-suited and helmeted population to match’ involved the punishing removal of reeds and mangroves on the promontory, often with the use of only butcher’s knives, while labourers battled the swampy terrain, relentless mosquitoes and fierce land crabs (7).

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This identity of Suva as a swamp turned to city recurs across colonial narratives, which emphasise both the geographical obstacles facing settlers and a metaphorical sense of the ‘savagery’ engulfing the region. While Schütz notes the difficulty of building on muddy terrain and mangrove forest, he also understands the construction of Suva as an ideological attempt to ‘clear away’ the debris deposited by North American and Australian settlers. The former capital, Levuka, is described as a lawless city and ‘sinful place’, whose white residents and sailors have secured its reputation as a hotbed of alcoholism, slavery and racist violence.10 Hoping to make ‘a fresh start . . . with the white settlement’, the British positioned themselves as an antidote to both the Pacific slave trade and the environmental and health crises that ravaged Fiji and exacerbated its regional conflicts.11 As with other initiatives across the British Empire, this narrative was part of a broader ‘turn to development’ characterising colonial policy from the Chamberlain era through to the Second World War. Anticipating this climate, Fiji was a key laboratory for liberal imperialists, among whom Sir Arthur Gordon, governor of Fiji from 1875 to 1880, devised a protectionist policy (‘Fiji for the Fijians’) that prefigured later doctrines of ‘indirect rule’ and ‘development along native lines’.12 In this context, the growth of Suva as the administrative capital was imagined as a transformation from settler swamp to orderly civic centre, an urbanising narrative that, as in the cities discussed in previous chapters, emphasised the benevolence of British rule. An example of this narrative appears in Cities and Men, the memoir of Sir Harry Luke, governor of Fiji in the 1930s, which passionately denounces the pre-urban savagery of settler activity in the Pacific. Luke claims that prior to British interference, the region served as a ‘magnet to the dregs of the white race’: [B]rutal whalers; villainous sandalwood-gatherers securing their fragrant booty by fraud and bloodshed; callous ‘blackbirders’ kidnapping sturdy Melanesians from the New Hebrides and the Solomon Islands to labour in the Queensland canefields . . . the scum of white humanity converged upon the primitive, beautiful islands and atolls of the South Seas, despoiling, debauching, scourging with their diseases island races hitherto so healthy that their blood had never developed the anti-toxins necessary to resist them.13

Invoking the language of contagion and disease, Luke describes Fiji’s early nineteenth-century history as ‘a sordid and at times a ghastly story, which not for nothing has been called “The Brown Man’s Burden”’; yet, he also

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insists that since the 1870s, the British administration has been ‘prompt to repay the debt which the white man owes to the brown man of the Pacific’ (118). Notably, he identifies this perceived repayment in the built landscape of Suva itself, viewing the Central Medical School and ‘the dignified surroundings of the New Legislative Council Chamber’ as structures that have made ‘a great impression both to residents and members of the general public’ (118–19). These public buildings appear to restore Luke’s faith in ‘white humanity’, and he remarks on their role in hosting an inflow of important diplomats, governor-generals and ‘distinguished Commonwealth and Allied leaders’ in Suva, even claiming that the city has now become ‘the Clapham Junction of the South Seas’ (131). Emphasising the city’s role in presenting a positive outward appearance to distinguished visitors and restoring the public’s faith in the colonial administration, Luke’s account shows how Suva was to be the public face of British government in Fiji, a role kept alive in the twentieth century during royal visits, sporting events and international conventions. In contrast to this triumphalist narrative of Suva as a vanquished swamp, a number of literary figures who visited in the early twentieth century were confident in their ability to see through the city’s modern veneer. Describing a trip to Suva in December 1916, Somerset Maugham notes the grandeur and luxury of the Grand Pacific Hotel (dubbed ‘The Raffles of the South Pacific’), a ‘large, two-storeyed building faced with stucco and surrounded by a veranda’, replete with a cool and quiet lobby, ‘electric fans constantly turning’ and ‘silent and vaguely hostile’ Indo-Fijian servants; yet, despite pointing out the modernity of the city’s hotel, shops and harbour front, he claims that something mysterious has been concealed: ‘You feel that in the farther country, thickly wooded, there is a strange and secret life’.14 While the racist overtones inflecting his account make for uncomfortable reading (he goes on to describe this life as ‘aboriginal and deeply cruel’), his writing conveys a sense of the antagonisms concealed by Suva’s modern facade, an idea that also emerges in the account of selfstyled ‘adventurer’ Martin Johnson, who had visited the city with Jack London just a few years earlier in 1913. Recalling how Suva ‘looms up from the sea, quite like a modern city, and is really the most modern in this part of the world’, Johnson cites the hotels, large trading headquarters, British prison and the fact that almost half of the city’s populace are ‘of white blood’, as evidence of this modernity.15 Yet, recounting a journey to the outlying mangroves – where he is rowed by ‘a party of Fiji prisoners’ and stared at ‘in wonder’ by the occasional ‘native in his little canoe’ – he comes to the conclusion that ‘While Suva was very modern for a South Sea city,

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one had only to go a few miles into the interior of the island to find primitive life’ (266–7). This evident fascination with the difference between Suva’s modern appearance and its marshy exterior appears again in the memoir of Bloomsbury poet Rupert Brooke, who visited Suva in 1913. In the letters transcribed by his biographer, Brooke imagines Fiji to be ‘the wildest place’ yet recalls his surprise on seeing Suva: ‘And lo! a large English town, with two banks, several churches, dental surgeons, a large gaol, auctioneers, bookmakers, two newspapers, and all the other appurtenances of civilisation!’16 Suva is described as ‘a queer place; much civilised; full of English people who observe the Rules of Etiquette, and call on third Thursdays, and do not speak to the “natives”’; yet, it is also ‘macabre’: surrounded by ‘inky, sinister mountains, over which there are always clouds and darkness . . . that trans-sinutic region is nothing but forbidding and terrible’ (109). If this describes the region’s propensity for storms and downpours, it also echoes Maugham’s and Johnson’s observations of the contrast between Suva’s ‘appurtenances of civilisation’ and the wildness of its surrounding environment. Brooke echoes colonial narratives when connecting these threats to the need for British protection. Noting ‘the extraordinary contrasts in the streets’, he paternalistically distinguishes ‘proud’ ‘Hindoos’ and ‘childlike’ Fijians from the ‘weedy Australian clerks’ whom he describes as ‘secret devil-worshippers, admirers of America, English without tradition and Yankees without go’ (110). Echoing British colonial critiques of settler savagery, Brooke emphasises the dangers that predatory Australians pose to Suva’s ‘proud’ and ‘childlike’ citizens. The same narrative of Suva as a site for the British protection of vulnerable Fijians appears again in James Michener’s Return to Paradise (1951). Describing the city as a ‘thriving seaport’, Michener pronounces the Grand Pacific ‘the ultimate in tropical hotels’ due to its immaculate cleanliness and seven-course dinners; he remarks approvingly on the architecture of the government headquarters and the ‘canal that reminds one of Venice’; and he proclaims the dances held in the Fiji Club to be befitting of ‘one of the jewels of the Commonwealth’.17 Like others before him, he links Suva’s successes explicitly to British rule, comparing the regime emblematised in these buildings to the dirtiness of what he calls ‘Yankee squatterism’ in North American cities, insisting that without the British there would be ‘no stately administration building, no railroad, no tradition of justice built upon local conditions’ (119). Despite this, however, he also implies that the British, ‘with a mania for wrong decisions in Fiji’, were misguided in their decision to build the capital on a site plagued by

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flooding and heavy rainfall, insisting that however much this ‘Venice in the South Seas’ protects Fijians from Americans and Australians, it fails to defend them from the ravages of the environment itself (114). While touristic complaints about the weather were commonplace in Suva, the city faced a number of more serious environmental hazards due to the location of the site chosen for reclamation works. Not only was its position vulnerable to flooding, landslides, cyclones and tsunamis, but, as in other British port cities, the town centre also was plagued by the waste and toxicity produced by quarrying, mining and dredging works, while contamination and outbreaks of disease, especially typhoid fever and dysentery, were frequent. The arrival and departure of tourists in cruise ships exacerbated these disease epidemics: Frances Steel shows how the first cruise in 1884 was disrupted by an outbreak of measles after leaving Fiji, which prevented passengers landing and left them trapped aboard a ‘veritable plague ship’.18 For Suva residents, the effects of these outbreaks were further exacerbated by inadequate sanitation infrastructure, and as in colonial Hong Kong and Singapore, newspapers regularly reported waste and sewage oozing from the pavements. Anxieties about disease and the transmission of bodily fluids led to a number of legal measures, including severe fines for spitting in the streets and strict policies of segregation. While the majority of white settlers chose to reside in elevated positions on the hillside, they called for formal segregation from and between Fijians and Indo-Fijians in residential as well as public spaces, including the Fiji Club, the concert and dance halls, reading rooms, public baths (the ‘Sea Baths’ were open only to Europeans), hospital wards, schools and the gaol (which segregated Fijians and Indo-Fijians).19 As in other colonial cities, health and sanitation became the pretext for forms of social stratification that privileged whites even when these health issues originated from colonial activity. In fact, many of Suva’s environmental issues have been linked to a lack of foresight on the part of the city’s planners. As Schütz notes, the design of the town centre was often ‘blamed upon’ (rather than credited to) Colonel F. E. Pratt of the Royal Engineers, who was appointed as director of works in 1875.20 The plan that his team produced was criticised in an editorial in the Suva Times, which asks ‘why every building in the line of streets should be forced into acute angles . . . why the plan of the streets generally should be copied from the crude designs of the school boy maze’ (qtd. 14). In a chapter titled ‘A Swamp Becomes the Capital’, a historian at The Fiji Times notes the description of the city as a ‘site of fetid and pestiferous mangrove swamps’ resembling ‘a spider’s web after a strong gale’, whose

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narrow lanes and alleys seemed ‘specially designed to retain the malarious swamp airs’.21 Victoria Parade is described as having ‘barely room for a handcart, a danger to life and limb’, and pedestrians are recorded ‘flounder[ing] through the mud, unable to tell whether they were on the street or off it’ (163). Calling Suva ‘a capital for paupers’, the article condemns the unprofitable nature of the peninsula, noting how earlier attempts at planting sugarcane on the site had also failed, and critiquing the government for having shifted its offices to a swamp (qtd. 162). Rather than blaming Pratt and his team of engineers for Suva’s problems, however, Schütz concedes that the primary obstacle was a lack of funding, citing the following explanation from the Suva Times: We have a very limited treasury. We cannot afford to raise splendid edifices, to make boulevards, to lay out parks and create an outside paradise . . . . Our roads are bad, our water supply is not completed, the houses are scattered over the hillside promiscuously, the architecture is not in the most artistic style. (qtd. 14–15)

As with colonial Dublin and Singapore, the most urgent issues facing residents were everyday municipal matters related to waste and sewage, roads, cemeteries and water supplies, and reports from the archives indicate a distinct lack of state investment and planning. As with other colonial regions, the persistence of these problems into the twentieth century was at odds with the considerable advancements made in municipal sanitation, transport and public infrastructure in the imperial centre, which accompanied the emergence of urban planning as a profession. Despite Suva’s British toponyms and commemorative buildings, its modernity appeared largely cosmetic and restricted to the city’s ‘distinguished visitors’. As Fiji’s position as a tourist centre grew in the twentieth century, Suva came to acquire an identity as the ‘other side of paradise’ (an identity that persists today in titles for travel articles such as ‘Suva: A Face of Paradise Only a Maugham Could Love’). If colonial visitors and officials imagined it as ‘Venice in the South Seas’, residents continued to lament its resemblance to a ‘malarious swamp’. It is worth noting, lastly, how these colonial narratives of Suva as a poorly chosen site go back to the beginning of the nineteenth century in the archives. In the oral accounts gathered in ‘Historical Notes on Suva’ (1919) by Colman Wall, curator of the Fiji Museum, the original inhabitants of Suva are traced to hilltop locations. Wall asserts that these inhabitants ‘removed from their old hill forts, and built the town of Suva on the

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site of the present Botanical Gardens’, estimating that this ‘cannot have taken place later than 1820’ and claiming that it occurred as part of ‘a general exodus’ in which ‘hill towns were left deserted’.22 Wall’s account coheres with research on the prevalence of hilltop settlements [koronivalu] during pre-contact times in Fiji, showing how the colonial-era encounter with white traders – which brought modern armaments, invasive disease and devaluations of Fijian customs through Christian conversions – culminated in the widespread abandonment of hill settlements across the islands.23 Wall claims that within just two decades, the vulnerability of the new coastal location in Suva led to an attack by another clan, during which the town was completely destroyed. He spends the majority of his account detailing this ‘siege of Suva’, which he calls ‘one of the fiercest and bloodiest fights in Fijian history’ due to mass looting, arson, cannibalism, rape and the murder of women.24 As Schütz notes, these conflicts paved the way for cheap land purchases: in the case of Suva, several years after the siege, the debt accrued following the accidental burning of a house owned by a US commercial agent led to the grossly unfair sale of the land to the Polynesia Company.25 Suva’s turbulent history thus forms part of a broader colonial process of dispossession, by which communities became embroiled in armed conflict, sickness and debt before migrating to the coast and selling their land to white planters. In contrast to the British narrative of Suva as a space of protection for Fijians, this story signals new and unprecedented forms of vulnerability in both political and environmental terms. Although Wall does not provide an explanation for the Suvans’ illfated decision to leave their protected hilltop locations, he does transcribe oral sources that link this move to female indolence, revealing a gendered dimension to Suva’s foundational narrative. The story of the Suva chief, Tabukaucoro, connects the decision to his poor choice of a wife: Now great Bau ladies, though they had to marry whom they were ordered, had no great liking for chiefs whose residence was on hill tops, for though slight and lithesome of form when young, they were apt to become of rather generous proportions when they reached maturity . . . . [T]o this day the Suva people speak bitterly of the influence of those great Bauan ladies whom [the chief and his father] married for the withdrawal of the clansmen from their strong hill forts, and the founding with their unwilling assistance of the town of Suva on the short of the harbour; a step that finally led to his own ruin, and the crippling, nay almost destruction, of his people.26

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According to the narrative transcribed by Wall, Fijian women, rather than local patriarchs and colonial traders, were to blame for the decision to leave the hill fort for the coast and hence are ultimately responsible for the violence inflicted on the Suva people. By associating women with a desire for an outward-facing modernity, they are made to shoulder the blame for the violent disruption to the harmoniously imagined rural community that ensued. Importantly, however, within Wall’s narrative women are not so much the cause of Suva’s violence as subjects in need of protection from it. Indeed, he goes into great detail when recounting the brutal murder of women during the siege of Suva, noting that ‘while women were often killed in Fiji’, and while mass rape was allegedly explained by Fijian male polygamy, the massacre in Suva was unparalleled for ‘the slaughter of a crowd of defenceless women after an armistice had been granted’.27 According to this narrative, Suva was not simply a swamp in a literal sense or, as in British colonial accounts, a place of settler depravity, but rather a location marked by inter-Fijian and patriarchal violence, whose present-day Botanical Gardens conceal another ‘savage’ history. Notably, Wall’s narrative is at all points framed by that of the modern city observed in 1919, whose landscape, while more amenable to female safety, is still in need of protection. He opens his account by criticising the ongoing decimation of the coastline, observing how Suva’s original cave of refuge for women continues to be destroyed by mining and quarrying works, while its ‘little beauty spot[s]’ are ravaged by extraction and development (‘an utilitarian age has buried the soft, warm sands under the concrete pavement’, 38). Wall thus explicitly links the vulnerability of women to that of the environment itself, tying the original susceptibility of the cave of refuge to its modern commercial expropriation. In this way, he weaves together themes of female and environmental fragility, recalling, for example, the rescue of women following a severe hurricane (32–3). Women are thus doubly integrated into the narrative of British protectionism, with Suva featuring not only as the centre of catastrophic violence against women but also as a feminised space whose ‘soft, warm sands’ are urgently in need of protection. Yet, as the next section will suggest, narratives of Suva as a site for the British protection of Fijians from settler savagery, and those emphasising its modern role as a space in need of further British protection, are interrogated in postcolonial fictions of Suva. By staging journeys of female independence within a consciously amphibious urban setting, these texts appropriate the swamp to city narrative. Reading the landscape itself, they bring its terraqueous past into the present and evoke the environmental background of Suva’s original, coastal-oriented

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vulnerability, unsettling the assumptions of protectionism at work in the city’s colonial narratives.

Amphibious Modernism: Suva in Griffen and Subramani Vanessa Griffen and Subramani each played formative roles within the wave of literary creativity associated with Oceanian modernism in the 1970s and 1980s. Griffen, a writer and anti-nuclear environmental activist, was born in Suva and graduated from the University of the South Pacific, after which she became well known regionally for her short stories. Praised for their lyricism and ability to capture ‘passing moods and moments’, many of these are reminiscent of the work of Katherine Mansfield, exploring the limiting, enclosed social spaces available to women in the South Pacific.28 ‘The Concert’, for example, narrates a trip taken by a group of Fijian girls from their village school to Suva, where they stare ‘at the shops, the dashing cars, the self-confident city people’ as their English teacher attempts to convince them of the value of European classical music (13). Other stories thematise similar impositions of value, notably that of economic development in ‘The New Road’, which details a construction worker’s return to the empty village of his ancestors, and that of touristic commerce in ‘Afternoon in Town’, which follows a young boy’s attempt to establish entrepreneurial independence by selling leis (flower necklaces) to tourists at the Suva harbour. While many of these narratives stage negotiations of value, a story that speaks to Suva’s specific role in this process is ‘One Saturday Morning’, published in 1977 just seven years after Fijian independence. Opening with images of sickness and contagion, the story follows the protagonist, Teresa, as she wakes up ‘to the sound of her grandfather’s coughing’ and, because he appears to be dying, is instructed to indulge his final request: ‘I want to eat crab today’.29 As Teresa wanders through the city for the majority of the narrative, Griffen conveys her affective responses to its fleeting sensations and external stimuli; yet, by opening with a request from a dying member of the older generation and relaying a young woman’s subsequent solo journey, the story speaks to larger themes, from the demise of an older regime and its patriarchal constraints to the city’s role as a space of commercial negotiation. Within Fijian political discourse, Suva has long been associated – often in problematically ethno-racial terms – with money and commerce (‘the way of money’) as opposed to the vanua (‘the way of land’).30 The mundane title of ‘One Saturday Morning’ draws attention to these associations in Christianised Fiji by staging events on the day of commerce, when

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everyone ‘roam[s] about the shops’ in Suva (33). After taking a bus into the city, Teresa is overwhelmed by the chaos of market day, observing the crowds, noise, dirt, blaring horns, people pushing one another, near traffic accidents, heatwaves rippling across the pavement and streets littered with garbage. As she begins her search for a crab, she is forced to step sideways to avoid numerous puddles of mud and ‘pool[s] of fish-smelling water’ on the ground, while the buildings and even the air are all saturated with water (36). After ‘squeez[ing] herself out of the wet concrete room’ in the marketplace, the perspiring Teresa observes how the muggy heat causes time itself to move slowly and heavily as if weighed down by moisture, while the crowd descends like a ‘hot steamy breath across her face’ (38). In contrast to the solid territoriality associated with the ‘way of the land’, Suva is represented as a terraqueous city, whose wet, slimy and steamy qualities dissolve the boundaries between self and environment. Although this language generates an interior and experiential sense of Suva in its humid summer months, Griffen’s depiction of a young woman’s search for crabs in a terraqueous environment can also be read more metaphorically. After Teresa finally manages to find a bundle of the creatures tied together, she is forced to negotiate a price with the vendor before carrying them home to her grandfather. On the return journey, she observes the crabs closely, noting how they ‘moved their legs up and down, and the sharp nippers made fractional movements in and out . . . they moved in slow motion, frothing white bubbles’ (39). This image of the crabs and their slow-motion movements recalls the stifling sense of claustrophobia and atmospheric compression felt by Teresa herself earlier in her hot, dark and cramped apartment, generating a feeling of domestic confinement that returns when she arrives home to learn that her grandfather has died. At her housing estate, the narrator notes how the ‘block of flats baked slowly in the sun’; the doors resemble ‘open black holes all along the floors’; the apartment fills with choking kerosene fumes and the ‘heavy feeling in the air’ suggests that residents are being slowly boiled alive. The crablike images that pervade the story – images of people retreating into dark holes, groups of children scuttling and ‘scampering’, a baby’s cheeks being ‘pinched’ and residents baked and broiled in hot fumes – all gesture towards shared experiences of entrapment across species. As Teresa processes her grandfather’s death at the end of the story, ‘The events of the day oozed out from where they had been smothered’, and her thoughts drift from her grandfather to the baby on the bus, recalling ‘the expression on her face as she had stretched towards the crab’s nippers’ (41). Bringing together images of age and youth with those of death and danger, her

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thoughts evoke subjects that are both resistant and trapped, resilient and vulnerable, forging an associative link between the conditions of the crustaceans and those of the city’s inhabitants. Given the symbolic and cultural meanings of the crab in Oceanian as well as Western thought, this dreamlike association in ‘One Saturday Afternoon’ can be seen to invest the city with qualities of amphibiousness and anachronism, generating a sense of spatial and temporal instability. Discussing the crab in European philosophy, Peter Royle notes Jean-Paul Sartre’s fixation on crabs (and lobsters, whose name in French, homard, parallels that of homme) due to their ambiguous combination of the qualities of hardness, softness, wetness and viscosity, the latter of which produces a sliminess that Sartre views as repugnant because it reverses the relations between observer and physical object.31 If, for Sartre, humans strive for freedom and autonomy, the encounter with sliminess gives priority to the object over allegedly free beings: ‘instead of our exercising control over it, it clings to us and threatens to suck us into itself.’ Perhaps for this reason, crabs have served as focal points for anxieties about hybridity in Gothic fiction: the crab-monsters in H. P. Lovecraft’s early twentieth-century fiction, for example, are reviled for their qualities of amphibiousness and directional ambiguity (which he connects explicitly to the threat of cross-cultural contact in the ‘queer ports’ of the South Seas).32 The in-between position of the crab as neither hard nor soft, wet nor dry, forwards- nor backwards-moving, causes non-binaristic anxiety here, and as with the ‘ragged claws’ scuttling across the seabed in modernist poetics, the body of the crustacean takes on an archaic and anachronistic appearance, disturbing the smooth time of the modern with suggestions of older, buried temporalities. Related to this flexible conceptualisation of space and time is the place of these creatures within indigenous ecological knowledge systems in the Pacific, where their habits have long served as premonitory signs of future weather patterns such as heavy rainfall. Reading Griffen’s story in this context, their sideways movements – abhorred by Lovecraft but emulated by her protagonist as she cautiously sidesteps through Suva’s streets – gestures to an alternative model of relating to the environment, one that eschews forward-thrusting linearity in favour of a more cautious and attentive navigation of the immediate surroundings. Read historically, this spatial and temporal ambiguity evokes the terraqueous nature of Suva’s own city centre as a space reclaimed from the ocean, bringing together the city’s past identity – as a space of mangrove forests defended by fierce land crabs – and its present, where mud oozes from the streets and where shopping malls sink into the ground due to land subsidence. Just as the

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city’s own topography blurs geo-epistemological distinctions between land and sea, so its urban land crabs continue to unsettle the artificial distinctions created by its original reclamations as they scuttle through the streets. Serving as crustacean reminders of Suva’s submerged past, these creatures reveal an aquatic history that resists full elimination. While the imagistic associations between city and crustacean in Griffen’s narrative can be seen to craft an affective response to the city – building up a sense of entrapment and entanglement that evokes the difficulties of independence at both the personal/gendered and the urban/historical levels – a similar atmosphere of spatial and temporal discontinuity emerges in the fiction of Indo-Fijian writer Subramani, where Suva is imagined in equally terraqueous terms. Like Griffen, Subramani taught at the University of the South Pacific’s Suva campus and was part of the wave of literary creativity that swept the region from the late 1970s into the 1980s.33 He too is best known for his short stories, many of which explore the alienating and disruptive effects of the plantation system on the indentured labourers brought from India to Fiji between the 1880s and the 1910s. While some of his most prominent stories, such as ‘Sautu’, ‘Tell Me Where the Train Goes’ and ‘Gamalian’s Woman’, are set in sugar-mill towns and remote villages, others examine the experiences of the postindenture generations that moved to Fiji’s coastal cities. Subramani has suggested that the fact that Indo-Fijians owned only 2 per cent of the land following independence yet were ‘visibly in control of the commerce in towns and cities’ turned Suva into a site of racial tensions in the years leading to the 1987 military coup.34 Stories set in Suva, such as ‘Kala’, ‘Dear Primitive’ and ‘No Man’s Land’, convey an atmosphere of rising tension within this climate. The story ‘Kala’, collected in The Fantasy Eaters (1988), stages a series of aimless urban journeys undertaken by the eponymous female protagonist. As with Griffen’s prose, mood and setting take precedence over the plot, which consists primarily of the protagonist walking around the city, where she pursues (or is pursued by) an unknown man. The dreamy, hallucinatory nature of her perceptions and the way that these intermingle with her fantasies and desires create an unstable narrative, allowing the protagonist’s projections and paranoias to distort the urban landscape. Kala, we learn through a focalised third-person narrative, has been rejected for a job at the Ministry of Education and is dissatisfied with her marriage, regarding it ‘as a trap’35. Having travelled in India, she craves independence yet feels frustrated by the influence of her husband, and as she wanders through the streets by day, these desires and frustrations colour the city’s

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appearance. Kala had ‘lived in Suva for over seven years, yet she hadn’t seen the city fully’, having regarded it ‘as featureless, existing only for money’ and lacking the myth and history of Indian cities. Now, however, the city takes on a ‘romantic aspect; it seemed to contain an extraordinary amalgam of feelings and sensations’ (97). Walking past the market stalls and harbour front, she feels a sense of intimacy: ‘She moved alone in the crowd, absentmindedly, among malingerers, hangers-on, and tourists all performing their rites . . . . She returned home when the sidewalks started to empty, her face burning with shame’ (96–8). Viewing the city as a kind of seducer, she regards these trips as a betrayal of her marriage; yet, the descriptions of Suva give her fantasy of a romance with the city a delusional character. Forced to ignore the unromantic aspects of her surroundings – the potholed pavements, flooded streets, crumbling scaffolding and ‘rubble from a collapsed façade’, as well as numerous other images of dilapidation and decay – she focuses on the mysterious figure glimpsed in the streets and in this way wilfully transforms the city into the stage for a romantic adventure (97). Notably, Kala’s projections are not the kind associated with a Western or ‘globalised’ modernity in the metropolis: she does not fantasise about luxury commodities or Hollywood movies but instead invokes Hindu icons, for example, by linking her fixation on the stranger to her childhood infatuation with Lord Krishna. Sudesh Mishra has noted how North Indian viraha songs, which stretch back to a tradition from twelfthcentury India, inform sections of ‘Kala’. The male figure that Kala views in the streets, he suggests, ‘is allusively conjoined to the sacral-sexual aesthetics of the rasalila tradition of a peasant-based Indian economy’, which generates a clash between Kala’s desire for a modern subjectivity liberated from domesticity and her ‘sexual passion (ratibhā va) for an idealized god’.36 Comparing Subramani’s Suva to T. S. Eliot’s ‘unreal’ London, Mishra shows how incompatible social relations are layered into the texture of the narrative as it imports past aesthetic apparatuses into a twentieth-century context. Consequently, just as Kala’s perambulating consciousness and excursions undermine the story’s sequential temporality, so Subramani’s formal layering of modern and antiquated styles is seen to give the text an anachronistic, asynchronous quality, staging an archaic haunting of the new at the levels of both content and form. In Subramani’s writing, Suva comes to resemble the unreal city of literary modernism not only because its landscapes are filtered through Kala’s consciousness but also because its multi-temporal complexities are reconfigured as sources of aesthetic innovation.

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While Mishra’s reading links Subramani’s fiction to the formal structure of the modernist city as discussed in previous chapters, it is worth noting how the moments of temporal disjunction in ‘Kala’ are also connected to ecologically disruptive forces. Significantly, both the story’s beginning and ending invoke the destructive consequences of a flood, describing heavy rainfall in supernatural terms from the first lines: ‘The rainy season was over. The unseasonable June rain descended on the city unexpectedly at mid-morning, by some strange godly intercession’; ‘Black rain erupted suddenly on the buildings, slashed into shop-fronts; soon both sides of the streets were filled with running water’ (87). As this sudden, apocalyptic burst of black rain descends on Suva, the water gives the city a spectral and unreal appearance, framing Kala’s first vision of the unknown man, who is drenched in rain and appears as a ‘mirage’ (88). In this extreme weather, everything takes on ‘a dreamlike quality’: the ‘faces that streamed in the sticky heat’ move towards Kala, producing a feeling of ‘generalized dread’; she ‘felt an unseen shadow touch her’; and ‘Faces behind frosted glass emerged briefly, took shape, and disappeared’ (88). In one sense, Kala’s emotional state makes the city ‘unreal’. As the narrator notes: ‘The rain had made everything seem unreal. She wondered if it was the rain or her habit of seeing extraordinary significance in ordinary things that caused that feeling’ (88). In another sense, the unseasonable rain acts as a narrative device that links elements of the story external to her consciousness. As water envelops the city, a crowd of people stop to stare at the body of a drowning rat – an image that predicts a subsequent drowning reported on the radio: ‘They were still searching for the girl who had plunged into the Rewa River. Now the river would be swollen . . . . She pictured the girl’s body washing out to sea and sinking below a ring of foam’ (88, 89). The fact that the event of drowning bookends the narrative (we learn later that ‘The drowned girl had resurfaced’) links the climatic turbulence to Kala’s own psychological experience of ‘drowning’ in the social and familial expectations placed on her – yet it also suggests a more literal notion of the destructive and cyclical elemental forces to which Suva appears vulnerable.37 If Subramani’s Suva is a temporally asynchronous space in which the archaic haunts the new, as Mishra suggests, then the interruption of the flood facilitates this process in the narrative, allowing nature itself to unsettle the linear projections of the modern as it overwhelms Suva’s subjects and threatens to ‘reclaim’ it streets. A key example of the way in which the extreme weather in ‘Kala’ adds to the narrative’s sense of temporal disjunction appears when Kala arrives at Nabukalou Creek, site of the white-arched colonial colonnade and

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location of various triumphalist descriptions of Suva as the ‘Venice of the South Seas’. Here, she observes only a ‘sour-looking stream, lined with black and green bricks and rusted iron, moved sluggishly with the refuse. It bore the stench of rotting mangroves’ (93). The sluggish flow of refuse pollutes the ideals of civilisational modernity emblazoned onto the colonnade. As Kala stares at the creek, ‘The lonely haunted face she had seen emerge from the black rain swam before her eyes. She saw a pair of bare feet on naked shingles slaked with rain’ (93). While the figure of Krishna haunts her here, the naked shingles and rotting mangroves serve as ghostly reminders of Suva’s own past: at the site of its initial land reclamations, the bare feet also suggest those of the indentured labourers who first carried out the labour of clearing its mangrove forests. Like the workers arriving from India, Kala ‘seemed to be pushed along as in a dream’, and, for her as for them, ‘what lay ahead seemed dim and frightening’ (94). Looking at the creek, Kala experiences a wave of disappointment as she becomes conscious of the gap between her projected desires and the reality she is faced with in the city: ‘When she became conscious of her surroundings, her face burned with shame’ (93). In staging two competing visions of the colonnade at Nabukalou Creek – whose white pillars featured symbolically in colonial narratives of Suva, encapsulating its split identity as both the ‘Venice of the South Seas’ and a ‘malarious swamp’ – the text maps the divide between Kala’s personal fantasies and disappointments onto the wider chasm separating Suva’s colonial projections from its precarious reality. If Nabukalou Creek concretised the early dreams of colonial administrators and travel writers in the Pacific, it is also a space through which the ocean enters the reclaimed city and in this respect it evokes the aquatic images that, in other stories in Subramani’s The Fantasy Eaters, refer back to Indo-Fijian memories of the ‘black waters’ crossed during indenture. As a space connecting the ocean to the new port city, the creek is both a passageway and a phantasmal end point where dreams meet reality, whose refuse and rotting mangroves produce an anti-paradisal image that dispels those generated by the arkatis (recruiters) and in which the girmitiyas (indentured workers) had invested their hopes when making the decision to migrate across the oceans. As Kala stands in the city reclaimed by her migrant ancestors, the Suva of her imagination clashes with the one she physically experiences, and her own personal disillusionments resonate with those felt by the city’s former inhabitants. Kala later hears of the fate that has befallen the stranger in this very location: ‘They found him face down on the wet asphalt, a few yards from the creek’ (102). While the deified and romanticised figure in her mind here is reduced to mundane

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mortality, the fact that this man has simply expired, face down by the creek, also suggests the exhaustion and expendability of the countless unknown labourers who built the modern city, gesturing towards the frustration both of Kala’s personal ambitions and of those coerced into the city’s construction. Read in these historically multilayered terms, the porous swampiness of the urban environment serves as a mechanism for blending the city’s past and present, confronting private with collective disappointments. In imagining the difficulty of building solid foundations on slippery ground, the narrative also anticipates the later, destabilising political events that would affirm the impermanence of Indo-Fijian claims to the land. In Subramani, Suva as swamp becomes the ‘other side of paradise’ in a new way, its terraqueous complexity foregrounding not only female but also Indo-Fijian experiences of socially produced vulnerability as they undermine discourses of colonial protection. This terraqueous language can also be seen to intersect with questions of literary form, especially concerning notions of organicism and constructedness within definitions of realism. Noting how English-language literature in the Pacific is often viewed as an ‘unspontaneous, artificial’ aesthetics rather than a ‘free flowering of culture’, Subramani agrees that writing in the region was ‘invented, planned, constructed’, resembling more a process of urban planning than a spontaneously flowering garden.38 Significantly, however, he defends the constructed quality of Pacific literature in English, associating it with a more self-aware and less mimetic art that shows how ‘reality is not something given’ (47). Specifically, he links the constructed nature of Pacific literature to the political climate in Fiji, which he claims has had a destabilising impact on both reality and realism. The colonial concepts of modernisation and progress, Subramani argues, were ‘made utterly meaningless by the military coups’, whose effects of social and political destabilisation suspended disbelief and credibility, ‘restructuring reality’ and creating ‘the problem of the plot running out of control’.39 If the fragmented sentences and short paragraphs in ‘Kala’, as well as its psychologised intercessions and meandering journeys, enact this unravelling of the plot in a formal sense, they evoke both the military context in which the story was written and the destabilising, disruptive forces shaping the city’s colonial history. Contributing to an Oceanian modernism, the amphibious Suva imagined by both Subramani and Griffen blends together personal and interiorised with collective and historical experiences of the Pacific port city, harnessing the aesthetic possibilities of the city’s terraqueous landscape to create spatially and temporally fluid narratives. Insofar as this illuminates the forms of political and environmental

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vulnerability linking Suva’s past and present, it undermines the assumptions of protectionism at work in its colonial narratives of foundation.

Ecological Memory and Landscape Histories This final section of this chapter turns to the relationship between Oceanian ecologies and modes of historiography as they apply to readings of the city, focusing on one of the most important cultural theorists of the Pacific: Epeli Hau‘ofa. Moving in the same literary circles as Griffen and Subramani in the 1980s, Hau‘ofa was a Fijian/ Tongan writer and anthropologist who also taught at the University of the South Pacific’s Suva campus, where he later established the Oceania Centre for Arts, Culture and Pacific Studies. Like Subramani and Griffen, Hau‘ofa became well known for his short fiction, much of which takes satirical aim at the development industry in the Pacific. The stories playfully expose the incongruities at work in the rhetoric of missionaries, modernisers and self-professed development experts, confronting their language with the contradictory and incompatible realities that it attempts to describe. At the same time, Hau‘ofa is well known for providing alternatives to the developmentalist thinking satirised in his fiction, articulating regionally based systems of theorising Oceania in important essays such as ‘Our Sea of Islands’ (1993) and ‘Pasts to Remember’ (1994). In the latter essay, Hau‘ofa takes up a notion of ecological time from Oceanian epistemologies to link past, present and future.40 While modern conceptions of time stress linear progression, imagining the past ‘behind us, receding ever further, while the future is ahead, in the direction of our progression’, Hau‘ofa suggests that Oceanian historiography is ‘neither evolutionary nor teleological, but sequential’ (65–66). According to this model, the past is ‘in front and ahead of us and the future behind, following after us’; when our eyes remain fixed on knowledge of the past, that past goes on ‘ahead of us, leading into the future’ (66–67). This movement towards the past, Hau‘ofa suggests, produces a circular model of time attuned to ‘the regular cycles of natural occurrences’ that punctuate human activity: Where time is circular, it does not exist independently of the natural surroundings and society. It is very important for our historical reconstructions to know that the Oceanian emphasis on circular time is tied to the regularity of seasons marked by natural phenomena such as cyclical appearances of certain flowers, birds, and marine creatures, shedding of certain

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Ecologies of Empire in Oceanian Modernism leaves, phases of the moon, changes in prevailing winds, and weather patterns. (67)

Hau‘ofa contrasts this Oceanian model with the time of capitalist modernity, which, with its ‘unquenchable thirst for growth’, disengages itself from natural cycles and drives global environmental degradation (67). Showing how this model of developmental time has been imposed on Oceanian societies, he notes that the discourses and educational models imported to the Pacific resist locally situated knowledge by projecting ideas specific to wealthy societies like the United States and Britain as ‘universal verities’ (71). He claims that We and our students digest these notions and then enter international discourses on progress almost always on other people’s terms. We play their games by their rules, and accept the outcomes as inevitable and even morally desirable, although these may be, as they have often turned out to be, against our collective well-being. (71)

Critical of Western historiography and its tendency to dis-embed knowledge from local conditions, Hau‘ofa’s essay outlines alternative avenues for historical inquiry that are grounded in local environments. History, he claims, is ‘inscribed on our landscapes’, where particular names pinpoint ‘landing places of original ancestors’, ‘arenas of great and decisive battles’, sites of ‘past settlements, burials, shrines, and temples, migratory routes and genealogies’ (72). Insofar as the past is recorded and inscribed in landscape-narratives, Hau‘ofa suggests, it can be conceived as ‘ahead’ of us in a more literal sense – not just as a source of future knowledge but also as something written into the scenes in front of our eyes. As such, Hau‘ofa insists that ‘We cannot read our histories without knowing how to read our landscapes’ (73). While Hau‘ofa’s point about reading the past through the landscape offers critical possibilities for scholars aiming to avoid colonial universalisms and to produce locally empowering knowledge, there is arguably a romanticising tendency at work in the notion that history is available to us as we study our surroundings, given that historical recovery is always a social and political process deeply bound up with access to archives, resources, funding, mobility and institutional power. In a striking counterimage to Hau‘ofa’s, the Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat recalls, when visiting the Dajabón River dividing Haiti from the Dominican Republic where a massacre took place, that ‘There are no markers. I felt like I was standing on top of a huge mass grave, and just couldn’t see the bodies. That’s the first time I remember thinking, “Nature has no memory” . . .

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and that’s why we have to have memory’.41 In other words, without the political, archival and institutional support necessary to historical recovery, landscapes can conceal as much as they reveal, or forget as much as they remember. This institutional nature of knowledge production is something to which Subramani is highly attentive. In his essay ‘Born to Disorder’, he suggests that the classification of Pacific culture as essentially oral overlooks the contamination and mixing of cultural forms; in Fiji, the role of popular culture from pulp fiction to Hollywood and Hindi movies contaminates strict distinctions between literacy and oralcy.42 Emphasising the role of institutions, Subramani questions why the West should claim literacy as its culture when this is largely the outcome of well-funded, centralised government institutions, literacy campaigns and publishing industries supported by centuries of imperial conquest, suggesting that culture is at the institutional level always mediated and framed by the power of nationstates. In Fiji, as in other postcolonial nations, the absence of strong, centralising state apparatuses especially following the structural adjustment policies of the late 1980s means that intellectuals have often faced a lack (or erosion) of knowledge-producing public institutions, relying on nongovernmental and intergovernmental organisations subordinate to the interests of larger and more powerful neighbours.43 If the knowledge produced under these conditions is locally disempowering, or at the very least influenced by external interests, Subramani highlights the (post) colonial university’s similar role in adjusting students to modernisation initiatives that imitate ‘the consumption patterns of the metropolitan centres, an orientation away from that which is produced locally’.44 In this way, he provides an institutional context to the problem of universalisation that Hau‘ofa outlines. Of course, Hau‘ofa himself is deeply attentive to the role of institutions in knowledge production. In his story ‘The Glorious Pacific Way’, collected in Tales of the Tikongs, the development industry has enlisted the main character, Ole, in a cultural preservation project; yet, instead of facilitating his research, the project embroils him in bureaucratic funding applications that ultimately create a relationship of dependency. By eradicating autonomy and self-sufficiency, the stated aim of development is never actually achieved. The title satirises the mandate of ‘The Pacific Way’, coined in the 1970s by Fijian Prime Minister Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, which, as Elizabeth DeLoughrey explains, promoted ‘native communal and familial values, consensus building, reciprocity, indigenous arts, and inter-island cooperation and unity’.45 Following this model, Ole by

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the end of the story has created eighteen national committees and councils, has applied for $14 million in aid for his organisations and has become a well-known international advisor; meanwhile, his oral history collection has been forgotten and the records are now used as toilet paper by an aunt at home. Ole’s story suggests that despite his faith in development, real development has not taken place: instead of using the aid money to benefit public institutions or communities, it has resulted in Ole becoming a skilful aid recipient and consumer. Development has allowed only for personal inclusion within an unequal consumer lifestyle, one that emulates (and benefits) the wealthy countries and condemns those at home to poverty. In this way, developmental rhetoric becomes the latest manifestation of earlier colonial narratives, providing an individualistically aspirational and falsely benevolent discourse that disavows its own role in the disempowerment of the community at large.46 As an emblem of this contradiction, ‘The Glorious Pacific Way’ ends by depicting ‘The University of Southern Paradise’ as an institution that does little else but confer meaningless titles to its decorated experts, while generally failing, like the agencies funding it, to support local research. Like Subramani, then, Hau‘ofa offers insight into the institutional problems facing knowledge production in the Pacific, highlighting not just a failure to think locally – about problems or experiences unique to the region, or about the contradictions and hypocrisies of universalising developmental models – but also the material difficulties facing institutions that might support these alternative and locally beneficial ways of thinking. In this context, the involvement of both Subramani and Hau‘ofa with the USP in Suva, from decolonising curricula to establishing alternative research centres, affirms their commitment to the construction of new spaces that materially underpin new imaginative concepts. All this points towards not just a diagnostic and critical role for the (post)colonial city – which, across this book, has tended to operate as a site for examining contradictions and fault lines – but rather a constructive one, in which the semi-periphery operates as a mediating space that fosters alternative knowledge by building alternative institutions of knowledge production. At the same time, Suva’s experience of modernity does continue to have a diagnostic and critical relevance that extends to other postcolonial cities. Hau‘ofa’s model of landscape reading, in particular, points to a mode of reading the city that resonates well beyond Oceania. In illuminating the environmental connections linking past and present and prioritising the act of looking backwards, Hau‘ofa emphasises the recovery of the ecological prehistories shaping the present, in an echo of Benjamin’s ‘Angel of

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History’, who gazes back at humanity’s accumulated wreckage during a storm. Hau‘ofa’s model of ecological time is useful for reading not only Suva but also a network of coastal cities in which the immense pressure on marine environments has exposed inhabitants to hazards such as rising sea levels, severe weather patterns and tidal surges, erosion, landslides, flooding and toxicity, as well as the political conflicts that these issues exacerbate. While, in one sense, the catastrophic temporality evoked by the discourse of climate change enforces a linearity that goes against Hau‘ofa’s circular model of ecological time, it also negates wholesale postmodernist rejections of history and forcefully refutes developmental claims. By adopting Hau‘ofa’s model of looking back and reading the signs on the landscape, we see how the history of environmental crisis is already woven into the fabric of colonial cities. The insights gained from Suva, whose original land reclamations continue to inform its contemporary vulnerabilities, reverberate across a network of other cities, including those discussed in this book’s previous chapters. In Dublin Bay, the expansion of the port onto reclaimed land is at the background of major episodes of Ulysses, which take place in the porous space separating land and sea, beset by a fatally poisonous accumulation of waste, sewage and toxic pollution. Mirroring the catastrophes endured by residents of the ‘low’ riverside region in Forster’s colonial town, the mudslide destroying chawls in Anand’s Bombay also has a context in British planning, taking place in areas reclaimed from the ocean surrounding the city’s original seven islets. Similarly, the deforestation and reclamation of British Singapore underlies Conrad’s aquatic images of coastal porosity in the region, where the ‘submerged level of broken waste and refuse left over from the building of the coast nearby [was] projecting its dangerous spurs’. In each of these examples, the detritus of empire washes into the colonial periphery, highlighting those spaces that have been transformed by its coastal imperatives and which are subsequently most vulnerable to its toxic effects. In each of these spaces, Hau‘ofa’s model for a history of the landscape offers a critical method of re-reading the future of the past, showing how these cities’ environmental futures are embedded in the ground on which they stand. Given the global implications of this in environmental terms, the spatial and historical complexity of the Oceanic city initiates, in Subramani’s words, a project of ‘turning the periphery into the centre’.47

conclusion

Mega-Dublins

Just south of Delhi lies Cyber City, a futuristic business park established in the metropolis of Gurgaon (Gurugram) by a group of multinational corporations during the liberalisations of the 1990s.1 When travelling through the district, the gleaming skyscrapers, shopping malls, modern apartments and neon-green golf course appear as shining exemplars of contemporary urban development. Despite the vision of corporate modernity on display, however, Cyber City’s incongruities are frequently pointed out. On the way in, the absence of paved road means that sharply dressed urban professionals can be seen walking to their jobs at offices and call centres for companies such as Google, Microsoft or IBM along potholed roads, crossing thirty lanes of traffic at a standstill. The contrasts are arresting: a glamorous, modern city within the global knowledge economy that nevertheless lacks basic municipal sewerage, reliable electricity, water services or rubbish collection, and where sports cars nudge their way past ox-pulled carts, SUVs with blacked-out windows attempt to overtake overfilled lorries, and diesel-fuelled buses with passengers clinging from the windows beep their horns at the pigs and cows zigzagging along the motorway. The landscape is dazzlingly futuristic, its signs pointing to ‘Micromax Avenue’; ‘IndusInd station’; the Vodaphone towers; or residences like the ‘U-block’, ‘DLF Phase-V’ and ‘Sector 29 Market’. Yet Cyber City also resembles a giant construction site, whose shifting roadblocks, deafening drilling and sprawling slums impede navigation, making the city’s construction of the future appear chaotically incomplete. Because the city’s public administration is outsourced to the private sector, Gurgaon seems to herald a neoliberal future: privatised, liberalised and deregulated, this is a place where corporate growth and rising inequality go hand in hand. Its development model was largely predicated on luring multinationals through cheap land, tax breaks and other incentives of the kind offered in Cyber Cities across the globe, from Mauritius to Malaysia and Myanmar. In Gurgaon, companies run their own private 146

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sewage and disposal facilities; they use private couriers in the absence of a local postal service; medical facilities are offered to employees; and those without the means to hire security guards are exposed to inequality-driven urban crime. In recent years, the counterproductive logic of this development model has become clear as air conditioning units raised the trapped air temperature in excess of 50°c – bearable for those with individual cooling units, not so for the migrant workers outdoors. Meanwhile, water crises loom as the city’s groundwater supplies are depleted and its riverways are filled with toxic waste. For those residing in the area’s gated communities, it is just possible to pass smoothly between residential units and the shops, gymnasiums and restaurants contained in the buildings. Yet, Gurgaon is a place in which the slums – and the migrant workers and dispossessed villagers that they accommodate – can never wholly be avoided. In this respect, its landscape evokes the fictional accounts discussed in previous chapters, where hotels on seafront promenades exist a stone’s throw from overcrowded tenements, where grand, tree-lined boulevards lead to muddy swamps, and where everyday street scenes juxtapose tramways and cattle, lawns and tigers, military cavalcades and rickshaws. In both Gurgaon and the cities examined in this book, uneven development is fully and arrestingly visible on the streets. Walter Benjamin wrote that ‘[f]or the materialist historian, every epoch with which he occupies himself is only prehistory for the epoch he himself must live in. . . . The events surrounding the historian, and in which he himself takes part, will underlie his presentation in the form of a text written in invisible ink’.2 If Benjamin’s method excavates the outmoded consumer cultures of nineteenth-century Paris in an effort to uncover the roots of fascism, this method suggests that understanding the urban present requires attention to its prehistories. To what degree are cities in the Global South, where studies have recorded unprecedented urban migration, capital flight and ecological disruption, still shaped by their colonial pasts? Do processes of colonial corporate planning and de-industrialisation anticipate today’s privatised development models? How do long histories of segregation still inform zoning practices and gated residential arrangements? And to what extent do unsustainable land reclamations continue to exacerbate environmental pressures? Insofar as the texts discussed in this book explore these structural vulnerabilities across a network of cities – narrativising the catastrophic effects of financial volatility, segregation and ethnic riots, extreme weather and coastal flooding – they gesture to the prehistories underlying some of the issues facing contemporary ‘megaDublins’.3 The perspectives that these texts offer are especially relevant to

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those cities now labelled ‘Tigers’ – Dublin, Singapore or Hong Kong, for example – whose developmental success stories have tended to assume a break with the past, even where colonial-era structural and institutional weaknesses have produced enduring vulnerabilities. By examining the uneven, metrocolonial conditions shaping these spaces and experiences within them, the modernist texts discussed in this book question the logic of urban development in enduringly relevant ways. In recent years, the unevenness characterising the contemporary global city has continued to inspire urban novelists, as seen for example in Ivan Vladislavić’s vision of Johannesburg in the grip of the security industry in Portrait with Keys (2006). This text recalls the dystopian architectural imaginary of J. G. Ballard, whose novel High Rise (1975) uses the private apartment building and its enclosed shops, restaurants and swimming pool as the stage for the return of a law-of-the-jungle logic, imagined as a surreal process of reverse development. In Ballard, the high-rise building forms a miniature version of a city owned by transnational companies, divided into gated communities and protected by private security firms. A similar spatial imaginary is vividly evoked in his semi-autobiographical novel of colonial Shanghai set during the Second World War, Empire of the Sun (1984): here, the city’s foreign concessions provide modern amenities for the European residents employed by multinational corporations and foreign governments, offering a suburban paradise of garden parties, luxury cars and maid-serviced mansions that shelter inhabitants from the violence and poverty beyond their fortified gates. In colonial Shanghai, European soldiers guard concessions that resemble miniature treaty ports, anticipating the formidable security measures employed in contemporary high-rise apartments in cities like Johannesburg or Gurgaon, where the process of entering gated communities can feel like stepping into a different time zone. In this context, Ballard’s claim that ‘the periphery is where the future reveals itself’ links the privatised, corporate metropolis back to the kinds of colonial cities discussed in this book, with their segregated European quarters and hilltop residential enclaves. The fact that Ballard described himself as a writer on the roadside, holding up a sign – ‘Dangerous Bends Ahead – Slow Down’ – takes on extra significance when we consider its ecological implications.4 It is not just private bore wells and toxic dumping but also past environmental actions – from badly chosen construction sites to the reclamation of oceans and the paving over of river networks – that have exacerbated water crises in cities across the globe, from Jakarta and Cape Town to Mexico City and Dubai. Anticipating these issues, the narratives discussed in this book do not

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simply meditate on the differences between colonial cities and the municipal modernisations taking place in European metropolises of the same period. Rather, their attention to lived experiences of environmental vulnerability reveals a precarious, potentially apocalyptic future for the contemporary city as such, warning of the difficulties involved in overcoming the past and the dangers of a collective failure to heed its lessons. The challenge to the periodising schema of the modern/postmodern metropolis that appears when comparing writers such as Conrad and Joyce to Ballard and Vladislavić has implications for how we read modernism’s unreal city today. For Jameson, writers such as Conrad, Joyce and Forster evoke spaces partially or incompletely modernised in the early twentieth century, where they perceive ‘the coexistence of realities from radically different moments of history’.5 Yet, according to Jameson’s narrative, this modernist aesthetic is distinct from a postmodernist order in which all unevenness has been ironed out: ‘the postmodern’, writes Jameson, ‘must be characterized as a situation in which the survival, the residue, the holdover, the archaic, has finally been swept away without a trace . . . Everything has reached the same hour on the great clock of development (or at least from the perspective of the “West”)’ (309–10). The idea that postmodernism spells the end of unevenness is not indicative of the global present as Jameson sees it. Rather, the fantasy of ‘evenness’ is associated with the perspective of the West and the desires and assumptions of globalisation theory.6 Jameson views architecture as a medium through which these desires are articulated: the Bonaventure Hotel, for example, ‘aspires to be a total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city’, content to ‘let the fallen city fabric continue to be in its being’ as no further effects or Utopian transformation is ‘either expected or desired’ (40–2). The postmodern aesthetic dreams of the end of the city: in the absence of planning, corporate developers construct their own miniature enclaves, celebrating the eclecticism and non-uniformity of the buildings even if it means the collapse of municipal life beyond their revolving doors. Not only do we see this kind of postmodern hybridity in Gurgaon, but we also detect it earlier in the hybrid, proto-postmodern architectural landscapes of British colonial cities. Here, the neo-historicist mixture of Victorian, Gothic, Mughal, French, Georgian and a hundred other styles celebrates a flattened depthlessness that thrives alongside the neighbouring slums. Instead of supporting a modern/postmodern binary, both early and late twentieth-century urban writing shows how the dynamics of uneven modernisation play out continually. Yet, in an important sense, modernism can be seen to offer a crucial corrective to glib postmodern celebrations

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of the chaos and creativity of cities shaped by colonial policies. We might compare the texts in previous chapters to those of postmodern writers of the city such as William Gibson, who, in his essay ‘Disneyland with the Death Penalty’, describes modern-day Singapore as a space in which ‘the organic, florid as ever in the tropics, had been gardened into brilliant green, and all-too-perfect examples of itself’.7 In contrast to Chinese modernist visions of an independent, egalitarian garden city, Gibson critiques the island for being micromanaged by the state: despite once being a ‘deliciously odd’ product of empire, everything in today’s Singapore, he laments, is the result of deliberate policy and planning. Although hygiene inspections have made the food safe, Gibson is not satisfied: ‘But still. And after all. It’s boring here’. For Gibson, Singapore’s future as a ‘smug, neoSwiss enclave of order and prosperity’ is the opposite of the liveliness of pre-handover Hong Kong, where butterflies fluttered through the customs hall. Gibson recalls Kowloon’s Walled City: the ‘hive of dream’, with its ‘mismatched, uncalculated windows’, its various ‘pork-butchers, unlicensed denturists, and dealers in heroin’ and its aesthetically preferable ‘frantic activity’. He concludes his essay with the spectre of Chinese modernity, against which he celebrates Hong Kong (‘before the future comes to tear it down’). Although there is something unsettling about dismissing state-led redistributive efforts as boring, it is clear that, from Gibson’s techno-orientalist perspective, the future as imagined by urban planners is the enemy not only of the slums but also of creativity itself.8 While this echoes a long history of celebrating Hong Kong as a model for laissez-faire colonial development (a move that downplays the city’s status as one of the most unequal in the world), one is reminded of an earlier celebration of creativity over municipal-mindedness among British modernists. Virginia Woolf’s rejection of Edwardians for their concern with public housing, or Rebecca West likening Joyce to a Westland Row tenement, comes to mind, as do the critiques levelled at Anand for his mundane subject matter and the naiveté of his faith in the transformative power of flush toilets. Yet, in these attempts to imagine mundane collective life, civic matters and public works, colonial modernists (unlike postmodernists) arguably do not appear to give up on the idea of development per se. Their emphasis on those elements of urban life generally considered mundane invites us to consider what is at stake when themes of municipal collectivity are dismissed as the antithesis to creativity. When reading cities, there is a tendency to take a selective interest in certain aspects of urban culture – the private over the municipal, the spectacular over the everyday, the cultural over the infrastructural.9 Yet we might see in

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modernist narratives of water reservoirs or sewage systems a certain commitment, even in the face of insurmountable obstacles, to the idea of ‘evenness’ beyond the imperial centre. At this point, it is worth taking up one of the central criticisms levelled against the theory of uneven development, regarding the chronological assumptions contained in its suggestion that capitalism involves ‘development’ of some kind (however ‘uneven’). This is a problem at the centre of the subaltern studies’ critique of Hegelian historicism. Dipesh Chakrabarty has accused the paradigm of ascribing ‘at least an underlying structural unity (if not an expressive totality) to historical process and time that makes it possible to identify certain elements in the present as “anachronistic”’.10 Yet abandoning the structural unity of historical time altogether risks overlooking the concrete universality imposed by colonial violence, from the irreversible colonisation of entire continents to the material rerouting of existing precolonial trade networks and attendant reorganisation of domestic industries – a process to which colonial port cities offer material testament, given how their consolidation often displaced traditional inland centres and the trade routes between them. Chakrabarty’s divestment from history as process, though useful in its refusal of a belated status for postcolonial societies, carries the risk of overlooking the historical materiality of this rerouting process and the real forms of linearity created by its material (and ecological) effects.11 If irreversible European appropriations of land and sea were backed by political and legal nationalisms, these have remained central to the demarcations, inequalities and exclusions of the postcolonial world and continue to structure the borders, laws and mobility rights that make some people migrants and others refugees. The uneven development on display in cities whose modern emergence necessitated forms of draining – of resources, of oceans, of the trading cultures of formerly thriving regional centres – thus contradicts a Hegelian model of historical development while nevertheless refusing to retreat into an ahistorical vacuum.12 A second rejoinder to the post-historicist critique of uneven development is that radical anti-modernisation theory has a tendency to ignore lived experiences of economic, political and technological modernisation in postcolonial societies. By contrast, an attentiveness to lived experience allows for the recognition of ‘development’ even while acknowledging its uneven and regressive effects. (Applied to daily experience, this might mean taking seriously the sensory relief produced by the arrival of an airconditioning unit in a slum during a deadly heatwave, even while acknowledging the regressive effects that are caused by this technology and to

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which it responds.) For modernists, this refusal to ignore the experience of modernity – its structures of feeling, to use Raymond Williams’s term – dovetails with a refusal to be relegated to the category of the pre-modern. If capitalist modernity involved the active regression and stagnation of preexisting, interconnected modernities elsewhere in the world, it makes sense for radical modernists such as Fanon or C.L.R. James to refuse consignment to the category of the pre-modern (for James, modernity was conceived in the sugar plantations, where slaves ‘lived a life that was in its essence a modern life’).13 Divesting from any sense of the modern as historical process not only forfeits this ability to speak to lived experience, but it also denies the political futurity necessary to the project of reclaiming modernity on reparative and redistributive terms. The fact that colonial-era borders continue to determine levels of access to the institutions of cultural production – creating imbalances in access to intellectual resources, research funding and academic mobility – should be a point for consideration within even the most affirmative studies of postcolonial cities, including those that disavow or downplay the role of the colonial past in an effort to transcend it.14 As Pascale Casanova suggests, literature circulates within a ‘world literary space’ that has been consolidated through powerful European institutions since the sixteenth century, a space whose national inequities continue to affect what is written about and published (and in which languages).15 For those working at the peripheries of this system, struggles for literary independence have necessitated the negotiation of prestige through cultural institutions, publishing houses, global prizes and aesthetic judgements. As a key space within this process, the postcolonial city can be situated at the literary semiperiphery, where local goods meet metropolitan markets and where national and regional disadvantages are combined with compensatory forms of cultural capital.16 Yet, while the writers discussed in this book turn experiences of the periphery into literary resources, their peripherality does not efface the metropolitan power structures governing the production and circulation of their texts. It is worth remembering that Joyce wrote in mainland Europe not Ireland; Anand was published in London before Bombay; and Conrad returned to Britain after two decades abroad to begin his literary career. Tellingly, Ulysses does not end with Molly’s ‘yes’ but transcribes the geography of textual production in a paraph – ‘TriesteZurich-Paris 1914–1921’ – suggesting an inevitable distance from the colonial city imagined in the novel.17 Nevertheless, this book has focused on cities that, despite or perhaps because of their distance from institutional and publishing centres such as

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London or New York, have been constitutive of some of modernism’s most significant formal and critical interventions. Specifically, I have linked the modernist fusion of the classical and the contemporary to the lived coevalities and multiple temporalities on display in the metrocolony, where the amalgams of grand houses and shabby tenements, tramways and cattle lines, modern media and village culture, produce a complex, elusive and paradoxical experience of the modern. Within self-consciously peripheral cities, the contrast between the universalising symbolism of the imperial culture and the unevenness of everyday life generates a breakdown in the coherence of novelistic development, signifying not a new stage in literary production but the incursion of a new space, from which writers negotiate the biases of metropolitan narratives. While scholars have shown how postcolonial writers were influenced by European modernism, this modernism was itself shaped by writers in peripheral cities, who drew on the strange contradictions, shadowy external forces and visual anachronisms on display in the city streets. In this way, the metrocolony offers a productive context both for rereading the modernist city and for tracing the colonial prehistories that continue to shape our urban present.

Notes

The Colonies in Concrete 1. As an example of the former position, Niall Ferguson celebrates the ‘ubiquitous creativity’ on display across former British cities: ‘To imagine the world without the Empire would be to expunge from the map the elegant boulevards of Williamsburg and old Philadelphia; to sweep into the sea the squat battlements of Port Royal, Jamaica; to return to the bush the glorious skyline of Sydney; to level the steamy seaside slum that is Freetown, Sierra Leone.’ Quoted in Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 4–5. 2. For a discussion of the relationship between imperialism and development in liberal political discourse, see Jeanne Morefield, Empires without Imperialism: Anglo-American Decline and the Politics of Deflection (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 3. Joseph Chamberlain, ‘The True Conception of Empire’, Foreign and Colonial Speeches (London: Routledge, 1897), 241–8 (244); Frederick Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1922), vii, 618. ‘Development’ referred to both the productive use of material resources and the provision of social welfare. Both aims were central to Lugard’s Dual Mandate of 1922, which advocated the colonial development of African resources as a process of reciprocal benefit. 4. For a comparative discussion of these urban development boards and improvement trusts, see Robert Home, Of Planting and Planning: The Making of British Colonial Cities (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 84–7. 5. Earl of Meath, ‘London as the Heart of the Empire’, in London of the Future, ed. by Aston Webb (London: T. F. Unwin, 1921), 251–8 (252–3). 6. Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel (New York: Doubleday, 1909), 198. See also Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Song of the Cities’, The Seven Seas (London: Methuen, 1896), 11–15. 7. Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days, trans. by Jacqueline Rogers (London: Penguin, 1994), 115. 154

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8. This book associates ‘urbanism’ with the discourses, narratives and ideologies surrounding urban planning and design as a practice and a discipline of study. 9. Aldous Huxley, Jesting Pilate: The Diary of a Journey (London: Chatto and Windus, 1926), 8; Evelyn Waugh, Remote People (London: Duckworth, 1931), 234. 10. Graham Greene, Journey Without Maps (London: William Heinemann, 1936), 33. 11. Robert Byron, Letter to his mother, 2 and 29 September 1929, in Letters Home, ed. by Lucy Butler (London: John Murray, 1991), 130; 134. 12. Robert Byron, ‘New Delhi’, The Architectural Review 69 (1931), 1–30 (30). Byron claims that ‘New Delhi will never, like Calcutta or Bombay, present the aspect of a Western town’, which is preferred by those ‘subservient to degraded and repulsive Western importations. Perhaps, in the end, New Delhi will lead [the Indian] to discover the true virtue still latent in the West, and, by that roundabout means, to a new appreciation of his own superb monuments’, ‘New Delhi’, 14. 13. Rabindranath Tagore, ‘City and Village’, in The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, vol. 3, ed. by Sisir Kumar Das (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1996), 510–18 (514). 14. Mahatma Gandhi, ‘The Great Sentinel’, Young India, 1919–1922 (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1924), 668–75 (670). Gandhi claims, ‘Our cities are not India. India lives in her seven and a half lacs of villages, and the cities live upon the villages. They do not bring their wealth from other countries. The city people are brokers and commission agents for the big houses of Europe, America and Japan. The cities have cooperated with the latter in the bleeding process that has gone on for the past two hundred years’, 670. 15. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. by Constance Farrington (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1965), 32; Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. by Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000 [1950]), 45. 16. Angela Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), x. 17. See Fredric Jameson, ‘Modernism and Imperialism’, in Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and Edward W. Said, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 43–66; and Fredric Jameson, ‘Ulysses in History’, in James Joyce and Modern Literature, ed. by W. J. McCormack and Alistair Stead (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016 [1982]), 126–41. 18. Stuti Khanna, The Contemporary Novel and the City: Re-conceiving National and Narrative Form (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 3.

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19. See Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 20. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988), 174. 21. Declan Kiberd, ‘Introduction’, in Andrew Gibson, James Joyce (London: Reaktion, 2006), 7. 22. Joe Cleary, ‘Toward a Materialist-Formalist History of Twentieth-Century Irish Literature’, Boundary 2 31.1 (2004): 207–41 (210). 23. Joe Cleary, ‘Realism after Modernism and the Literary World-System’, Modern Language Quarterly 73.3 (2012): 255–68 (257). Building on Franco Moretti, Cleary suggests that modernism emerged forcefully in literary semiperipheries including ‘the United States, Germany, Ireland, the Scandinavian countries, Bolshevik Russia’ (257). 24. Anthony King discusses the term at length in ‘Colonial Cities: Global Pivots of Change’, in Colonial Cities: Essays on Urbanism in a Colonial Context, ed. by Robert Ross and Gerard Telkamp (Dordrecht: Niijhoff, 1985), 7–32. See also Thomas Metcalf, ‘Colonial Cities’, in The Oxford Handbook of Cities in World History, ed. by Peter Clark (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 753–69. 25. Henri Lefebvre discusses the ‘colonization of everyday life’ in the metropolis, drawing on Guy Debord. For a discussion of the term in imperial and colonial contexts, see Stefan Kipfer, ‘Fanon and Space: Colonization, Urbanization, and Liberation from the Colonial to the Global City’, Environment and Planning D 25 (2007): 701–26. 26. Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 2. 27. This term is also adopted by Joseph Valente in his description of Dublin as ‘metro-colonial’ in ‘Between Resistance and Complicity: Metro-Colonial Tactics in Joyce’s Dubliners’, Narrative 6.3 (1998): 325–40. Drawing on the theory of de Certeau, Valente defines this term as a dynamic of disruption, which ‘comes about through the internal splitting or self-fission of a given strategic domain and the resulting creation of a doubly/divisively inscribed interspace’, applied on a geopolitical scale, in which Dublin constitutes ‘a border zone both joining and dividing an imperialist and an irredentist culture under the always contestable titles of United Kingdom and Irish nation respectively’ (327). 28. See Home, Of Planting and Planning. 29. Duncan Bell, ‘John Stuart Mill on Colonies’, Political Theory 38.1 (2010): 34–64 (36). 30. Duncan Bell, Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 33. 31. Corbusier views the ‘business sharks in Paris’ as an obstacle to the enactment of his modernist plans, noting how lawyers began selling plots for the

Notes to pages 11–14

32. 33. 34.

35.

36. 37.

38.

39. 40.

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construction of ordinary housing estates with tiny, more profitable houses; the military reserved a base; the state gave away mining concessions; and migrant workers began to move towards the ‘various sources of riches and work’, The Four Routes, trans. by Dorothy Todd (London: Dobson, 1947), 90. Corbusier, Four Routes, 109–10. Thomas Stamford Raffles, The History of Java, vol. 1 (London: Black, Parbury and Allen, 1817), 83. An example of the ‘sleepy fishing village’ narrative is given by C. W. Darbishire of Singapore’s legislative council: ‘Visit any Malay village on the coast of Singapore . . . and you have a very good idea of what the port of Singapore was like a hundred years ago – a group of primitive huts upon the shore, a few fishermen with their boats and tackle’, ‘The Commerce of Singapore’, in One Hundred Years of Singapore, vol. 2, ed. by Walter Makepeace, Gilbert Brooke and Roland Braddell (London: John Murray, 1921), 22–101 (22). Yet after centuries of regional conflict, as historians Mark Ravinder Frost and Yu-Mei Balasingamchow point out, there is ‘little to suggest that Singapore was in any way “sleepy”’, Singapore: A Biography (Singapore: National Museum of Singapore, 2009), 35. For example, Janet Abu-Lughod’s work shows how the militarised development of Algiers, Tunis and Casablanca undermined traditional inland cities and the ancient trade routes between them, directing unequal flows of wealth to their modernised sectors and leaving poor and rural populations overcrowded in old, decaying former regional centres. See King, ‘Colonial Cities’, 18–19. Marian Aguiar, Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Dalhousie, quoted in Daniel Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 64; Karl Marx, ‘The Future Results of British Rule in India’, in Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx, ed. by James Ledbetter (London: Penguin, 2007), 223. See Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001), 167. On literary engagements with these disasters, see Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire: Famines, Fevers and Literary Cultures of South Asia (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013). Henry Norman, ‘A City of Orientals’, in Travellers’ Singapore: An Anthology, ed. by John Bastin (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1994), 140–3 (143). Thomas Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 250. See also Anthony King,

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41.

42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

Notes to pages 14–17 Writing the Global City: Globalisation, Postcolonialism and the Urban (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 44. Peter Scriver, ‘Stones and Texts’, in Colonial Modernities: Building, Dwelling and Architecture in British India and Ceylon, ed. by Peter Scriver and Vikramaditya Prakash (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 27–50 (34); and Richard Harris, ‘Development and Hybridity Made Concrete in the Colonies’, Environment and Planning A 40 (2008): 15–36 (24). Raffles, History of Java, 71. Guests’ Guide to Singapore and Malay Peninsula: Compliments of Raffles Hotel (Singapore: Raffles Hotel, 1921), 24–5; 35; Munshi Abdullah, quoted in Wong Hong Suen, Singapore Through 19th Century Prints and Paintings (Singapore: National Museum of Singapore, 2010), 14. George Orwell, Burmese Days, ed. by Peter Davison (London: Secker and Warburg, 1997 [1934]), 66. Rashmi Varma, The Postcolonial City and Its Subjects: London, Nairobi, Bombay (New York: Routledge, 2011), 10. Norman, ‘A City of Orientals’, 142. Sir Frank Swettenham, British Malaya: An Account of the Origin and Progress of British Influence in Malaya (London: John Lane, 1906), 342. See James Francis Warren, Rickshaw Coolie: A People’s History of Singapore, 1880–1940 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2003). See Matthew Gandy, ‘Planning, Anti-planning and the Infrastructure Crisis Facing Metropolitan Lagos’, Urban Studies 43.2 (2006): 371–96 (375). See J. L. Miège, ‘Algiers: Colonial Metropolis, 1830–1961’, in Colonial Cities, 171–9 (173). For a discussion of the ‘planned violence’ of infrastructure in relation to postcolonial urban literature, see Elleke Boehmer and Dominic Davies, ‘Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructures, Literature and Culture’, in Elleke Boehmer and Dominic Davies, eds., Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructure, Literature and Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018), 1–26. Carl Nightingale, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil (London: William Heinemann, 1925). Tomas Frederiksen, ‘Authorizing the “Natives”: Governmentality, Dispossession, and the Contradictions of Rule in Colonial Zambia’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104.6 (2014): 1273–90 (1283). John Comaroff, ‘Reflections on the Colonial State, in South Africa and Elsewhere: Factions, Fragments, Facts and Fictions’, Social Identities 4.3 (1998): 332–61 (340). Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 98, 88.

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56. Fanon describes the effects of settler colonialism as ‘cultural lethargy’ and ‘petrification’, suggesting that debt and a lack of capital investment have led to ‘regression or at least to stagnation’, preventing the eradication of poverty, illiteracy and the separatist politics installed or supported by colonial powers, The Wretched of the Earth, 72, 82. 57. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 103. These words appear frequently in the psychoanalytic context of ‘The Fact of Blackness’; see Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. by Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 2008 [1952]), 82, 88, 89. 58. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 91, 38. Fanon suggests that these ruralurban antagonisms are not only founded on stereotypes but also on divisions promoted by colonial powers in their struggles against nationalist parties. 59. J. H. Stape, ‘Conrad’s “Unreal City”: Singapore in “The End of the Tether”’, in Conrad’s Cities: Essays for Hans van Marle, ed. by Gene M. Moore (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992), 85–96. 60. See Jessica Berman, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 28–33. 61. See Laura Winkiel, ‘The Modernist Novel in the World-System’, in A History of the Modernist Novel, ed. by Gregory Castle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 408–28; Jed Esty, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); John Marx, The Modernist Novel and the Decline of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 62. Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 63. See for example Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 64. Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 65. Esty, Unseasonable Youth, 198. 66. Sandro Mezzadra and Federico Rahola, ‘The Postcolonial Condition: A Few Notes on the Quality of Historical Time in the Global Present’, in Reworking Postcolonialism, ed. by Pavan Kumar Malreddy, Birte Heidemann, Ole Birk Laursen and Janet Wilson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 36–54 (48). 67. Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Program of the Coming Philosophy’, Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913–1926, ed. by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 100–110

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Notes to pages 23–31

(108). This method also coheres with the archaeological and genealogical modes of new historical criticism developed by Michel Foucault. 68. This draws on Fredric Jameson’s program for a method of comparison ‘not of the individual texts, which are formally and culturally very different from each other, but of the concrete situations from which such texts spring and to which they constitute distinct responses’, ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, Social Text 15 (1986): 65–88 (86). 69. This borrows from Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, who begin with ‘the premise that spaces have always been hierarchically interconnected, instead of naturally disconnected’, ‘Beyond “Culture”: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference’, Cultural Anthropology 7.1 (1992): 6–23 (8), emphasis in the original. 70. Davis, Planet of Slums, 13.

Metrocolonial Modernism 1. Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record, ed. by Zdzisław Najder and J. H. Stape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 110. 2. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998), 130. 3. See the various discussions of London in Moore, Conrad’s Cities. 4. On threats of ‘external and internal subversion’ in the imperial metropolis, see Christina Britzolakis, ‘Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis: Impressionism as Traumatic Afterimage in Conrad and Ford’, Journal of Modern Literature 29.1 (2005): 1–20 (8). 5. Jameson, ‘Modernism and Imperialism’, 51. 6. Berman, All That Is Solid, 124. 7. Berman, All That Is Solid, 192; Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground and The Double, trans. by Ronald Wilks (London: Penguin, 2009), 6. 8. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, 74. 9. Visiting London in 1862, Dostoevsky described the Crystal Palace as a ‘terrible force that has united all these people here, who come from all over the world, into a single herd; you become aware of a gigantic idea; you feel that here something has already been achieved, that here there is victory and triumph’. Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, trans. by David Patterson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 37. 10. See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 327. 11. Peter Kaye, Dostoevsky and English Modernism, 1900–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 10. See also Rebecca Beasley and

Notes to pages 32–34

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

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Philip Ross Bullock, eds., Russia in Britain, 1880–1940: From Melodrama to Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Virginia Woolf, ‘The Russian Point of View’, The Common Reader, vol. 1, ed. by Andrew McNeillie (London: Vintage, 2003), 173–82 (178, 180). Virginia Woolf, ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’, Collected Essays, vol. 1 (London: Hogarth Press, 1966), 319–37 (327). Woolf, ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’, 333, 322, 326. For a discussion of these themes in Woolf’s essay see Winkiel, ‘The Modernist Novel in the WorldSystem’, 413. Desmond Harding, Writing the City: Urban Visions and Literary Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2003), 4. Woolf, ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’, 326. James Joyce, quoted in Arthur Power, Conversations with James Joyce, ed. by Clive Hart (London: Millington, 1974), 58; James Joyce, Dubliners, ed. by Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 33. Joyce suggests that at the end of the Victorian period ‘the peace of literary England was disturbed by the inroads of Russian and Scandinavian writers’, ‘The Centenary of Charles Dickens’, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, ed. by Kevin Barry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 183–6 (183). Jameson, ‘Modernism and Imperialism’, 60. Fredric Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 347–60 (349). Jameson acknowledges that identifying emblematic breaks is ‘not an empirically verifiable matter but a historiographic decision; nor are chronological parallels of this kind much more at the outset than incentives to construct new and more complex and interesting historical narratives’, ‘Modernism and Imperialism’, 45. He also acknowledges that ‘The hypothesis suggested here – between the emergence of a properly modernist “style” and the representational dilemmas of the new imperial world system – will be validated only by the kind of new work it enables’, 59. It is worth quoting Jameson’s ‘thought experiment’ at length here, given that it generates the research question motivating this book. For Jameson, this question is one ‘in which this particular metropolitan or First World modernist laboratory experiment is tested against radically different environmental conditions. These are not, in this period, to be found in what will come to be called the Third World, or in the colonies: there the face of imperialism is brute force, naked power, open exploitation; but there also the mapping of the imperialist world system remains structurally incomplete, for the colonial subject will be unable to register the peculiar transformations of First World or metropolitan life which accompany the imperial relationship. Nor will it, from the point of view of the colonized, be of any interest to

162

20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

Notes to pages 35–36 register those new realities, which are the private concern of the masters, and which a colonized culture must simply refuse and repudiate. What we seek, therefore, is a kind of exceptional situation, one of overlap and coexistence between these two incommensurable realities which are those of the lord and of the bondsman altogether, those of the metropolis and of the colony simultaneously. Our experimental variation, then, would presuppose, were it possible in the first place, a national situation which reproduces the appearance of First World social reality and social relationships – perhaps through the coincidence of its language with the imperial language – but whose underlying structure is in fact much closer to that of the Third World or of colonized daily life. A modernism arising in these circumstances could then be inspected and interrogated for its formal and structural differences from the works produced within the metropolis and examined above. But at least one such peculiar space exists, in the historical contingency of our global system: it is Ireland . . . a radically different kind of space, a space no longer central, as in English life, but marked as marginal and eccentric after the fashion of the colonized areas of the imperial system. That colonized space may then be expected to transform the modernist formal project radically, while still retaining a distant family likeness to its imperial variants. But this “deduction” finds immediate historical confirmation, for I have in fact been describing Ulysses’, 59–61. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 307. See also Ernst Bloch, ‘Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics’, trans. by Mark Ritter, New German Critique 11 (1977): 22–38. Walter Benjamin, ‘Some Reflections on Kafka’, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. by Harry Zohn and ed. by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 141–5 (141). See Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), xxii; Perry Anderson, ‘Modernity and Revolution’, New Left Review 144 (1984): 96–113 (104). Anderson suggests that European modernism ‘flowered in the space between a still usable classical past, a still indeterminate technical present, and a still unpredictable political future . . . it arose at the intersection between a semi-aristocratic ruling order, a semi-industrialized capitalist economy, and a semi-emergent, or -insurgent, labour movement’ (105). For a discussion of this, see Joe Cleary, Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland (Dublin: Field Day, 2007), 90–1. For a discussion of Pound and Eliot in this context, see Paul Stasi, Modernism, Imperialism, and the Historical Sense (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Notes to pages 36–40

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25. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. by Joan Riviere (New York: Dover Publications, 1994), 6. This interest in layers followed developments in reconstructive archaeology including those of Schliemann (Troy), Evans (Minoan Crete) and Carter (Tutankhamun’s tomb). 26. Anderson, ‘Modernity and Revolution’, 101. 27. This draws on a tradition of Marxist thought that combines structural analysis with attention to the everyday, extending from Marx to Lukács, Gramsci, Benjamin, Debord and Lefebvre. See Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre, ed. by Kanishka Goonewardena, Stefan Kipfer, Richard Milgrom and Christian Schmid (New York: Routledge, 2008). 28. Roberto Schwarz, ‘Misplaced Ideas: Literature and Society in Late-Nineteenth -Century Brazil’, trans. by Edmund Leites, in Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, ed. by John Gledson (London: Verso, 1992), 19–32. 29. Schwarz argues that apart from ‘a reorganization of the top administration, the socio-economic structure created by colonial exploitation remained intact’, albeit with benefits now also accrued by a national elite, ‘Brazilian Culture: Nationalism by Elimination’, Misplaced Ideas, 1–18 (12). 30. Schwarz, ‘Misplaced Ideas’, 23. 31. Schwarz, ‘Misplaced Ideas’, 24; quoted in Adriana Johnson, ‘Reading Roberto Schwarz: Outside Out-of-Place Ideas’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 8.1 (1999): 21–33. 32. Schwarz, quoting Nestor Goulart Reis Filho, in ‘Misplaced Ideas’, 26. 33. The suggestion that ideas can be misplaced when they arrive at the periphery has been criticised by poststructuralist critics, for whom the argument reduces language to a crude referential function, given that no idea can be ‘out of place’ if the conditions are there for the idea’s reception: see, for example, Ellías José Palti, ‘The Problem of “Misplaced Ideas” Revisited: Beyond the “History of Ideas” in Latin America’, Journal of the History of Ideas 67.1 (2006): 149–79. Yet it is important to note that although all ideas are misplaced to a certain degree, some ideas can be less adjusted to local conditions due to the material context in which they are mediated. Far from supporting an ontological distinction between the alien and the original culture, Schwarz finds in nationalist critiques of cultural ‘parroting’ a genuine response to the fact that this culture was alien, insofar as it was adopted by a national elite whose interests were oriented towards Europe rather than to the majority of Brazilians. Under these conditions, ideas of bourgeois rationalism, legal equality and the autonomy of the individual were misplaced not because they were English in essence (or even because they ‘applied’ fully in England, which had its own internal

164

34.

35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

Notes to pages 40–44 class contradictions) but because the unequal and dependent relationship binding Brazil to Britain framed their mediation and structured the way in which they took hold. Rebecca Karl shows how empiricist positivism also ‘served to bypass the unevenly structured materiality of global social practice through an overemphasis on specificity and a rejection of structural analysis’, The Magic of Concepts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 2. As Karl explains, this process is viewed as a thoroughly material and social form of ‘forced mediation’, marked by ‘the continuously violent and ongoing historicity of incorporation, and the concrete materiality of the transculturation and enforced modes of mediation as actually lived social processes’, The Magic of Concepts, 14. Liu Kang, quoted in the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) (Sharae Deckard, Nick Lawrence, Neil Lazarus et al.), Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 11. Kang suggests that the modern ideas introduced by American missionaries laid the foundation for modern civil society in China, yet this was not a society comprised primarily of an independent bourgeoisie as in Europe but rather ‘a segment of civil society in a country dominated by both local imperial or military rulers and Western colonialists’; hence the modern culture of China’s major cities needs to be situated within the ‘nonsynchronous, uneven development’ of a global modernity, Aesthetics and Marxism: Chinese Aesthetic Marxists and Their Western Contemporaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 40–41. Neil Larsen, Determinations: Essays on Theory, Narrative and Nation in the Americas (London: Verso, 2001), 77. See also Roberto Schwarz, ‘Former Colonies: Local or Universal?’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 43.1 (2010), 100–106. Schwarz contrasts this with the cheerful juxtaposition of carts and tramlines in Brazilian Modernist poetry, which, he argues, transforms conflict into a ‘picturesque contrast’, ‘The Cart, the Tram, and the Modernist Poet’, trans. by John Gledson, in Misplaced Ideas, 108–25 (118). Roberto Schwarz, A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism, trans. by John Gledson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 18. Schwarz is describing The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881). Schwarz, ‘Misplaced Ideas’, 29. Roberto Schwarz, ‘A Brazilian Breakthrough’, New Left Review 36 (2005): 91–107 (92). WReC, Combined and Uneven, 14. Esty, Unseasonable Youth, 76.

Notes to pages 44–50

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45. Esty identifies modernist ‘antidevelopmental fictions set in colonial contact zones, where uneven development is a conspicuous fact of both personal and political life’, Unseasonable Youth, 2. 46. Georg Lukács, ‘Dostoevsky’, in Marxism and Human Liberation: Essays on History, Culture and Revolution, ed. by E. San Juan Jr. (New York: Dell Publishing, 1973), 179–97 (180–1). 47. For a discussion of Lukács’s global relevance, see Eli Park Sorensen, ‘Novelistic Interpretation: The Traveling Theory of Lukács’s “Theory of the Novel”’, Journal of Narrative Theory 39.1 (2009): 57–85; and Jed Esty, ‘Global Lukács’, Novel 42.3 (2009): 366–72. 48. Epeli Hau‘ofa, Tales of the Tikongs (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1983), 8–9.

Architectures of Free Trade in Conrad’s Singapore 1. Conrad visited Singapore in March–April 1883, September–October 1885 and between July 1887 and January 1888. For details, see Norman Sherry, Conrad’s Eastern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966). 2. See Benita Parry, who discusses Avrom Fleishman’s suggestion that Conrad’s community was ‘not only colonised but also colonialist’, Conrad and Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1983), 14. 3. See, for example, Britzolakis, ‘Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis’, and Graham MacPhee, ‘Under English Eyes: The Disappearance of Irishness in Conrad’s The Secret Agent’, in Empire and After: Englishness in Postcolonial Perspective, ed. by Graham MacPhee and Prem Poddar (New York: Berghahn, 2007), 101–17. 4. See Sherry, Conrad’s Eastern World, 173–7. I discuss the absence of place names at the end of this chapter. For other studies of Conrad’s Asia, see Robert Hampson, Cross-Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad’s Malay Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000); Agnes Yeow, Conrad’s Eastern Vision: A Vain and Floating Appearance (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009); and Andrew Francis, Culture and Commerce in Conrad’s Asian Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 5. Raffles secured agreement with local leaders to establish a commercial enclave for East India Company factories in the territory, which, as Ernest Chew remarks, ‘had a historic existence and cartographic expression . . . long before Raffles appeared on the scene’, ‘The Foundation of a British Settlement’, in A History of Singapore, ed. by Ernest Chew and Edwin Lee (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1991), 36–40 (38).

166

Notes to pages 50–56

6. Thomas Stamford Raffles, Letter to Addenbrooke, 10 June 1819, in Memoir of the Life and Public Services of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, vol. 2, ed. by Sophia Raffles (London: James Duncan, 1835), 19 (emphasis in the original). 7. Quoted in Wong Lin Ken, ‘The Strategic Significance of Singapore in Modern History’, in A History of Singapore, 17–35 (31). 8. Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-utan and the Bird of Paradise (New York: Dover Publications, 1962 [1869]), 17. 9. Joseph Conrad, Almayer’s Folly: A Story of an Eastern River, ed. by Floyd Eddleman and David Higdon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 6, 8. 10. Han Mui Ling, ‘From Travelogues to Guidebooks: Imagining Colonial Singapore, 1819–1940’, Sojourn 18.2 (2003): 257–78 (261). 11. Quoted in Han, ‘From Travelogues to Guidebooks’, 262. 12. In Singapore, Walter Makepeace documents the various bank failures and closures, asset stripping, government bailouts and liquidations that affected everything from coconut plantations to the Marine Club, ‘The Machinery of Commerce’, in One Hundred Years of Singapore, vol. 2, 166–234 (174–80). 13. See Wong Lin Ken, ‘Commercial Growth before the Second World War’, in History of Singapore, 41–65. For a discussion of colonial botany in the region in relation to Conrad, see Andrew Francis, ‘Recovering the Ethics of Economic Botany in Conrad’s Asian Fiction’, The Conradian 34.2 (2009): 75–89 (82). 14. Norman, ‘A City of Orientals’, 142. 15. Kipling, ‘The Song of the Cities’, 12; Kipling, From Sea to Sea, 236. 16. William Worsfold, A Visit to Java: With an Account of the Founding of Singapore (London: Bentley and Son, 1893), 263–4. 17. Worsfold, A Visit to Java, 282, 264, 276. 18. Joseph Conrad, The Shadow-Line: A Confession, ed. by J. H. Stape and Allan Simmons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 14–15. 19. Isabella Bird, The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither (London: John Murray, 1883), 118. 20. Roland Braddell, The Lights of Singapore, quoted in Han, ‘From Travelogues to Guidebooks’, 263. 21. See Warren, Rickshaw Coolie. 22. Arnold Wright and Thomas Reid, The Malay Peninsula: A Record of British Progress in the Middle East (London: T. F. Unwin, 1912), 236. 23. Wallace, Malay Archipelago, 16. 24. See Wong, ‘Commercial Growth’, 44–5. 25. See Han, ‘From Travelogues to Guidebooks’, 260. 26. Joseph Conrad, ‘The End of the Tether’, Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether, ed. by Owen Knowles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 129–251 (129).

Notes to pages 56–62

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27. See Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 175. This method can also be seen to characterise the structure of the narrative more generally. When Conrad’s publisher George Blackwood complained about the story’s slow start, Conrad insisted that ‘in the light of the final incident, the whole story in all its descriptive detail shall fall into place – acquire its value and its significance. This is my method based on deliberate conviction’, The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, ed. by Laurence Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 152. 28. On literary representations of the ‘Eastern crowd’, see Douglas Kerr, Eastern Figures: Orient and Empire in British Writing (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008), 53–78. 29. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 32. 30. David Mulry suggests that in emphasising the subjective dimensions of urban representation, the story ‘untethers’ the reader by rejecting concrete or absolute narratives: ‘Untethered: Conrad’s Narrative Modernity in “The End of the Tether”’, The Conradian 33.2 (2008): 18–29. Douglas Kerr also links Whalley’s loss of ‘the realist’s confidence in the substantial universe’ to modernist epistemological uncertainty in ‘Conrad and the “Three Ages of Man”: “Youth” “The Shadow-Line”, “The End of the Tether”’, The Conradian 23.2 (1998): 27–44 (43). 31. Stape, ‘Conrad’s “Unreal City”’, 86. 32. Conrad, ‘The End of the Tether’, 140. 33. Conrad himself has little sympathy for the character, dismissing sentimental reviews of the story and interpretations of Whalley as a tragic hero: ‘Touching, tender, noble, moving . . . Let us spit!’ Letter to Edward Garnett, 22 December 1902, Collected Letters, 158. 34. See Francis, Culture and Commerce, 147; also Stephen Donovan, ‘Figures, Facts, Theories: Conrad and Chartered Company Imperialism’, The Conradian 24 (1999): 31–60. 35. Kerr, ‘Conrad and the “Three Ages of Man”’, 41–2. 36. Conrad, ‘The End of the Tether’, 151. 37. Noting these themes across Conrad’s work, Robert Hampson documents Conrad’s own turbulent finances, speculative investments, bankruptcy, bank failures and life-long indebtedness in Conrad’s Secrets (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), 17–19. 38. Fredric Jameson, ‘The Brick and the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism, and Land Speculation’, New Left Review 228 (1998): 25–47. 39. Georg Simmel, ‘The Berlin Trade Exhibition’, trans. by Sam Whimster, Theory Culture Society 8 (1991 [1896]): 119–23 (121–2). 40. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 221.

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Notes to pages 62–65

41. Scriver, ‘Stones and Texts’, 43–4. For a discussion of the relationship between colonial Singapore and the aspirational postmodern city, see Jini Kim Watson, The New Asian City: Three-Dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 42. Conrad, ‘The End of the Tether’, 142. 43. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim: A Tale, ed. by J. H. Stape and Ernest W. Sullivan II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 15–16. 44. Conrad, Almayer’s Folly, 34–5. 45. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, in Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether, ed. by Owen Knowles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 43–128 (66). 46. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 227. 47. Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Envisioning Capital: Political Economy on Display’, Critical Inquiry 21.2 (1995): 434–67 (450). 48. Quoted in Buck-Morss, ‘Envisioning Capital’, 450. 49. Marx suggests that ‘as much as the individual moments of this movement arise from the conscious will and particular purposes of individuals, so much does the totality of the process appear as an objective interrelation, which arises spontaneously from nature; arising, it is true, from the mutual influence of conscious individuals on one another, but neither located in their consciousness, nor subsumed under them as a whole. Their own collisions with one another produce an alien social power standing above them, produce their mutual interaction as a process and power independent of them’, quoted in Adorno, ‘Reconciliation Under Duress’, in Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin et al., Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 2010): 151–77 (155). Buck-Morss notes how Smith departs from his contemporaries insofar as he fails to invoke a unique position – whether of God or King or Reason – from which to view the entire social body, ‘Envisioning Capital’, 446. 50. Joseph Conrad, ‘Well Done!’ (1918), Notes on Life and Letters, ed. by J. H. Stape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 142–52 (150). While scholars have discussed Conrad’s Schopenhauerian vision of a universe driven by an irrational, chaotic and blind ‘will’, my approach focuses on the colonial economic context informing his interest in this philosophical world view. 51. Joseph Conrad, ‘The Planter of Malata’, Within the Tides, ed. by Alexandre Fachard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 11–73 (18–19). 52. Stephen Donovan, ‘Figures, Facts, Theories’, 51–2. 53. Conrad, Lord Jim, 87, 78; Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’: A Tale of the Sea, ed. by Allan H. Simmons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 94.

Notes to pages 65–73

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54. Conrad, Almayer’s Folly, 95, 108. 55. Joseph Conrad, ‘Typhoon’, Three Sea Stories, ed. by Keith Carabine (Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 1998), 1–77 (12). 56. Ross Forman, ‘Coolie Cargoes: Emigrant Ships and the Burden of Representation in Joseph Conrad’s Typhoon and James Dalziel’s “Dead Reckoning”’, English Literature in Transition 47.4 (2004): 398–428 (411). 57. Raymond Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970), 141. Citing Hannah Arendt, Edward Said uses similar language to describe how individuals are driven by empire’s ‘anonymous forces’, in Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993), 27. 58. Conrad, ‘The End of the Tether’, 132. Joseph Conrad, Chance: A Tale in Two Parts, ed. by Martin Ray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 72. 59. Robert Home notes how although planters in private estates were ‘intolerant of state intervention, and spent much of their energy feuding with colonial governors’, their activity gave rise to the concept of a regulatory role for the state in the colonies, Of Planting and Planning, 2. Ron Visser notes the similarities between Conrad’s Batu Beru and the village of Tanjung Redeb in Berau, a district in northeast Borneo, ‘An Out-of-the-Way Place Called Berau’, The Conradian 18.1 (1993): 37–47. 60. Max Weber, ‘Protestant Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism’, Weber: Selected Essays in Translation, ed. by W. G. Runciman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978): 138–73 (171). Michael Levenson, among others, has outlined the connections between Conrad and Weber, suggesting that they share intellectual and moral concerns, ‘The Value of Facts in Heart of Darkness’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 40.3 (1985): 261–80 (267–9). 61. Conrad, ‘The End of the Tether’, 201. 62. Weber, ‘Protestant Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism’, 170. 63. Other examples of the iron ‘shell’ in Conrad include jackets lined with money (The Rover), iron hands (‘Because of the Dollars’), coins sewn into clothing (‘Karain: A Memory’) and iron chains (Heart of Darkness). 64. Conrad, Lord Jim, 16. 65. Joseph Conrad, Victory: An Island Tale, ed. by J. H. Stape and Alexandre Fachard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 164; Conrad, ‘Well Done!’ 144; Conrad, The Shadow-Line, 46. 66. Conrad, ‘The End of the Tether’, 131. 67. Conrad, Lord Jim, 172. 68. Conrad, Almayer’s Folly, 90. 69. Britzolakis, ‘Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis’. See also Joseph McLaughlin, Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 26.

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Notes to pages 73–78

70. See Ford Madox Ford, The Soul of London: A Survey of a Modern City (London: Alston Rivers, 1905). 71. Britzolakis, ‘Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis’, 2. 72. Jameson, ‘Modernism and Imperialism’, 51. 73. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 213. 74. See Sherry, Conrad’s Eastern World, 173–7. Sherry shows how the port in Lord Jim, for example, is based not on Bombay but on Singapore, where Conrad learned of the enquiries into the Jeddah case, 58–63.

Synchronising Empire Time in Joyce’s Dublin 1. See Andrew Gibson, who discusses the history of this divide between ‘Poundian’ and ‘Wellsian’ readings of Joyce, the first of which presents him as an anti- or post-nationalist writer of ‘international standard’, while the second reads him as an Irish or postcolonial writer: Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics in Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1–2. 2. Quoted in Liam Lanigan, James Joyce, Urban Planning and Irish Modernism: Dublins of the Future (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), 1. Lanigan notes that while Paris is viewed as ‘a glamorous European capital and a center of global culture, Dublin is regarded as a backwater in which the force of Joyce’s intellect could not be contained’, 2. 3. James Joyce, ‘Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages’, in Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, 108–26 (113–14). 4. See Kiberd, ‘Introduction’, 7. Kiberd’s question echoes Jorge Luis Borges’ claim that South American writers, like Jewish and Irish ones, could handle European themes ‘without superstition, with an irreverence which can have, and already does have, fortunate consequences’, ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’, in Labyrinths, ed. and trans. by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (London: Penguin, 2000), 211–20 (218). 5. Enda Duffy, The Subaltern Ulysses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 10; Shane Leslie, quoted in Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge, 2. 6. Joseph Conrad, ‘Author’s Preface’, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale, ed. by Bruce Harkness and S. W. Reid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 8. For a discussion of this absent Irish context, see Graham MacPhee, ‘Under English Eyes’, 107. 7. Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge, 180. 8. See Adam Barrows, The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 9. Joyce’s work has been examined alongside town-planning schemes in Dublin in the 1910s and 1920s, while Ulysses – long compared to a work of engineering – has

Notes to pages 78–80

10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

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been situated in the context of the national planning and municipal infrastructure projects of the Irish Free State: see, for example, Michael Rubenstein, Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010) and Liam Lanigan, Dublins of the Future. Although Meath is often described as the founder of Empire Day, the event originated in Canada in the 1890s. As David Hume notes, on the anniversary of Queen Victoria’s birthday in 1903, Empire Day was celebrated in ‘no fewer than nine countries of the Empire, including Canada and India, and by 1910 Australia and South Africa had joined in the celebrations’, ‘Empire Day in Ireland, 1896–1962’, in An Irish Empire?: Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire, ed. by Keith Jeffery (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 149–68 (150). The rejection of a proposal to officially formalise the event in the House of Commons in 1908 was met with loud cheers from Irish Nationalists, see J. O. Springhall, ‘Lord Meath, Youth, and Empire’, Journal of Contemporary History 5.4 (1970): 97–111 (105). See Andrew Kincaid, Postcolonial Dublin: Imperial Legacies and the Built Environment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). William Woodfall, Letter to William Eden, 16 August 1785, in The Journal and Correspondence of William, Lord Auckland, vol. 1 (London: Richard Bentley, 1861), 78–85 (85). Woodfall claims that ‘After the talk of the misery of the people in our Parliament, and in the Parliament here, I cannot but feel daily astonishment at the nobleness of the new buildings, and the spacious improvements hourly making in the streets . . . . Will not those who see this and say it, fairly apply a remedy, encourage their tenantry, dispel the national sloth and indolence of the lower orders of the people?’ (84–5). See Kincaid, Postcolonial Dublin, xviii. Thomas Cromwell, Excursions through Ireland, vol. 1 (London, 1820), 149. For a detailed discussion of Nelson’s Pillar in relation to Joyce, see Andrew Thacker, Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). On Queen Victoria’s visit, see David Dickson, Dublin: The Making of a Capital City (London: Profile Books, 2014), 306. Dublin was often labelled the ‘Second City’ although various other cities also claimed this title, including Calcutta on account of its size. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, ed. by David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 46. See Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge, 88. See Dickson, Dublin, x. Elizabeth Bowen, The Shelbourne (London: Vintage, 2001 [1951]), 10. See Kincaid, Postcolonial Dublin, xxi–ii.

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Notes to pages 80–83

22. Quoted in Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge, 24–5. 23. Earl of Meath, ‘London as the Heart of the Empire’, 252–4. 24. Earl of Meath, ‘London as the Heart of the Empire’, 252–4. In Dublin, the legacy of Meath’s estate is memorialised in streets and squares such as Reginald Street and Meath Terrace. 25. Quoted in Hume, ‘Empire Day in Ireland’, 152, 151. 26. Quoted in Hume, ‘Empire Day in Ireland’, 150. 27. Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 12. 28. ‘Empire Day and Sane Imperialism’, The Spectator, 30 May 1908, The Spectator Archive, http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/30th-may-1908/7/em pire-day-and-sane-imperialism. 29. See Springhall, ‘Lord Meath, Youth, and Empire’, 107, 100. 30. This conclusion is reached in studies of working-class autobiographies: see Brad Beaven and John Griffiths, ‘The City and Imperial Propaganda: A Comparative Study of Empire Day in England, Australia, and New Zealand, c. 1903–1914’, Journal of Urban History 42.2 (2016): 377–95 (379). 31. Quoted in Beaven and Griffiths, ‘The City and Imperial Propaganda’, 388. 32. Jim English, ‘Empire Day in Britain, 1904–1958’, The Historical Journal 49.1 (2006): 247–76 (247). Beaven and Griffiths also suggest that ‘Lord Meath’s desire that Empire Day would nurture a unifying and homogenous imperial identity proved an elusive aspiration’, ‘The City and Imperial Propaganda’, 378. 33. See Springhall, ‘Lord Meath, Youth, and Empire’, 105. 34. See Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge, 135–45. Gerty’s sense of self-possession corresponds with political discourses of emancipation, as Gibson notes, yet there is a dissonance between the ideal of ‘true love’ taken from women’s magazines (‘She would follow, her dream of love, the dictates of her heart that told her he was her all in all, the only man in all the world for her for love was the master guide. Nothing else mattered. Come what might she would be wild, untrammelled, free’) and the actual events taking place (Bloom masturbating at the sight of her and then thinking uncharitably about her limp as she walks away). James Joyce, Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, ed. by Hans Walter Gabler, with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (New York: Garland Publishing, 1986), 13.670–3. 35. For a discussion of statues and monuments in the novel, see Ellen Carol Jones, ‘Memorial Dublin’, in Joyce, Benjamin and Magical Urbanism, ed. by Maurizia Boscagli and Enda Duffy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), 59–121. 36. See Boscagli and Duffy, Magical Urbanism. Declan Kiberd uses the term ‘mythic realism’ to describe Joyce’s representation of Ireland as a place ‘filled with echoes and shadows, a place of copied and derived gestures, whose

Notes to pages 83–91

37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42.

43.

44. 45.

46.

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denizens were turned outward to serve a distant source of authority in London’, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Vintage Books, 1996), 330. James Joyce, ‘James Clarence Mangan (1907)’, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, 127–36 (127). See David Spurr, ‘Colonial Spaces in Joyce’s Dublin’, James Joyce Quarterly 37.1–2: Dublin and the Dubliners (1999–2000): 23–42. James Joyce, ‘Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages’, 117. Gibson observes the importance of ‘little calculations of or tussles for advantage; tussles for power through financial gain, however small, or through claims to status, however trivial. Such tussles are determined by a context in which chronic disadvantage is the norm’, Joyce’s Revenge, 88. Enda Duffy highlights the difference between Clarissa Dalloway’s stroll past the plate-glass windows of florists and haberdashers in London, and the sense of meanness, scarcity and aimlessness experienced in Bloom’s Dublin, where these kinds of commodities are in shorter supply, The Subaltern Ulysses, 19. This moment conflates the symbolism of the stone statue of King William of Orange with a sense of the real power of imperial legacies. For an illuminating discussion of this monument and the various abuses it received over time, see Jones, ‘Memorial Dublin’, 65–7. See Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge, 102. In such moments, Gibson identifies a gap ‘between an (English) form of representation and a clandestine set of indications as to “what is really going on” in an Irish context. The result is subversive and wickedly funny’, 102. The spectators in ‘After the Race’ are described as the ‘gratefully oppressed’ in Joyce, Dubliners, 30. This form of temporal interruption can also be compared to Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’, where the time of the party – with its suggestion of the oblivious enjoyment of a suburban settler elite – is brought into conflict with the time of death and monotony in the neighbouring slum, just as the divisions of New Zealand society are mirrored at the formal level through tactics of temporal delay, cyclical structures and fragments of childhood that start in media res. On Mansfield and the temporal aspects of boredom in the settler colony, see Saikat Majumdar, Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). Hans Walter Gabler, Text Genetics in Literary Modernism and Other Essays (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2018). For Gabler, the exercise proves that the episode is held together ‘not through any material or topographical localisation, but through acts of reading alone’, as the segmenting technique adopted by Joyce stages interpolations and dislocations whose meanings rely

174

47. 48.

49.

50.

51. 52.

Notes to pages 91–93 on readerly participation, working to ‘train’ the reader and to draw them into collusion with the text, 98, 93. Jameson, ‘Modernism and Imperialism’, 61. Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to García Márquez, trans. by Quentin Hoare (London: Verso, 1996), 191. Moretti’s suggestion that modernism disintegrates the unitary individual resonates with the narrative of failed development discussed previously in Conrad, where a financial crisis sparks a chain of events leading to the Crusoean protagonist’s burial at sea. On the theme of Crusoe, Joyce describes Defoe as ‘the father of the English novel’ and the first English writer to ‘instil a truly national spirit into the creations of his pen’, ‘Realism and Idealism in English Literature’, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, 163–82 (164); yet, Bloom anticipates the burial of the Crusoean figure: ‘Say Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him’, Ulysses, 6.810–11. Enda Duffy, ‘Setting: Dublin 1904/1922’, in The Cambridge Companion to Ulysses, ed. by Sean Latham (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 81–94 (81). Duffy points out how the final line of Ulysses (‘Trieste-ZurichParis, 1914-1921’) further emphasises this duration. We could add to this the ‘public time’ created by the novel: just as Irish nationalists constructed new monuments and commemorative events, Bloomsday might be viewed as a home-grown alternative to events like Commonwealth Day. Building on Jameson’s analysis of the role of infrastructure in ‘deconcealing’ sites of human and collective praxis – as exemplified when the water from Bloom’s faucet is traced through various pipes to the reservoir in County Wicklow – Michael Rubenstein shows how the ‘networks of rivers, sewers, and canals that make up Dublin’s circulatory system’ provide a narrative view from which the novel articulates its multiple perspectives: see Fredric Jameson, ‘Ulysses in History’, 141; and Rubenstein, Public Works, 70. While scholars have identified a hostility to nationalism in the novel and particularly in the ‘Cyclops’ episode, others have been wary of constructions of Joyce that enforce a Cold War binary between open-minded, democratic thought and authoritarian dogmatism, the latter implicitly connected to the thinking of Catholics and nationalists; see M. Keith Booker, Ulysses, Capitalism, and Colonialism: Reading Joyce After the Cold War (Greenwich, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 9. As James Connolly remarked, England would continue to rule Ireland ‘through the whole array of . . . institutions she has planted in this country’, quoted in Gibson, Revenge, 96. Although Ireland was deindustrialised and ‘underdeveloped’ under British rule, scholars have suggested that it shares more in common with Europe than with postcolonial nations in Africa or Asia, given Ireland’s participation in imperial missions: see Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes, ‘Introduction’,

Notes to pages 93–96

53. 54.

55.

56. 57.

175

Semicolonial Joyce, ed. by Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1–20 (8). For an alternative perspective, see Cleary, Outrageous Fortune, 20. As Cleary notes, there is no standard model of colonialism without compromise, collusion and elements of cooperation. Davis, Planet of Slums, 13. Barry McCrea notes that ‘Ireland is a combination of real particularity, on the one hand a small but distinct culture, with a historical awareness of itself and its uniqueness, but on the other, a part of the wider anglophone world, not immediately different from England or America in most obvious cultural ways. It is this combination of particularity and indistinctness, of periphery and center . . . this combination of specificity and its lack that Joyce employed in writing Ulysses: his novel became the ultimate expression of twentiethcentury metropolitan modernity’, ‘Privatising Ulysses: Joyce Before, During and After the “Celtic Tiger”’, in Joycean Unions: Post-Millennial Essays from East to West, ed. by R. Brandon Kershner and Tekla Mecsnóber (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), 81–93 (91). Ariela Freedman, ‘Global Joyce’, Literature Compass 7.9 (2010): 798–809 (799). Freedman cautions that studies of Joyce’s influence ‘should serve to call attention to other international writers, rather than to overwrite them’ (798). For an example of a comparativist method that does this sensitively, see Jessica Berman’s reading of Joyce alongside Mulk Raj Anand, Modernist Commitments, 90–135. Quoted in Cyril Connolly, Previous Convictions (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963), 271. As A. J. Christopher writes, Dublin was the capital of England’s first overseas colony and the first to undergo decolonisation in the twentieth century; yet, the Dublin of 1911 ‘exhibited little resemblance to the racially structured colonial city’, given that divides fell along religious lines. The fact that Dublin was not the centre of an extractive tropical colony nor of a colony demographically dominated by settlers means that comparisons to Melbourne, Sydney and Toronto are in a certain respect misleading, however, making a ‘comparison with India more apt’: ‘“The Second City of the Empire”: Colonial Dublin, 1911’, Journal of Historical Geography 23.2 (1997): 151–63 (151–2).

Anglo-Indian Crises of Development 1. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India, ed. by Oliver Stallybrass (London: Penguin, 2005), 5. 2. Douglas Kerr, Eastern Figures, 15.

176

Notes to pages 96–100

3. E. M. Foster, Letter to Anand, 5 May 1934, in E. M. Forster, Only Connect: Letters to Indian Friends, ed. by Syed Hamid Husain (New Delhi: Heinemann, 1979), 73. 4. On the modernist qualities of Anand’s novels, particularly their use of focalisation and interior perspectives, see Jessica Berman, ‘Comparative Colonialisms: Joyce, Anand, and the Question of Engagement’, Modernism/Modernity 13.3 (2006): 465–85 (469–70). Debates as to whether to describe early twentieth-century anti-colonial writers of predominantly realist prose as ‘modernists’ are ongoing. Timothy Brennan notes that the fact that peripheral or postcolonial writers have often been critical of modernism, self-consciously rejecting its stylistic excesses on political grounds, means that they cannot simply be integrated, ‘Against Modernism’, in Marxism, Postcolonial Theory, and the Future of Critique: Critical Engagements with Benita Parry, ed. by Sharae Deckard and Rashmi Varma (New York: Routledge, 2019), 21–36. Anand’s inclusion as a modernist would be a case in point here, both because of the realist elements of his prose and because of his anticolonial critique of British modernism. Equally, however, he does associate himself with his British contemporaries and even refers to himself as a modernist to describe his political and architectural preferences. Recalling the ‘modernism of underdevelopment’ discussed in previous chapters, this book compares diverse twentieth-century writers on the basis of their stylistically varied responses to historically compatible situations of uneven development. 5. This biographical information is based on Anand’s personal recollections: for a note on the accuracy of Anand’s accounts of this period, see Anna Snaith, ‘The Hogarth Press and Networks of Anti-Colonialism’, in Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism, ed. by Helen Southworth (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 103–27 (123). 6. Mulk Raj Anand, ‘Mulk Raj Anand Remembers’, Indian Literature 36.2 (1993): 176–86 (177–8). 7. Anand’s Two Leaves and a Bud (1937) documents life at a British tea plantation in Assam and was banned by the colonial government; Across the Black Waters (1940) follows an Indian sepoy in Britain during the First World War. 8. Mulk Raj Anand, Conversations in Bloomsbury (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 15, 8. 9. See Susheila Nasta, ‘Between Bloomsbury and Gandhi? The Background to the Publication and Reception of Mulk Raj Anand’s “Untouchable”’, in Books Without Borders, Volume 2: Perspectives from South Asia, ed. by Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 151–70.

Notes to pages 100–3

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10. E. M. Forster, ‘Preface’, in Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1940), v. 11. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962), 125; Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2: 1920–4, ed. by Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth Press, 1978), 189. 12. Ben Conisbee Baer suggests that Untouchable writes back to Bloomsbury, marking ‘the desire to carry the periphery to the metropolis so as to inscribe and make visible the unknown, excremental abjection of the colonial margin in the aesthetic heart of the center’, ‘Shit Writing: Mulk Raj Anand’s “Untouchable”, the Image of Gandhi, and the Progressive Writers’ Association’, Modernism/ Modernity 16.3 (2009): 575–95 (577). 13. See also Jessica Berman, ‘Comparative Colonialisms’, 468. Attending a Bloomsbury cocktail party, Anand recalls being overcome with an uncanny feeling of inferiority: ‘I came from a world where everyone was hampered, where desires were frustrated, and happiness thwarted’, Conversations in Bloomsbury, 12. 14. Anand, Untouchable, 9. 15. Anand, Untouchable, 101. A young Indian clerk in Coolie similarly ‘never felt quite at ease with white men ever since one had kicked him at the corner of Hornby Road’: Mulk Raj Anand, Coolie (Delhi: Penguin, 1993), 222. This practice was well documented in colonial cities: Isabella Bird noted that ‘[y]ou cannot be two minutes in a Hong Kong street without seeing Europeans striking coolies with their canes or umbrellas’, quoted in James PopeHennessy, Verandah: Some Episodes in the Crown Colonies, 1867–1889 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1964), 193. 16. Anand, Coolie, 152. 17. Quoted in Gillian Tindall, City of Gold: The Biography of Bombay (New Delhi: Penguin, 1992), 180. 18. Jan Morris, Stones of Empire: The Buildings of the Raj, photographs by Simon Winchester (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 212. 19. John Clement Ball notes that ‘Since cities like Bombay, Madras, and Forster’s Chandrapore were the primary staging-grounds of colonialism – the places where Britain’s trading activities, public buildings, and people made its power visible – Gandhi’s preference for villages can be seen not just as a backwardlooking anachronism; it was also a strategic turning-away from the cosmopolitan spaces that represented the Raj’s public face and the European narrative of historical progress that undergirded them’, Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 175. 20. See Scriver, ‘Stones and Texts’, 32–4; 47.

178

Notes to pages 103–6

21. This emphasis on the progressive aspects of the city’s cosmopolitan identity and hybrid architectural landscape also appears in literary imaginaries of Bombay, many of which celebrate its diversity against colonialism’s reliance on stable categories, binaries and order: for a discussion of literary imaginaries of Bombay, see Priyamvada Gopal, The Indian English Novel: Nation, History, and Narration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 116–38. 22. Harris, ‘Development and Hybridity Made Concrete in the Colonies’, 20. 23. Harris, ‘Development and Hybridity Made Concrete in the Colonies’, 24. 24. Gyan Prakash, Mumbai Fables: A History of an Enchanted City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 3. 25. Kipling, From Sea to Sea, 198. 26. Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 31–3. 27. Kipling, From Sea to Sea, 199. 28. For a number of eyewitness accounts from missionaries and relief workers – which show that despite the ‘immense grain stores piled up at the docks, the stringencies of relief in Bombay condemned thousands of refugees from the countryside to starve openly in the streets’ – see Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 167. For a discussion of ‘drain theory’ in the late nineteenth century, see Aguiar, Tracking Modernity, 52–3. 29. Norman MacLeod, Peeps at the Far East: A Familiar Account of a Visit to India (London: Strahan and Co., 1871), 26. MacLeod also describes areas of Calcutta as looking ‘very much as the poorest and worst portion of the poorest and worst Irish village would do if transported to somewhere near Belgravia’, 199. 30. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar discusses how the failure of urban social policy in the mid-century was ‘attributed to dirty, native habits, overlooking the fact that the conditions in which the poor lived were the product not the cause of ineffective policy’, History, Culture and the Indian City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 48. 31. Sandip Hazareesingh shows how urban improvements following the establishment of the Bombay City Improvement Trust in 1898 exacerbated congestion, inadequate housing and environmental degradation: in comparison to contemporary developments in Europe, Bombay ‘reveals the limitations of urban regeneration in a laissez-faire colonial capitalist environment where the search for quick returns by competing economic actors precluded the adoption of long-term policies and interventionist strategies’, ‘Colonial Modernism and the Flawed Paradigms of Urban Renewal: Uneven Development of Bombay City 1900–1925’, Urban History 28.2 (2001): 235–55 (235). 32. Byron, ‘New Delhi’, 14.

Notes to pages 106–15

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33. Byron mentions the hotel in a letter to his mother from 6 February 1930, Letters Home, 162; Huxley describes it in Jesting Pilate, 10. 34. Huxley, Jesting Pilate, 8. 35. Anand, Coolie, 140. 36. Elizabeth Kolsky shows how Indians were referred to as ‘black’, noting that the ‘explicitly racial discourse espoused by critics and perpetrators of white violence in India . . . reveals continuities in racial attitudes and actions across the British empire, from the eighteenth-century slave plantations on Britain’s Caribbean colonies to the nineteenth-century British Raj’, Colonial Justice in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 233. In an oppositional gesture, Coolie undermines the naturalness of whiteness by frequently describing Europeans as ‘pink’, ‘red’ and ‘purple-faced’: the face of the factory foreman Jimmie Thomas, for example, is ‘like the raw meat in a butcher’s shop, with its vivid whisky-scarlet curdled into a purple, over which the blue lines of a frown traced their zigzag course’ (199). 37. Anand, Coolie, 159. 38. For an example, see Renisa Mawani, ‘Racial Violence and the Cosmopolitan City’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30 (2012): 1083–102. Mawani focuses on the combination of cosmopolitanism and anti-Asian violence in early twentieth-century Vancouver. 39. Huxley, Jesting Pilate, 11. 40. Rashmi Varma, ‘Provincializing the Global City: from Bombay to Mumbai’, Social Text 22.4 (2004): 65–89 (66). 41. Varma, ‘Provincializing the Global City’, 78. 42. Anand, Conversations in Bloomsbury, 50. For a comparison to Kim, see Sonali Perera, No Country: Working-Class Writing in the Age of Globalization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 27–30. 43. Berman, Modernist Commitments, 120–1. 44. Berman, Modernist Commitments, 121; see also Berman, ‘Comparative Colonialisms’, 474–5. 45. Munoo learnt ‘to label everything he could not understand as English’, Coolie, 71. 46. See Berman, Modernist Commitments, 131. Berman identifies in Anand moments of linguistic ‘syncretism, disruption, and play’ that build towards ‘new cosmopolitan linguistic geographies’, Modernist Commitments, 134. 47. George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (London: Gollancz, 1933), 160. 48. The Chinese modernist Hu Shi, for example, compared West and East as ‘rickshaw and automobile civilizations’, quoted in Fung Chi Ming, Reluctant Heroes: Rickshaw Pullers in Hong Kong and Canton, 1874–1954 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005), 95.

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Notes to pages 115–19

49. See David Strand, Rickshaw Beijing: City People and Politics in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 36. 50. Ferguson and Gupta suggest that the ‘“distance” between the rich in Bombay and the rich in London may be shorter than that between different classes in “the same” city’, ‘Beyond “Culture”’, 20. In this case, Anand’s emphasis on divisions between those who are mobile and those less mobile becomes more relevant than the distinction between the two cities as such. 51. While this explains the continued reliance on manual labour across regions in the Global South, it also explains the prevalence of activities such as manual car washing among immigrants in cities such as London. 52. This is the kind of uneven modernity that Anand refers to when arguing that India ‘has been deliberately kept as a muddlesome mixture of the Middle Ages and the twentieth century’: Mulk Raj Anand, Letters on India (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1942), 150. 53. Arindam Dutta, ‘“Strangers within the Gate”: Public Works and Industrial Art Reform’, in Colonial Modernities, 93–114 (99). 54. Anand recalls asking Forster, after reading the final paragraphs of A Passage to India, if a friendship between Fielding and Aziz might be possible in an independent India, Conversations in Bloomsbury, 72. 55. Forster, A Passage to India, 306. 56. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003), 91. 57. Anand, Letters on India, 18. Anand’s opposing view is that ‘there is, and always has been, one world civilization, including Asia and Europe, inhabited by various parts of the same human family, struggling for food, clothing and shelter, with one history, which has been a continuous, though uneven, development from times immemorial to the machine age and the present day’, 18. 58. Anand, Letters on India, 17. Anand concludes that ‘[w]hatever we may say about the gentlemen of “the strong-hand-and-no-damned-nonsense” school, we must at least admire their candour’ and suggests that the ‘explanations of Messrs. Facing-Bothways are more dangerous because they are more plausible’, 18. 59. Mulk Raj Anand, ‘London As I See It’, Wasifiri 26.4 (2011), 19–21 (19). 60. Mulk Raj Anand, ‘On the Progressive Writers’ Movement’, in Marxist Cultural Movement in India: Chronicles and Documents, 1936–1947, vol. 1, ed. by Sudhi Pradhan (Calcutta: Santi Pradhan, 1979), 1–22 (17). In 1950, Césaire also suggested that Hitler ‘applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the “coolies” of India and the “niggers” of Africa’, Discourse on Colonialism, 36. 61. Anand, ‘London As I See It’, 21.

Notes to pages 119–26

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62. Mulk Raj Anand, Roots and Flowers: Two Lectures on the Metamorphosis of Technique and Content in the Indian-English Novel (Dharwar: Karnatak University, 1972), 15.

Ecologies of Empire in Oceanian Modernism 1. On recent definitions of modernism in Oceania, see Matthew Hayward and Maebh Long, eds., New Oceania: Modernisms and Modernities in the Pacific (New York: Routledge, 2020). 2. For a discussion of writers in Suva, see Subramani, South Pacific Literature: From Myth to Fabulation (Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, 1992), viii–xix. 3. Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016), 57. 4. See Wallace, The Malay Archipelago. 5. Sudesh Mishra, ‘“Kidnapped by a Band of Western Philosophers”: Modernism and Modernity in Oceania’, in New Oceania: Modernisms and Modernities in the Pacific, ed. by Matthew Hayward and Maebh Long (New York: Routledge, 2020), 20–38 (24–5). 6. Deryck Scarr, A History of the Pacific Islands: Passages Through Tropical Time (Abingdon: Routledge, 2001), 162. Scarr also shows how these spaces were often inaccessible due to restrictions on movement, noting how John Thurston, first auditor-general of Fiji under Arthur Gordon, designed a restrictive taxation scheme that confined Fijians to their villages, where they were required to cultivate market crops in communal tax gardens. 7. On the role of the USP, see Subramani, ‘The End of Free States: On Transnationalism of Culture’, Altering Imagination (Suva: Fiji Writers Association, 1995); see also Matthew Hayward, ‘Movies and Pacific Modernities in Wendt and Subramani’, Symploke 26.1–2 (2018): 109–23. 8. Kim Gravelle describes the city using this term, Fiji Times: A History of Fiji in Three Parts (Suva, Fiji Times, 1983), 164. 9. See Albert J. Schütz, Suva: A History and Guide, assisted by L. G. Usher (Sydney: Pacific Publications, 1978), 2. See also James A. Michener, Return to Paradise (London: Secker and Warburg, 1951), 114. 10. Schütz, Suva: A History, 7. 11. Colonel W. T. Smythe, quoted in Schütz, Suva: A History, 8. 12. See Martha Kaplan, ‘Luve Ni Wai as the British Saw It: Constructions of Custom and Disorder in Colonial Fiji’, Ethnohistory 36.4 (1989): 349–71 (351). On the incorporation of colonial notions of Fijian tradition into contemporary Suva’s touristic landscapes, see John O’Carroll, ‘Multiple Cities: Suva and the (Post)colonial’, Dreadlocks 1 (1997): 26–52.

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Notes to pages 126–32

13. Sir Harry Luke, Cities and Men: An Autobiography, vol. 3 (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1956), 118. 14. Somerset Maugham, A Writer’s Notebook (Melbourne: Heineman, 1949), 122. The Grand Pacific hosted a number of celebrity travellers, including Maugham, Michener, Burt Lancaster and the aviator Charles Kingsford Smith. Fanny Stevenson also visited Suva in 1891, recalling a visit to a shop to buy kava, where she was recommended ‘a “real brain bowl” in which the natives used to eat the brains of their enemies’, Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson, Our Samoan Adventure (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1956), 120. 15. Martin Johnson, Through the South Seas with Jack London (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1913), 265. 16. Rupert Brooke, The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke: With a Memoir by Edward Marsh (New York: John Lane, 1918), 106. 17. Michener, Return to Paradise, 114–15, 118. 18. Quoted in Frances Steel, ‘The Cruise Ship’, in Touring Pacific Cultures, ed. by Kalissa Alexeyeff and John Taylor (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2016), 61–71 (63). 19. Gravelle, Fiji Times, 164. See also Brij Lal, Broken Waves: A History of the Fiji Islands in the Twentieth Century (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1992), 34–5. 20. Schütz, Suva: A History, 14. 21. Quoted in Gravelle, Fiji Times, 161. 22. Colman Wall, ‘Historical Notes on Suva, Part 1’, ed. by Paul Geraghty, Domodomo: A Scholarly Journal of the Fiji Museum 10.2 (1996): 28–39 (36–7). 23. See Patrick Nunn, ‘Na Koronivalu ni Bā: Upland Settlement during the Last Millennium in the Bā River Valley and Vatia Peninsula, Northern Viti Levu Island, Fiji’, Asian Perspectives 51.1 (2013): 1–21 (3). 24. Wall, ‘Historical Notes’, 37. 25. Schütz estimates that the loss was magnified from £200 to £10,000 due partly to the Fijians not being familiar with the currency system. Chiefs paid this debt by selling 200,000 hectares of land to the Polynesia Company, which worked out at about a shilling per hectare. Suva: A History, 13–15. 26. Colman Wall, ‘Sketches in Fijian History, Part 2’, ed. by Paul Geraghty, Domodomo: A Scholarly Journal of the Fiji Museum 11.1 (1997): 33–49 (36–7). A similar narrative appears in the legends recorded by K. Vuataki, which suggest that the tribe moved to the coast because ‘a hefty Bauan lady married by their chief was unable to climb the slippery slopes of the Nacovu fortress’, Softly Fiji (Bloomington: Westbow Press, 2013), 38. 27. Colman Wall, ‘Historical Notes’, 46.

Notes to pages 133–43

183

28. Subramani, South Pacific Literature, 97. For a discussion of Griffen’s stories, see Gina Wisker, ‘Paradise Revisited: Women’s Writing from Fiji’, Fijian Studies 3.2 (2005): 425–50 (434). 29. Vanessa Griffen, ‘One Saturday Morning’, in The New Road: A Collection of Short Stories (Suva: Thyra and Gordon, 2016): 31–42 (31–2). 30. See Margaret Jolly, ‘Custom and the Way of the Land: Past and Present in Vanuatu and Fiji’, Oceania 62.4 (1992): 330–54 (330). As critics have shown, the word vanua in Melanesian and Polynesian languages, and in Fijian specifically, denotes a more fluid concept of place that encompasses both ‘land’ and a range of other concepts, including ‘place’, ‘people’ and ‘home’, tying indigenous identity to land ownership but also combining the geographical space of the island with the soil in which ancestors are buried. See Maebh Long, ‘Vanua in the Anthropocene: Relationality and Sea Level Rise in Fiji’, Symploke 26.1–2 (2018): 51–70 (63). 31. Peter Royle, ‘Crabs’, Philosophy Now (2008), https://philosophynow.org/iss ues/67/Crabs. 32. H. P. Lovecraft, ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, in The Lurking Fear and Other Stories (New York: Del Ray, 1971), 119. 33. Subramani recalls first arriving in the city in 1962 to attend Suva Grammar School, ‘How We Lost Our Way’, in Altering Imagination, 185–9 (185). 34. Subramani, ‘Images of Fiji’, in Altering Imagination, 35–43 (36). 35. Subramani, ‘Kala’, in The Fantasy Eaters: Stories from Fiji (Washington: Three Continents Press, 1988), 90. 36. Mishra, ‘Modernism and Modernity in Oceania’, 33. Mishra shows how ‘Subramani draws on the rasalila tradition, characterised by the love-play of Radha and Krishna and that of Krishna and the Gopis (herd-girls), to frame Kala’s quest for a passion that, in its unbearable intensity, marries the erotic and the ethereal, thereby transcending the sterility, uncertainty and tedium of mortal love in the postcolonial city’, 32. 37. Mishra notes how ‘the unseasonal rain of Suva is perfectly seasonal in India during June and related to the viraha aesthetic that associates monsoon rains (sawan) to sexual longing-in-separation (vipralambhaś ŗ ň gā ra)’, ‘Modernism and Modernity in Oceania’, 33–34. 38. Subramani, ‘The Writer, Pluralism, and Freedom’, Altering Imagination, 44–53 (45). 39. Subramani, ‘Introduction’, Altering Imagination, 7–12 (11); ‘The Writer, Pluralism and Freedom’, 47. 40. Epeli Hau‘ofa, ‘Pasts to Remember’, in We Are the Ocean: Selected Writings (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010), 60–79 (65). 41. Mallay Charters, ‘Edwidge Danticat: A Bitter Legacy Revisited’, Publishers Weekly (1998): 42–3 (42).

184

Notes to pages 143–49

42. Subramani, ‘Born to Disorder’, in Altering Imagination, 106–10 (106). 43. See the discussion of this phenomenon in WReC, Combined and Uneven Development, 76. 44. Subramani, ‘The End of Free States’, 239. 45. Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007), 128. 46. For a discussion of these themes in the story, see Jini Kim Watson, ‘“We Want You to Ask Us First”: Development, International Aid and the Politics of Indebtedness’, in Negotiating Normativity: Postcolonial Appropriations, Contestations, and Transformations, ed. by Nikita Dhawan, Elisabeth Fink, Johanna Leinius and Rirhandu Mageza-Barthel (Switzerland: Springer, 2016), 241–53. 47. Subramani, ‘The End of Free States’, 245.

Mega-Dublins 1. This description is based on the author’s personal observation from a trip in 2014. The city was renamed Gurugram in 2016 but the name Gurgaon is still frequently used. 2. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 474, 476. 3. For an alternative perspective in which colonial Dublin is linked to other European metropolises, see Andreas Huyssen and Eric Bulson, ‘Literature and Close Reading: An Interview with Andreas Huyssen’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 9 February 2016. 4. Mick Brown, ‘From Here to Dystopia: Interview with J. G. Ballard’, Telegraph Magazine, 2 September 2006, 16–22 (20). This recalls another quote from Benjamin, who writes that while Marx saw revolutions as ‘the locomotive of world history’, they are in fact ‘an attempt by the passengers on this train – namely, the human race – to activate the emergency brake’: Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 4: 1938–1940, ed. by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 402. The image suggests that if we allow the train to follow the course already set down by the rails, as Michael Löwy points out, ‘we would be heading straight for disaster’, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’, trans. by Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2005), 67. 5. Jameson, Postmodernism, 307. As Julian Murphet notes, the context in which modernism emerged can be understood in terms of a ‘spatial allegorization of historical lags and disjointedness’ that exposes the gaps between incompatible social worlds, see ‘Introduction: On the Market and Uneven Development’, Affirmations: Of the Modern 1.1 (2013): 1–20 (5).

Notes to pages 149–52

185

6. As Neil Lazarus explains: ‘The idea that history (in the sense of [class] struggle) has come to an end; the idea that unevenness (in the sense of inequality, exploitation, immiseration) has been transcended; the idea that nature (in the sense of sheer and potentially recalcitrant externality) has been superseded – it is these ideas, and also the implication that they are unforgoable, given the problematic of “the postmodern”, that interest Jameson here, rather than the question of whether or not they are true, or even tenable’, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 110, emphases in the original. 7. William Gibson, ‘Disneyland with the Death Penalty’, Wired 1.4 (September/ October 1993). 8. Although Kowloon Walled City was a Chinese enclave in a British colonial city, it is viewed by Gibson as a more effective preserver of authentic Chinese culture than modern China. 9. To draw again on Benjamin, it is not enough to do justice ‘to the concrete historical situation of its object . . . it is just as much a matter of doing justice to the concrete historical situation of the interest taken in the object’, Arcades Project, 391, emphasis in the original. 10. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 12. 11. Alternatively, Chakrabarty recommends replacing the universal dialectic with a negative universal history predicated on a shared future of ecological exhaustion and catastrophe, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry 35.2 (2009): 197–222. 12. The difficult question within ‘alternative modernities’ theory, as Jed Esty puts it, is ‘how to oppose Hegelian historical destiny without collapsing into an ahistorical vacuum’, Unseasonable Youth, 199. 13. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (London: Penguin, 2001), 392. 14. Jed Esty and Colleen Lye suggest that what marks the present moment is ‘a widening cognizance of the untenable inequality within what used to be the global North, where the social ravages wrought by neoliberal governmentality forebode a repeat of the global South’s financial disciplining even as they create opportunities for coalitional movements’, ‘Peripheral Realisms Now’, Modern Language Quarterly 73.3 (2012): 269–88 (287). Yet, note how the language is firmly focused on the future: neoliberal governmentality forebodes a repeat of the global South’s financial disciplining. As with Ballard’s dystopian imagination, the emphasis is on the possibility of the North becoming like the South. At a moment in which politicians increasingly appeal to protectionism and nationalism in an effort to prevent Western nations from slipping into ‘third-world’ status, postcolonialism’s relational

186

Notes to Page 152

perspective on the inequalities, borders and divisions produced by colonial legacies is particularly urgent. See Robert J. C. Young, ‘Postcolonial Remains’, New Literary History 43.1 (2012): 19–42. 15. Pascale Casanova, ‘Literature as a World’, New Left Review 31 (2005): 71–90 (72). 16. See Stephen Shapiro and Philip Barnard, Pentecostal Modernism: Lovecraft, Los Angeles and World-Systems Culture (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 17. Untouchable ends similarly with the place of publication: ‘Simla-S.S. Viceroy of India-Bloomsbury’, 232.

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Index

Adshead, Stanley, 10 Algiers, 10, 16, 17–19, 37, 157 Ali, Ahmed, 6 Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji, 101 American Civil War, 104 anachronism, 4, 5, 35–6, 42, 73, 91, 106, 135, 137, 151, 153 Anand, Mulk Raj, 6, 21, 46, 94, 97–8, 123, 145, 150, 152 ‘London as I See It’, 118 Conversations in Bloomsbury, 98–9 Coolie, 97, 102–18 Letters on India, 118 Untouchable, 96–7, 100–2 Anderson, Perry, 35–7 Anthropocene, 122 architecture, 2, 4–8, 9–14, 18, 23–4, 27, 40, 55, 59, 61–3, 71, 78, 97, 98, 102–9, 120, 125, 128, 130, 148, 149 Baker, Herbert, 10 Ballard, J. G., 148, 149, 186 Baudelaire, Charles, 25, 30–1 Beijing (and Peking), 31, 41 Bell, Clive, 99 Benjamin, Walter, 23, 25, 31, 35, 38, 61, 62, 144, 147 Bennett, Arnold, 32 Berman, Marshall, 8, 28–33, 37, 45, 79, 153 Bildungsroman, 21, 44, 46, 92, 97, 111–12, 118 Bird, Isabella, 54, 177 blackbirding, 126 Boer Wars, 80, 81, 82 Bombay, 2, 3, 7, 14, 23, 48, 97, 102–11, 122, 152 borders, national, 151, 152 botanical gardens (and botany), 2, 3, 12, 52, 122, 125, 131, 132 Braddell, Roland, 54 Brazil, 8, 38–40, 41–2 British law, 3, 10 Brooke, Rupert, 128–9

Buck-Morss, Susan, 64–5 bureaucracy, 11, 26, 35, 39, 59, 60, 63, 68, 143 Burnham, Daniel, 10 Byron, Robert, 5, 106 Calcutta, 2, 4, 88, 104, 119, 122, 155, 171, 178 Canning, Charles John, 50 Cape Town, 1, 4, 148 Casanova, Pascale, 152 Césaire, Aimé, 5 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 151 Chamberlain, Joseph, 2, 104, 126 China, 14, 18, 22, 36, 40–1, 48, 50, 93 Cleary, Joe, 8, 175 climate change, 122, 145 colonial education, 16, 18, 142 Conrad, Joseph, 6, 20, 25, 31, 34, 35, 44, 46, 48–54, 123, 145, 149, 152 ‘Because of the Dollars’, 48 ‘The End of the Tether’, 48, 56–64, 66–75 ‘The Planter of Malata’, 48 Almayer’s Folly, 48, 63, 65, 72 Chance, 48, 66 Heart of Darkness, 48, 63 Lord Jim, 48, 63, 65, 70, 71, 74 Nostromo, 63 The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, 65 The Secret Agent, 25–8, 48, 73, 77, 90 The Shadow-Line, 48 Typhoon, 65 consumerism, 14–15, 22, 30, 35, 50, 55, 79–80, 91, 144, 147 cosmopolitanism, 4, 13, 14, 15, 25, 28, 50, 54, 55, 76, 97, 102, 103, 108, 109, 110–11 Crystal Palace, 29, 31, 37 Cunard, Nancy, 99 Dalhousie, Marquess of, 12 Danticat, Edwidge, 142–3 Davis, Mike, 1, 24, 93, 123, 157 de Assis, Machado, 42

200

Index

201

decolonization, 1, 2, 98, 124, 144, 175 Defoe, Daniel, 45, 46, 174 Robinson Crusoe, 69, 74, 174 deforestation, 46, 52, 121–2, 145 Des Voeux, William, 125 developmentalism, 2–3, 18, 21–2, 31, 37, 40, 44–7, 71–2, 74–5, 81–2, 85, 90, 92, 97, 111–16, 120, 141–5 Devi, Mahasweta, 43 Dickens, Charles, 25, 26–7, 33, 45, 46, 112 Dietrich, Marlene, 108 disease (and epidemics), 15, 16, 54, 105, 121, 124, 126, 129, 131 Disraeli, Benjamin, 125 Dobrée, Bonamy, 99 Dos Passos, John, 25, 184 Dostoevsky, Fydor, 8, 20, 23, 27, 29–32, 34, 37, 42, 44–5, 79 Dublin, 76–7, 78–80 Dudley, Earl of, 85

Griffen, Vanessa, 45, 120, 133 ‘One Saturday Morning’, 133–6 Guangzhou, 13 Gurgaon, 146–7

Eagleton, Terry, 26 East India Company, 11, 59, 95, 96, 102, 121, 165 ecology (and environment), 1, 12, 21, 24, 46, 93, 97, 110, 115, 120–5, 135, 138, 141–5, 147, 148, 151 Eliot, T. S., 25, 27, 34, 36, 91, 98–9, 137 Engels, Friedrich, 79, 93 Enlightenment, 29, 38, 42 Eri, Vincent, 124 Esty, Jed, 22, 44, 185

imperial maturity, 5, 14, 21, 97, 104–6, 111 imperialism, 91, 98, 119 impressionism, 6, 8, 25, 36, 47, 48–9, 56, 72, 73–5 indentured labour, 12, 55, 136, 139 Indian mythology, 99, 137 Iqbal, Muhammad, 99 Irish Free State, 92

Fanon, Frantz, 5, 17–19, 37, 38, 152 Figiel, Sia, 125 flânerie, 25, 88, 121 Ford, Ford Madox, 25, 73 Forster, E. M., 21, 25, 31, 35, 74, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 149 A Passage to India, 6, 95–7, 117–18, 145 Frankfurt School, 38 Frere, Henry Bartle, 103 Freud, Sigmund, 31, 36 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 22 Galsworthy, John, 32 Gandhi, Mahatma, 5, 101 Ghosh, Amitav, 121–2 Gibraltar, 80, 92 Gibson, William, 150 Gladstone, William Ewart, 80 Gordon, Arthur, 125, 126, 181 Grace, Patricia, 124 Grand Pacific Hotel, 127, 128 Greene, Graham, 5 Greenwich Meridian, 26, 77, 90

Harootunian, Harry, 35 Hau‘ofa, Epeli, 121, 141, 144–5 ‘Pasts to Remember’, 141–2 ‘The Glorious Pacific Way’, 143–4 ‘The Winding Road to Heaven’, 45–6 Haussmann, Baron, 15–16 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (and Hegelian historicism), 65, 151 Hereniko, Vilsoni, 125 Hong Kong, 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 13, 16, 34, 51, 61, 80, 121, 129, 148, 150, 177 Huxley, Aldous, 4, 21, 98, 106–7 Huxley, Julian, 98 hybridity, 13, 14, 35, 43, 48, 55, 62, 76, 97, 102–4, 108, 110, 116, 135, 149

James, C. L. R., 152 Jameson, Fredric, 6, 26–7, 34–5, 61–3, 74, 76, 91–2, 149, 160 Jerusalem, 10 Johannesburg, 148 Johnson, Martin, 127–8 Joyce, James, 24, 34, 76–77, 83, 93–94, 99–100, 150, 152 ‘Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages’, 76 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 99 Dubliners ‘After the Race’, 90 Ulysses, 6, 77, 91–3, 99–100 ‘Ithaca’, 90 ‘Lestrygonians’, 90 ‘Nausicaa’, 82–3, 90 ‘Oxen of the Sun’, 77 ‘Wandering Rocks’, 84–91 Kafka, Franz, 20, 28, 31, 35, 38, 43, 91 Kincaid, Jamaica, 81 Kipling, Rudyard, 4, 53, 99, 104, 112 Kowloon Walled City, 150 Lagos, 2, 3, 15, 24, 30 laissez-faire capitalism, 14, 20, 48, 52, 63, 105, 150

202

Index

Lancaster, Burt, 182 Lao She, 41 Lawrence, D. H., 31, 98 Lazarus, Neil, 185 Le Corbusier, 10–11, 98 Lefebvre, Henri, 38 Levuka, 126 liberalism, 9, 19, 39, 41, 49, 51, 97, 118, 126 literary comparativism, 22–3, 42, 153, 175 London, 5, 7, 22, 23, 25–7, 32, 33–4, 36, 48, 49, 52, 73–5, 77, 78, 98, 104, 105, 116, 118–19, 137, 152 London, Jack, 127 Lovecraft, H. P., 135 Lu Xun, 41 Lugard, Frederick, 2 Lukács, Georg, 44–5 Luke, Harry, 126–7 Lutyens, Edwin, 5, 107 Macarthur, John, 125 Malay Archipelago, 44, 53–5, 71 Manchester, 1, 12, 15, 24, 42, 51 Mansfield, Katherine, 5–6, 7, 31, 121, 133, 173 Māori culture, 6 Marx, Karl (and Marxism), 1, 12, 23, 30, 31, 37, 64, 66, 118, 163, 168, 184 Maugham, William Somerset, 16, 124, 127, 128, 130 Meath, Reginald Brabazon, Lord, 2, 78 and Empire Day, 80–2 Melbourne, 56, 71, 175 Melville, Herman, 124 metropole, Imperial, 23, 26, 27, 31, 34–7, 49, 73–4, 87, 88, 90, 105, 119, 122, 184 Michener, James, 128–9, 182 Mishra, Sudesh, 123, 137 missionaries, 16, 18, 47, 82, 105, 178 mobility, 11, 12, 17–18, 32, 44, 46, 97, 101, 102, 107, 112, 115–16, 117, 142, 151, 152 Moretti, Franco, 25, 91–2, 156 neoliberalism, 146, 185 Nevsky Prospect, 29–30 New Delhi, 5, 30, 94, 102, 107 Oceania (and Oceanian culture), 36, 120–1, 123–5, 135, 141–2 opium, 14, 52, 103 Orwell, George, 14, 99, 115 Papua New Guinea, 123 Paris, 7, 15, 23, 25, 28, 30, 31, 147, 152, 170 Parnell, John Howard, 89 paternalism, 78, 99, 104, 128

philanthropy, 20, 78, 84–5 plantations, 8, 9, 38, 52, 55, 67, 71, 72, 75, 92, 122, 123–4, 136, 152, 179 ports (and port cities), 2, 4, 9, 10, 14–15, 41, 48–50, 56, 62, 70, 75, 79, 102, 104, 110, 120, 121–4, 128, 129, 135, 139, 140, 145, 148, 151 positivism, 33, 41 postcolonial criticism, 8, 22, 23, 46, 77, 92, 97, 116, 186 postcolonial societies, 1, 7, 8, 22, 24, 30, 46, 78, 87, 92, 93, 123, 143, 144, 151, 152–3 postmodernism, 7, 21, 61–2, 63, 145, 149–50 Pound, Ezra, 36 poverty, 3, 15, 44, 54, 76, 79, 85, 88, 95–6, 105, 107, 120, 123, 144, 148 Prague, 35 Prost, Henri, 10 protectionism, 52, 133, 186 Queensland, 126 racism, 12–13, 17, 44, 55, 70–1, 75, 95, 96, 108, 110, 113, 116, 126, 127, 133 Raffles, Thomas Stamford, 11, 14, 50–2, 53–4, 55, 72 and Raffles Hotel, 14, 53, 127 railways, 12, 30, 41, 95, 103, 105, 114 Rangoon, 10 rationalism, 12, 33, 39, 111, 163 realism, 25, 32, 33, 35, 42–4, 58, 100, 140 resources, 2, 8, 10, 11, 18, 40, 46, 52, 63, 104, 118, 124 Rome, 36 Rushdie, Salman, 6, 7, 94 Said, Edward, 26, 169 Samoa, 123 sanitation, 2, 15, 16, 79, 105, 129, 130 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 135 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 168 Schwarz, Roberto (and misplaced ideas), 38–40, 42, 87 segregation, 3, 14, 15, 16–19, 53, 55, 96, 97, 101, 102, 116, 129, 147, 148 settler colonialism, 3, 5, 9–10, 19, 71, 92, 126–9, 132, 159, 173 Shanghai, 7, 28, 41, 66, 119, 148 Sierra Leone, 4, 65, 154 Simmel, Georg, 61, 62 Singapore, 2, 11, 13, 14–15, 20, 48–75, 103, 121, 122, 129, 130, 145, 148, 150, 157 Smith, Adam (and the invisible hand), 40, 51, 64–7 Smith, Charles Kingsford, 182 Social Darwinism, 81 Solomon Islands, 126

Index Sontag, Susan, 118 sport (and leisure), 12–13, 81, 127 St. Petersburg, 8, 23, 27, 28–33, 36, 45, 79 statues, 1, 2, 3, 18, 19, 38, 54, 79, 80, 83, 108, 119, 172, 173 Sterne, Laurence, 43 Stevenson, Fanny, 182 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 124 Subramani, 21, 120, 124, 136, 143–4, 145 ‘Kala’, 136–41 Suez, 14, 98, 118 Suez Canal, 50, 103 Summer Palace, 31 Suva, 120–1, 123, 125–33 Tagore, Rabindranath, 5, 99 Temple, Richard, 105 toponyms, 3, 23, 130 tourism, 15, 62, 96, 129, 130, 133, 137 uneven development, 9, 10, 43, 45, 48, 59, 74, 76, 93, 107, 112, 115–16, 119, 147–53, 164, 165, 180 universalism, 20, 23, 24, 28, 32, 33, 37, 39, 42, 47, 77, 78, 82, 84, 85, 90, 93, 94, 99, 102, 111, 142, 143, 144, 153

203

urbanism, 4, 6, 11, 14, 16, 21, 30, 37, 63, 123, 155 Verne, Jules, 4 Victoria, Queen, 38, 78, 79, 80, 81, 84, 86, 108, 125 Vladislavić, Ivan, 43 Walcott, Derek, 94 Waley, Arthur, 98 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 51, 55, 122 Wang Yanan (and magical concepts), 40–1 Waugh, Evelyn, 4 Weber, Max, 68–9 Wellington, New Zealand, 2, 5–6, 78, 82 Wells, H. G., 32 Wendt, Albert, 124, 125 Westernization, 8, 14, 17, 20, 28–33, 42, 55, 137, 142 Williams, Raymond, 65, 152 Woolf, Leonard, 98, 99 Woolf, Virginia, 25, 27, 31–4, 44, 98–9, 100, 150 Worsfold, William Basil, 53–4 Yu Dafu, 41 Zanzibar, 10