Journal of Postcolonial Writing

ISSN: 1744-9855 (Print) 1744-9863 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjpw20

Modernist voyages: colonial women writers in

London, 1890–1945

Veronica Barnsley

To cite this article: Veronica Barnsley (2014) Modernist voyages: colonial women
writers in London, 1890–1945, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 50:6, 752-753, DOI:
10.1080/17449855.2014.962898

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2014.962898

Published online: 30 Sep 2014.

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752 Reviews

As a social scientist, Nanni re-examines “discourses of temporal aberrance” (9) with

the awareness that anthropology first emerged as “a science of other men in another
Time” (10). His twin case studies of the settler colonies of Victoria (Australia) and the
Cape Colony (South Africa) establish (in chapters 2 and 4 respectively) how the devel-
opment of “discourses of ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘African time’ would benefit their advocates
by justifying the need to ‘civilise the natives’, whilst at the same time legitimising their
dispossession” (12). Subsequent chapters examine how colonial temporal structures
inevitably clashed with local cultures of time; in Victoria because the indigenous
migratory patterns collided with the regulation of land ownership by the settlers
(chapter 3) and in the Cape Colony because a shortage of indigenous labour intensified
attempts to reform “African time” (chapter 5). Accordingly, chapter 6 considers how
the early role of missionaries as “the cultural vanguards of European time” in the Cape
(150) was extended into schools, where “the temporal regime [ … ] came to reflect that
of the modern factory environment” (191). However, settlers alleged that on leaving
school, “the ‘native’ evinced a regular tendency to slip back into ‘African time’” (207),
thus exemplifying Frantz Fanon’s interpretation of “relapse” as evidence of resistance,
rather than as a failure to assimilate.
Nanni’s book, then, thoroughly achieves its aim of adding “depth to our under-
standing of imperial power” as a temporal as well as a spatial project (4). Cumulatively,
however, the four titles reviewed here underline how approaches to modernity and time
as ideas can generate a plurality of readings that also bridge discourses.

Susan Reid
University of Northampton, UK
Email: sue@niallc.co.uk
© 2014, Susan Reid
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2014.962902

Modernist voyages: colonial women writers in London, 1890–1945, by Anna Snaith,

New York, Cambridge University Press, 2014, 278 pp., £60.00 (hardback), ISBN 978
0 521 51545 0

Recent scholarship on the global genealogies and expanded geographies of modernism

has both brought to light the work of lesser-known writers and produced the alternative
critical formulations required to map their relationships to earlier Eurocentric concep-
tions of modernism. The realization that empire and modernism, as manifestations of
modernity, were mutually constitutive was articulated in Howard J. Booth and Nigel
Rigby’s collection Modernism and Empire (2000), triggering what Anna Snaith calls an
“explosion” of scholarship on alternative modernities that has allowed modernist studies
the opportunity to call itself “new” and to engage with postcolonial perceptions of the
necessarily global intersections between literatures and cultures connected through colo-
nialism (3).
Snaith’s study joyfully participates in this expansion of the modernist canon, offer-
ing readers the chance to discover female writers who have been ignored, dismissed or
neglected (Olive Schreiner, Sarojini Naidu, Sara Jeanette Duncan, Una Marson and
Christina Stead) and to consider afresh those with critically established oeuvres
(Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys). Snaith’s scholarship diligently reveals a London
 Journal of Postcolonial Writing 753

that offered these authors an “initiation” into modernity, a taste of colonial privilege
and the chance to escape the restrictions of colonial womanhood within resistant
networks that, notably in the case of Naidu’s campaigning for Indian independence and
Marson’s involvement with Pan-Africanism, challenged imperial control. Modernist
Voyages makes a convincing case for focusing on London in order to isolate and
examine the interlocking concerns of gender, empire, race and modernity. While the
city held a magical appeal for colonial incomers, it was also a site of prejudice and, for
Schreiner, Duncan and Rhys, “a degenerate, barbaric, retrogressive place” (13). In
response to this ambiguity, Snaith’s conceit of the “Voyage In” remains loose enough
to allow the inclusion of each writer’s transnational context, acknowledging that look-
ing at these figures in and through the urban metropolis is only “one way” of situating
them within overlapping literary and cultural trajectories (13, original emphasis).
Although the book’s blurb implies that all these women can be called “anti-colonial”,
Snaith shows that the positions they occupied, while often precarious or subversive,
rarely offered an easily defined stance on empire. Duncan, for example, retains faith in a
federation of “sister nations” (95) while Marson becomes increasingly “explicit” in her
anti-colonial commitments (164). Snaith reminds us that by being in London at all these
women were pioneers, who were often restricted by economic circumstances and the
requirements of the creative marketplace. She therefore locates their “modernism” in
social and cultural interactions as much as in their work. In certain instances this tactic is
frustrating, giving the impression that a critical interest in modernism is required to
justify a consideration of these writers when, particularly in the cases of Marson, Naidu
and Duncan, there are many other frameworks in which their modernity can productively
be viewed. Indeed some of their most revealing texts are not modernist in their form and
Snaith’s analyses of their uses of realist, romantic or traditional forms is often more
satisfying than her focus on their social connections with modernist circles. This said, the
impressive range and elegant execution of Modernist Voyages makes it a pertinent inter-
vention in the “new modernist studies”, demonstrating that colonial women writers were
active both in constructing the tenets of empire and in “defamiliarizing and dislocating”
their operations (205).

Veronica Barnsley
University of Manchester, UK
Email: veronica.barnsley@manchester.ac.uk
© 2014, Veronica Barnsley
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2014.962898

Katherine Mansfield and the (post)colonial, by Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber and Delia
da Sousa Correa, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2013, 210 pp., £60.00 (hard-
back), ISBN 978 0 7486 6909 7

Volume 5 of the journal of Katherine Mansfield Studies contains the now standard mix
of critical essays, creative writing, reports and book reviews, here tied together by co-
editor Janet Wilson’s robust introduction, which overviews Mansfield’s emerging neo-
reputation as a colonized aesthete bearing the psychic scars of transplanted Englishry in
colonial New Zealand (a racist, monoculturally “superior”, flotsam culture of mimicry,