No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Internationalism after Internationalism: Response to Aarthi Vadde, Chimeras of Form
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 January 2019
Abstract
Matthew Hart is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Nations of Nothing but Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2010) and Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction (forthcoming from Columbia University Press). A founding co-editor of the Columbia University Press book series Literature Now, Matt is a former president of A.S.A.P.: Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present and currently vice president of the Modernist Studies Association.
- Type
- Book Forum on Aarthi Vadde’s Chimeras of Form
- Information
- Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , January 2019 , pp. 107 - 113
- Copyright
- © Cambridge University Press 2019
References
1 The biographical sketch that follows synthesizes information drawn from three sources: First, Ted Crawford’s biography of Petroff at the Marxists Internet Archive. Accessed August 15, 2018. https://www.marxists.org/archive/petroff/biography.htm. Second, the entry on Petroff in William Knox, Scottish Labour Leaders 1918–1939: A Biographical Dictionary (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1984). And third, the “Biographical/Historical Note” included in the online finding aid to the Peter Petroff Papers, International Institute of Social History (IISH), Amsterdam. Accessed August 15, 2018. https://search.socialhistory.org/Record/ARCH04330/ArchiveContentAndStructure. As Crawford notes, there exists no complete biography of Petroff’s life and activities. The IISH archivists suggest that existing biographies depend on Petroff’s self-representation in a climate he himself describes as marked by “systematic falsification and the manufacturing of faked revolutionary pedigrees.”
2 Petroff, Peter, “Rebuilding the International,” The Vanguard 4 (1915)Google Scholar . Accessed August 15, 2018. https://www.marxists.org/archive/petroff/1915/rebuild-international.htm.
3 Vadde, Aarthi, Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 231 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
4 In France, the assassination of the antiwar socialist leader Jean Jaurès led to broad left support for a patriotic antistrike policy; in Belgium, Britain, and Germany, the main socialist and social democratic parties voted in favor of war credits to fund military action; in Austro-Hungary, the socialists agitated in favor of war. Only the British Independent Labour Party, the Serbian Social Democrats, and the Russian Bolshevik and Menshevik parties maintained their commitments to the Second International. For a fuller history, see Joll, James, The Second International, 1889–1914 (London: Routledge, 1974)Google Scholar .
5 Petroff, Peter, “The Breakdown of the International,” The Vanguard 3 (1915)Google Scholar . Accessed August 15, 2018. https://www.marxists.org/archive/petroff/1915/breakdown-international.htm.
6 Petroff, “Rebuilding the International.”
7 Ibid.
8 Peter Petroff, “The Breakdown of the International.”
9 Vadde, Chimeras of Form, 38.
10 Ibid., 43.
11 Ibid., 57.
12 Ibid., 75.
13 Ibid., 3.
14 Ibid., 187.
15 Vadde’s account of modernism continues the decolonization of that literary field while remaining traditional in its emphasis on formal innovation and incongruity. A book that begins with Tagore and ends with Smith does indeed “stretch the usual parameters of canonical modernism” (7). And yet readers of Hugh Kenner or Richard Ellmann would recognize Vadde’s assertion that those authors “are accurately called modernist because they do not look of literature to overcome the real illegibilities, distortions, and affective conflicts that pervade attempts to think through collectivity … [but] allow those irregularities room to flourish” (7). Lest the reader think I’m being critical in saying this, I’ll note here that much work on literary modernism shares this same aspect. There’s no properly literary account of modernism that doesn’t foreground the (admittedly relative and subjective) dimension of formal innovation and generic non-identity.
16 Ibid., 8.
17 Robbins, Bruce, Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 7 Google Scholar . Quoted in Vadde, Chimeras of Form, 3.
18 Vadde, Chimeras of Form, 4.
19 Ibid., 3.
20 Ibid., 222.
21 Ibid., 230.
22 Ibid., 4.
23 Ibid., 231.
24 Ibid.