Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890–1945

Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 48 (2015) 70e89

Sanna Turoma and Maxim Waldstein (Eds), Empire De/Centered: New Spatial Histories of Russia and the Soviet Union. Farnham, Ashgate, 2013, xiii þ 347 pages, £75 hardcover. The editors of Empire De/Centered have assembled a broad range of essays by scholars from diverse disciplines including history, geography, international relations, sociology, literature, and photography to explore Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet history, society, and culture in relation to empire studies. The collection places special emphasis on the study of space and its role in shaping national and imperial identities, stressing the enduring relevance of Russian and Soviet imperial experiences for the study of empire today. Following the recent trend in empire studies, the editors aim to de-centre the field’s focus on Western Europe and ‘“de-provincialize” Russia as an object of study, to bring its history, present day, and intellectual traditions into the center of contemporary theory and research in social sciences and the humanities’ (p. 2). The volume focuses not only on Russia proper, but also on the peripheral spaces of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. Indeed, the collection strives to overcome the binary distinction of centre and periphery, focussing instead on concepts such ‘nested centrality’ and ‘subalternity’, as well as ‘hybrid, networked, decentered discourses, identities, strategies, and social formations’ (p. 4e5). The individual contributions thus address a variety of spatial and historical situations from different perspectives, organised thematically in four parts. In the book’s first part, ‘Eurasianism and Intellectual Construction of Space’, contributors explore various facets of the Eurasianist ideology, which serves as a vivid example of a Russian imperialist ideology rooted in theories of geographical space. In the first chapter, Sergey Glebov’s essay reveals the Eurasianist intellectual roots of European Structuralism, shedding new light on how some of the pioneering Structuralist ideas were developed by Roman Jakobson in dialogue with Eurasianist thinkers Petr Savitskii and Nikolai Trubetskoi. In the next essay, Igor Torbakov argues that the scholarship of Eurasianism’s principal historian, Georgii Vernadskii, was influenced by ‘his personal search for national identity’, and explores how his work relates ‘to his own struggles with national identity and to his thinking on empire, nation, and Russian and Ukrainian history’ (p. 65). In Chapter 3, Marlène Laruelle explores how, throughout the last 150 years, proponents of nationalist discourse in Russia have exploited theories of geographical determinism (such as Eurasianism and neoEurasianism) and Cosmism to promote the idea of Russian imperial destiny. The book’s second part, ‘Spatial Science and Geographical Knowledge’, will particularly interest scholars of geography, as it focuses on political and economic questions directly pertaining to the partition of geographical space. Nick Baron’s essay closely analyses Dmitrii Mendeleev’s ideas of spatial change and planning, and their implementation in the early Soviet period by Evgenii Sviatlovskii, highlighting his attempt to connect territorial planning and policy making in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union to scientific theories, appropriate at the time of the general modernisation of the Soviet society. In the following essay, underscoring the binary structure of the Russian geographical tradition in favour of physical and economic geography (to the detriment of cultural and political geography)d, Marina Loskutova establishes the roots of this tradition in the development of regionalisation as a leading approach to geography in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, and conducts an analysis of cadastral surveys and their role as an instrument of power in the imperial state. In its third part, ‘Political and Cultural Economy of the (Post-) Soviet Space’, the book extends its range to cover Eastern Europe

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and Central Asia. Two essays examine the material uses of space and its connections to political economy: Ulrich Best’s exploration of the oil pipeline construction in the Eastern bloc in the 1970s and Katri Pynnöniemi’s essay on the infrastructure network of postSoviet space. Thomas Zarycki explores the political and geopolitical context that shaped the reception of postcolonial theory in post-Soviet Poland. All three essays reveal unexpected connections between the socialist East and capitalist West on ideological, political, and cultural levels. The book’s fourth and final part, ‘Representing Empire: Media, Art, Literature’, assembles discursive and visual constructs of imperial space and will be of special interest to social scientists and humanities scholars alike. Anni Kangas analyses political cartoons of interwar Finland, exploring the role that ‘language games of empire’ played in establishing a new relationship between Soviet Russia and the newly independent Finland (p. 220). Sanna Turoma attempts to find the roots of the ‘cultural authority’ that spatial imaginings have exercised on Russian intellectuals by looking at both state-approved and dissident narratives of travel produced in the time of Khrushchev’s Thaw. Analysing such diverse materials as the popular monthly periodical Around the Worlddalong with Andrei Bitov’s prose and Joseph Brodsky’s poetrydTuroma seeks to explore the symbolic meanings of Soviet geographical space and determine how it affected the construction of Soviet collective as well as individual identities in the 1960s. Iina Kohonen’s essay, while remaining in the same temporal frame of the 1950s and 1960s, takes readers away from earthly travel and into outer space. Kohonen examines photographs and other illustrations of Soviet ‘cosmic triumphs’, highlighting the imperial nature of this imagery and arguing that ‘via mapping and naming, outer space was included into Soviet territory’ (p. 259). In the final essay of the collection, Kevin M. F. Platt points out the complexities of applying the term ‘Russian’ to denote social or cultural identity on the geographical territory of ‘the near abroad’. Specifically, Platt focuses on Russian culture in Latvia, examining Russian-language journalism and the Russian-language poetry of the Riga-based ‘Orbit’ artistic circle. A highly engaging collection, Empire De/Centered covers a wide variety of subjects in disciplines ranging from political economy to visual arts. The themes of geographical space, imperial narrative, and national identity hold these diverse essays firmly together. Despite a few typographical errors, this volume will be a valuable and enjoyable read for Slavists as well as for scholars of empire in general. Tatiana Filimonova Vanderbilt University, USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.09.006

Anna Snaith, Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890e1945. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2014, x þ 278 pages, £60 hardcover. It is now almost 15 years since the publication of Howard Booth and Nigel Rigby’s edited collection Modernism and Empire: Writing and British Coloniality, 1890e1940 (2000). A landmark publication, the book opened the door to historical studies of the intersections between modernist artistic forms and the dynamics of imperial power. Though the precise formative role of Modernism and Empire in the explosion of works on transnational, alternative, or multiple modernisms cannot be determined exactly, it is certainly the case that it appeared at an opportune moment. With the expanding

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Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 48 (2015) 70e89

interest in postcolonial theory and new forms of global histories and geographies, the time was ripe for an examination of the ways in which modernist artistic forms had both shaped and been shaped by empire and anti-imperialism. Such historical and geographical impulses drew attention to the interrelationships between colony and metropole. As Anna Snaith puts it in Modernist Voyages, a book which makes a significantly novel contribution to the study of the intersections of modernism and empire, ‘Modernist London starts to look very different when we can locate Jamaican Claude McKay, in London between 1919 and 1921, at the “1917 Club”, the haunt of Fabians and Bloomsbury intellectuals’ (p. 4). The presence of McKay certainly shifts our perspective on imperial London and its modernist dimensions, but he is not the primary focus of Snaith’s study. Instead, she shifts the perspective further by attending to colonial women writers in London, and by working with a capacious definition of modernism itself. In the rush to study modernism transnationally, its gendered dynamics have all too often been sidelined. Snaith returns gender to the centre of our analyses of modernism and empire, and in doing so seeks to ‘address issues relating to colonial modernism through a focus not only on women writers, but also on the tensions and interactions between feminism and anti-colonialism in the modernist period’ (p. 11). Snaith argues persuasively that if we are to fully account for the formative role of colonial writers and activists at the heart of empire, then ‘we need to construct alternative maps that depict resistant spaces and networks that worked to counter an urban architecture that monumentalized imperial power’ (p. 5). Snaith’s terminology here is rather too bluntdher book itself studies a number of writers whose work challenged certain aspects of imperial power, but often resisted a full criticism of empire, a point we shall return to shortlydbut nevertheless captures the importance that she places upon what she terms the ‘spatial practices’ through which modernism and empire were brought into relationship with one another. By centring her narrative on London, Snaith risks privileging the place of the metropolis for colonial writers, as if one can only be considered a colonial writer of note if one has been present in the imperial metropolis. Yet she deals with this risk head on, acknowledging it but arguing for the significance of ‘the transformative exchanges that took place between colonial and metropolitan writers’ (p. 5). In doing so, she is able to explore both wellknown and comparatively lesser-known writers in novel ways through an analysis not only of their writings, but of the relationship between their writings and their own experiences the imperial metropolis, the dynamics of imperial power, or the journey from colony to metropole. The writers at the heart of Modernist Voyages cross political preoccupations, as well as national and racial distinctions. Snaith reads the works of the South African Olive Schreiner as being closely tied both to ‘a concern with the treatment and movement of women within a capitalist imperialist system’ (p. 42), and with a social Darwinism that lent her approach to questions of race a markedly less progressive tint; Sarojini Naidu’s poetry is read as illustrating how her perspective on London shifted over intermittent periods of residence in the city, beginning in the 1890s and culminating in a trip alongside Gandhi in the early 1930s; Sara Jeanette Duncan’s writing displays an intimate engagement with the place of Canada within the British Empire; whilst New Zealander Katherine Mansfield’s early stories of her homeland are read both as attempts to translate the atmosphere of this colony to readers in the imperial metropolis, and simultaneously to enable Mansfield herself to shock her readership and to assist her in standing out amongst literary London’s avant-garde writers; Jean Rhys’s earliest novels, especially Voyage in the Dark (1934), offer an opportunity for Snaith to explore how colonial women writers

rewrote the urban geography of London whilst, at the same time, struggling with their own racial identity in the imperial metropolis; the Jamaican Una Marson confronts head on the racism of the metropolis in her poetry and plays written in London in the early 1930s, and Snaith neatly draws out the links between Marson’s writings and her feminist and anti-racist activism. Snaith closes with Christina Stead, in some ways perhaps the most interesting writer in the book, whose work put the journey from colony to metropole at the centre of its narrative, reversing the colonising trope of a civilised metropole and barbarous colonies by depicting the sea journey to Britain as a ‘descent into an underworld of sexual and economic exploitation’ (p. 177). On the whole, Snaith juggles the tensions between this diverse cast of characters, and their differing political and aesthetic commitments, admirably. She draws regular comparisons and frequently exposes differences between the approaches of each. Strong on the place of feminist politics in these writers’ works, there remains the problem of interpreting the political impulses of anti-imperialism. Where Snaith’s broad definition of modernism works well to enable her to explore the ways in which writers from different backgrounds explored the fundamentally modern concerns of gender and race in their writings on empire, her use of ‘anti-imperialism’ and ‘resistance’ to categorise some of the writers she considers seems rather too broad. Take Marson, for instance. Certainly she challenged the racial divisions upon which imperial power was so often grounded. Yet she nevertheless saw no hurry to break with the British Empire. In an editorial in The Keys (vol. 2, no. 3, 1935), the periodical of the League of Coloured Peoples, uncited by Snaith, Marson wrote that ‘We [non-white colonial subjects] are under a democratic government and that government is acting as trustees for us until we can stand on our feet’ (p. 46). Despite this, and although she acknowledges that Marson cannot be considered a political radical, Snaith treats her as an example of the way that ‘black anti-colonialism cut across and forged collaborations between different kinds of organizations’ (p. 153). Here lies a problem that Snaith is unable to fully resolvedseveral of the writers in her project are critical of aspects of imperialism, but often fall back on the security of the imperial bond in one particular aspect and refuse to call explicitly for an end to empire, and yet they simultaneously criticise particular aspects of imperial politics, notably their racialized or gendered dimensions. Modernist Voyages is, nevertheless, a model for the way in which historical and geographical scholarship can be brought to bear on the study of modernism and empire through an attentiveness to the dynamic intersections of race and gender, and to the formative, transformational role played by colonial women in London. Snaith’s main accomplishment is to study the writings of these authors against the backdrop of their material engagement with the urban spaces of imperial London, and her fine book ought to advance scholarship not just on the relationship of modernism and empire, but on the historical geographies of imperial London itself. Daniel Whittall Ranelagh School, UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.08.036

J.F. Merritt, Westminster 1640e60: A Royal City in a Time of Revolution. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013, xii þ 276 pages, £75 hardcover. The city of Westminster has been curiously neglected by historians of the English Revolution. Events in parliament and its immediate