Chapter 1 - The Queer Modernist Origins of Interwar Liberal Order

Summary

The first chapter describes how plans for liberal internationalist government began within the extended Bloomsbury group, as a moment of queer cosmopolitan disaffiliation with imperial order. The chapter opens with a mysterious set of letters written in protest against the Boxer Rebellion, one of the last wars of Victorian liberal imperialism. These letters, supposedly written by a Chinese consul, in fact are penned by a central member of “Edwardian Bloomsbury,” G. L. Dickinson, a Cambridge mentor to E. M. Forster who will be crucial to plans for formal international government after the First World War. Dickinson generates connections between Cambridge and May Fourth Modernism in China, through his friendship with the poet Xu Zhimo. It argues that the affiliations of Dickinson, Forster, and Xu Zhimo provide a model for thinking through an interwar modernism defined by cosmopolitan friendship, queer disaffiliation from the nation, and a strong attachment to liberal governmental institutions.