Introduction: South African and African Modernism – Beyond a Century, Beyond the Provisional

On 16 June, 1926, the Johannesburg newspaper Rand Daily Mail carried a gloved dismantling of a new literary magazine called Voorslag. In name and in content, this half-crown monthly promised to be at the sharp end of a rising South African avant-garde, all the while keeping touch with the best art abroad.¹ Splendid ideals, a timely intervention – but was Voorslag quite ‘what it should be’ (Millin 43)?

The reviewer, Sarah Gertrude Millin, had her doubts. Despite its claims to radical newness, she saw in Voorslag something oddly familiar, derivative even. Its focus was too ‘narrow’. Its philosophy resembled too closely that of certain Anglo-American little magazines. And its editors – Roy Campbell, William Plomer and Laurens van der Post – seemed to endorse a predictable cast of European ‘prophets’ and ‘gods’ (44): the Sitwells, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, T.S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce and others. There is neat irony in the fact that Millin’s piece appeared on 16 June, otherwise known as ‘Bloomsday’. Only four years had passed since modernism’s ‘annus mirabilis’ – the year that saw the publication of Ulysses, The Waste Land, and Jacob’s Room, the year that supposedly ‘[broke] the world … in two’ (Cather v) – and already its tenets, methods and proponents were being treated as a known quantity. ‘The fact of the matter,’ Millin lamented, ‘is that Voorslag, for all its South African flavour, is a branch of a well-defined overseas group’ (44).

An uncharitable reader might be tempted to say the review betrays that ‘grocer’s mentality’ (Gardner and Chapman 4) which Voorslag sought to trouble. It is difficult not to regard Millin’s quibbles as both slight and slighting. It is difficult, too, crediting the idea that modernism was as ‘well-defined’ as her tone of polite boredom would suggest. But despite some hasty dismissals, the novelist’s tacit scepticism about a ‘South African modernism’ is itself not easily dismissed. Could such a movement ever amount to more than a provincial version of its metropolitan model? Could it add anything other than local ‘flavour’ to an apparently European project? Would ‘South African modernism’ ever shake the pincers of the provisional?

One way of answering these questions would be to say that all modernisms now stand under the star of provisionality. Recent scholarship on ‘global’, ‘world’ and ‘planetary’ modernism has disrupted narratives about centre-towards-periphery trajectories of transnational influence. It has given us ways of rethinking the tentacular reach of an increasingly elusive literary marker. When seen in its broadest, weakest relational mode – as Susan Stanford Friedman (2015), Paul Saint-Amour (2018), Alys Moody and Stephen J. Ross (2020), and others have compellingly urged us to do – modernism relinquishes some of its overdetermined connotations, sheds some of its period-specific baggage.² Untethered from the monoliths and (mostly) men of 1922, new modernisms can begin to constellate – around neglected moments of social and historical upheaval, between writers previously ‘lost’ to an older rubric, across epochal and geographical divides. This expansion facilitates a measure of release from cultural-imperial imports by which the modernist credentials of Global South writing have often been measured – imports such as autonomy, impersonality, dislocation, allusiveness, and self-conscious difficulty.³ It also makes room for the local and singular effects of modernity without an obligatory return to the ‘scene of the modern’ (North 1999), whether in pilgrimage or in protest.

The present special issue of English Studies in Africa joins this project of expansion. Each of the contributions worries the binarism and belatedness that have long dogged the idea of South African and, more broadly, African modernism. Instead of reinforcing the myth which modernism likes to tell itself – that 1922 marked the dawn of a new era⁴ – these articles identify alternative moments of rupture, moments which not only produce formally challenging literary works but which are in turn made visible by these works. Such mutual return is mapped between various contexts and texts: the influenza pandemic of 1918 and H.I.E. Dhlomo’s ‘millenarian modernism’ in The Girl Who Killed to Save (Rose), the ‘Colour Question’ and Plomer’s Turbott Wolfe (Adler), postcolonial modernity and the ‘countermodernism’ of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (West-Pavlov). Also at stake are canonical reconfigurations: the formal and intellectual kinship between Virginia Woolf and Olive Schreiner (Ong), Fiona Melrose’s rewriting of Woolfian class-consciousness (Kostelac), J.M. Coetzee’s ongoing debt to modernism’s institutionalised modes of reading (De Villiers).

Splendid ideals, a timely intervention. But is this special issue (or indeed any which seizes the centennial of modernism’s miracle year as an opportune moment for revision) quite what it should be? Does the temporal marker not reinscribe the centrality and priority of European antecedents? The spectre of Millin’s doubts is hard to quell. Hard, and also inadvisable. To do so would be to perpetrate wilful historical blindness, to court anachronism and risk ‘reducing modernism to a style without a content, or context,’ as Michael Chapman (4) has warned. It would mean discounting both the indirect influence of European modernism within South African institutions, which extends from this very journal’s investment in modernist studies to the continued predominance of ‘close reading’ as the favoured hermeneutic for undergraduate literature programmes.⁵ It would also mean overlooking the pointed engagement of individual authors or groups with ‘traditional’ modernism, which ranges from the The Waste Land-praising days of Voorslag up to Damon Galgut’s 2021 Booker Prize winner, The Promise, a work with avowed ‘roots … in modernism’; from the Joycean experiments of Njabulo Ndebele to the estranging aesthetic of ‘Die Sestigers’.⁶ Conscious cross-contact is therefore naturally explored in this issue, though without positioning the South African writers as ‘Western colonial[s] whose imaginary identity [is] sewn together … from the tatters passed down … by high modernist art’ (Coetzee 24). Instead, the articles foreground what David Atwell (2005) has called ‘transculturation’: a process which rejects passive absorption in favour of self-determination.

This special issue promises, then, to keep doubts about South African and African modernism in a state of generative tension. On the one hand, it confronts that scepticism that would see South African and African modernism as secondary or imitative. But careful to avoid an apologetics that could easily box us into the enormous, ‘well-defined’ rooms of modernism, this issue looks beyond its apparent centennial frame, beyond questions of the provincial and provisional.

Acknowledgement

I am deeply grateful to Michael Titlestad’s generous assistance over the last 18 months: I hope this special issue rewards his trust, patience and sharp eye in some small measure. My thanks also to the contributors for their intellectual energy and professionalism throughout the project. A final debt of thanks is owed to the anonymous reviewers and the staff at Taylor & Francis.

Notes

1 Voorslag means ‘whiplash’. In the editorial preface to the first volume, Maurice Webb promised that Voorslag ‘will … keep in contact with contemporary thought in Europe and America’ (in Gardner and Chapman, Voorslag 1, 3).

2 Particularly relevant in this regard is the AHRC-funded ‘South African Modernism Research Project: 1880–2020,’ led by Jade Munslow Ong.

3 For an excellent counter-narrative about artistic autonomy as a means rather than a bar for the self-realization of African and other world modernisms, see Peter J. Kalliney’s Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics.

4 In his ‘Little Review Calendar’, Ezra Pound designated 1922 as Year 1 of a post-Christian era.

5 During its inaugural decade in the 1960s, English Studies in Africa carried articles on Eliot, Faulkner, Joyce, Foster, Conrad, Fitzgerald, Lawrence, Mann, and Yeats. This focus on the ‘men of 1914’ carried into the 1970s, though there is a gradual decline in contributions on modernism after 1980.

6 Galgut remarks in an interview with Mark Gevisser: ‘the roots of the book lie in modernism … . [M]ost of the people celebrated as the great modernist writers were the writers that spoke most loudly and clearly to me when my writing consciousness was being shaped.’ Njabulu Ndebele recounts his experimentation with Joycean stream of consciousness in an interview with Bernth Lindfors (230).