Global Modernisms and Asia’s Other Empires

The aim of this cluster is to provide an alternative to the disciplinary reliance on Anglo-European imperiality as a structuring force for what is considered global within global modernisms. Collectively the cluster aims to expand understanding of the relationship between modernism, imperialism, and the global by reconceptualizing how modernism engaged with entangled colonial networks in which Europe is influential, but not the sole player. This cluster contends that some of the strongest and most contested sites of imperialism in the period of modernism’s emergence involved locations and imperial aspirations beyond Europe’s core empires. Focusing on empires located on the continent of Asia broadly defined, including the Ottoman, Russian, Japanese, Soviet, and Sinophone empires, offers a provocative case study to examine how the global turn has reconfigured the relationship of modernism and empire.[1]

Modernism’s relationship to empire and the critical legacies of postcolonialism have been central to the ways in which the New Modernist Studies has productively expanded the locations and timelines of modernism. Yet, in 2014 Laura Winkiel recorded a “dearth of critical work— until recently on the relation of empire to the literary production of this period, usually referred to as modernism.”[2] In the decade since this comment was made, there has been a growing awareness of the importance of empire to modernism, particularly as the field’s global turn has gone from a small subset of work being produced to an active subfield of modernist studies. A substantial body of work, including that by Jed Esty, Peter Kalliney, Urmila Seshagiri, Gayle Rogers, Joe Cleary and the Warwick Research Collective, has challenged received ideas of modernism’s apolitical nature and relative silence towards the institutions of imperialism.[3] Similarly, there have been extensive discussions about empire in relation to individual modernist authors, especially in regard to some of the most canonical High Modernists, such as James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf.[4] Beyond this, many figures, literary works, and images central to the locational and temporal expansion of modernist studies are drawn from the British and French Empires. From Mulk Raj Anand’s predominance as the archetypal subject of this new modernism to recently published volumes on global modernism and imperialism which exclusively examine literatures from the British imperial network, one of the curious features of the new modernist studies is that its engagement with empire frequently—though certainly not always—offers a vision of the globe limited to the international reach of European empires.[5]

In other words, thinking globally within the field of global modernisms has primarily taken place within the narrow frame of European imperial legacies.[6] The global has become continuous with the imperial to the extent that the primary works of global modernism are fully identified with literature from or about former colonies within the British Empire, with the occasional nod to the Spanish, French, Austro-Hungarian, or Prussian empires. To that end, this cluster features papers which consider how literary modernism records the entangled imperial legacies of empires outside of Europe, with a specific focus on modernisms on the Asian continent. In doing so, it investigates the ways in which such inter-imperial entanglements contribute to the uneven or unequal effects of modernity on modernism’s global emergence. It asks, what happens if modernist studies refocuses the discussion of the relationship between modernism and imperialism on a version of Asia that centers the long-standing imperial formations from across that continent?

Beyond decentering Eurocentric perspectives, the Asian continent offers a compelling location through which to re-examine the relationship between modernism and empire. In the era contingent with modernism’s global emergence, Asia is the space where other empires persisted to be true rivals to European power both in the late nineteenth century and in the second wave of empire.[7] Consequently, the anti-colonial struggles which sprung from these empires are frequently triangulated through inter-imperial relations with both European and local imperial practices. This refocusing on the Asian continent in the study of modernism and imperialism can help scholars of global modernism to think about familiar terms in different ways: how we might examine the relations between empires differently, how empire is conceived and mobilized beyond Europe, and what are the cultural or aesthetic consequences that follow from that difference in imperiality?

The concept of inter-imperiality is particularly useful in this regard. In recent years, there has been an increasing focus on such inter-imperial relations within modernist studies. Pioneered by Laura Doyle’s Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance, this field of study has initiated a methodological paradigm-shift to theorize the ways in which such inter-imperial negotiations register within fiction.[8] Doyle defines the term as one which “names a political and historical set of conditions created by the violent histories of plural interacting empires and by interacting persons moving between and against empires” (Inter-imperiality, 2). The term also registers an acknowledgement that postcolonial scholarship has, in its focus on what Doyle terms “the single cluster of Anglo-European empires” contributed to “the oddly Eurocentric assumption that western European imperialism accounts for all recent imperialism, with the concomitant misperception that all territory is either a European (post)colony or uncolonized” (3–4). This observation is particularly relevant to the imperial formations under study in this cluster, which include territories that often, but not always, fall outside of the purview of European imperialism.

In Doyle’s introduction to a Modern Fiction Studies special issue on inter-imperialism, she argues:

An inter-imperial framework highlights two dimensions that are less consistently captured by other approaches: 1) it lengthens the typical temporal dimensions of critical theory by considering eras before the rise of Europe; 2) it widens the spatial dimensions of critical theory by considering the full field of interacting empires in any period, on the principle that the interactions among multiple empires have shaped the material and ideological conditions of oppression as well as revolution.[9]

These two dimensions—lengthening our temporal dimension of study and considering how empires interact spatially—are particularly important for situating the papers in this cluster. For the first, lengthening our temporal dimension to include the long durée provides a compelling rationalization for focusing on Asia on the continental scale. In the disciplines of History and International Relations there is a recent expansion of scholarship into the continent-spanning legacy of the Mongol empire. These studies focus on the ways in which the legacy of the Mongol empire not only shaped global, including European, understanding of what empires are but also instituted a form of sovereignty unique to the Eurasian continental context.

In the collection, The Mongol World, the contributors make the case for thinking about how the Mongol empire shaped what we might consider an intercontinental Eurasian historical trajectory which they claim spanned from Central Europe to the Korean peninsula. In their introduction, Timothy May and Michael Hope argue that the Mongols “reshaped the map of Eurasia,” through enhancing “transcontinental connections, facilitating the exchange of goods and ideas on a scale not seen again until the nineteenth century.”[10] Similarly, Ayşe Zarakol’s recent book, Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders has emphasized how, by lengthening the temporal dimensions in the study of world orders to include what she has termed the “Chinggisid” world orders of Asia, we can speak of a Eurasian world order that pre-dates the rise of Europe.[11] In this way, Zarakol rejects the idea that it is “shared colonial experience and trauma of the nineteenth century that made the continent into an ontological category” because “such accounts put too much power in European colonialism in creating the world we live in (and are thus Eurocentric in their own way)” (Before the West, 54). By focusing on this long historical sweep, we can explore how this imperial legacy in the long durée underpins lasting notions of imperiality that endure until the eras contingent with the rise of literary modernism that span the Asian continent.

By focusing on this long durée of continental history, Zarakol observes an important difference between the Eurasian empires she studies and those of Europe: what she views as a lack of “assimilationist centralisation” due to what she terms a Chinggisid tendency that “had little to no interest in homogenizing the population under their control” (19). Consequently, according to Zarakol, Asian empires were, at the start of the nineteenth century, more ethnically and culturally heterogenous than their European equivalents (41). As Zarakol points out, such cultural diversity made it difficult to create nationalized histories or pull off projects of nationalism necessitated by the emerging Eurocentric international order in the nineteenth century. This is because, as she highlights, heterogeneity rendered these states vulnerable domestically and internationally, since affiliation to a given polity was not necessarily based on ethnic or racial homogeneity in a world where the ethnic-based nation was increasingly the standard of the international order (39, 40). This tension between the rise of the ethnicity-based nation state and the legacy of multiethnic imperiality is highly visible in the aesthetic negotiations that modernism takes in the locations under study in this cluster.

Crucially for the conception of Asia that underpins this cluster, the Empires featured here are those whose force is exerted at the edges of continental and regional forms that underpin the current scholarly and disciplinary divisions of Area Studies. A continental emphasis allows this cluster to both expand the area of focus beyond the traditional confines of what gets called Asian studies, and the attendant Asian or Pacific Rim modernisms it enfolds.[12] In Martin W. Lewis and Kären Wigen’s The Myth of Continents, they remind readers that the traditional division between Asia and Europe is “entirely arbitrary,” but the “cultural distinction” between the two continents is deeply rooted in our collective historical imagination.[13]  Instead of reproducing continental thinking that enshrines essentialisms, they advocate for the study of world regions defined through historical connections and cultural ties, connections which ask us to rethink the physical separation that underpins much continental thinking (The Myth, 13). Similarly, Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents advocates for a reading practice that moves across the divisions that underpin Area Studies. Lowe suggests that such a practice can disrupt the methodologies, temporal frameworks, and canons derived from studying such areas or nations separately. This in turn encourages scholars to see connection and contemporaneity between and across areas and nations rather than pursuing historical narratives of individual progressive development.[14] This tendency towards reading, particularly the reading of literature, within national bounds has been particularly prominent in modernist studies, given the way that literary studies tends to focus on national or linguistic formations as a unit of study.

The locations covered by papers in this cluster typically fall into three major regions of Area Studies as they are comprised in the Anglo-American academy: Asian Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and Eastern European, Russian and Eurasian Studies.[15] Yet the institutional practices and knowledge production that undergird these regional divisions are, as Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa demonstrate in Orientations: Mapping the Asian Diaspora, not only driven by Cold War politics in general, but US foreign relations interests in particular. Chuh and Shimakawa point out that Asia as an object of area studies “emerges out of American modernity’s characteristic imperialist ideology and concomitant belief in the possibility of objective knowledge.”[16] The modernist corollary to these ideas, which has often been named either Asian Modernism(s) or Pacific Rim modernisms has also frequently focused primarily on East Asian authors, identities, and countries, rather than a more expansive understanding of continental histories and objects of literary study. As Stephen Yao writes in the introduction to Pacific Rim Modernisms, this largely has to do with the ways in which modernist studies has long been interested in how high modernism “developed some of its most distinctive features specifically through a sustained, if decidedly uneven, engagement with the Asian ‘Orient.’”[17] What these accounts of Asian area studies and Asian modernisms make clear is that both are the result of a relatively contemporary geopolitics. In contrast, continental Asia is not part of a modern geopolitical configuration, nor do these locations necessarily include the others in their political spheres in the contemporary world. Rather, the continental focus highlights the ways in which these seemingly separate locations are interlinked through a shared political and cultural history, a lens which the theoretical tools of inter-imperiality are uniquely poised to highlight and bring into focus.         

In his book, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization, Kuan-Hsing Chen calls for an understanding of a regionally integrated Asia as a bulwark against imperial intervention on the global scale. Chen reminds his reader, “Iraq is in Asia, in the center of West Asia,” suggesting that an expanded understanding of Asia on the scale of the continent could help to inspire anticolonial solidarity and imperial resistance.[18] Expansive in its vision, Chen’s continental Asia reframes the regional breakdown of traditional area studies in which what is commonly known as the Near or Middle East becomes West Asia. By a similar gesture, the Caucasus region commonly taught under the umbrella of Central and Eastern European, Russian and Eurasian Studies could also be reframed as Northwest Asia. Chen’s reminder that holding these modes of knowledge production—which have been made discontinuous by the regional emphasis of Area Studies programs—together can serve as an intellectual defense against neo-imperialism in its contemporary guises.

One of the legacies and complications of modernism revealed in this context is the question of imperial cultural heterogeneity and its encounter with the homogenizing nationalisms or homogenizing modes of imperiality derived from Anglo-European empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This tension reveals a complicated cultural move that happens in the transition from multiethnic empire to homogeneous nation state and such tension is highly visible in the forms that aesthetic modernism took in the locations under study in this cluster. This raises questions regarding how modernist studies might best reckon with the heterogeneity of cultural inheritance in these long-standing imperial formations while also foregrounding questions about the constellations of ethnicity and race that get taken up and dealt with in these texts.

A strategy that modernism takes in these locations as revealed by the papers in this cluster is very much invested in navigating the encounter between older literary practices and plural or heterogeneous cultural legacies of these locations and the homogenizing demands of new imperial or national literatures. In many of the works, authors, and movements covered in this cluster, we encounter combinations of local aesthetic forms derived from older imperial formations, such as the Persianate autobiographical practices found in Sadriddin Aini’s work examined by Emily Laskin, elements of Ottoman divan poetry in the work of the İkinci Yeni poets in the essay by Kenan Behzat Sharpe, Fazil Iskander’s homage to nineteenth century realist Russian literature investigated by Leah Feldman, or Tan Twan Eng’s use of shakkei as explored by Karen Lui. Yet in this cluster, these forms are also intermixed with modernism’s highly recognizable aesthetic practices, such as non-linear or fragmented narrative structures, stream-of-consciousness techniques, and linguistic experimentation. This suggests that these formal residues of cultural heterogeneity all mark a problem encountered by the authors covered in this cluster, one which modernism’s formal strategies of plurality, fragmentation, and experimentation were uniquely able to stage and encompass.

This focus on hybridity is by no means a new observation in the nationally or ethnically bound studies of these individual literatures. Yet the shared historical conditions of heterogeneity that span the Eurasian continent due to a common imperial legacy going back to Chinggisid practices (that permitted diversity as opposed to the more homogenizing practices of European empires), place the modernist aesthetic practices engaged in the literatures under study in a new light. In opening up to a continental viewpoint, we can begin to explore how this legacy of imperial heterogeneity posed a specific problem for the modernisms in these varied contexts.

This effort to rethink modernist hybridity in its relationship to the transition from imperial homogeneity to increasingly ethnic nation states also highlights the ways in which the aesthetic works under study in this cluster might complicate the colonizer/colonized binary that underpins much postcolonial inquiry. This brings us to the second element investigated by the works under study in this cluster: the way in which focusing on empire and modernisms on the Eurasian continent highlights and stages the unequal interaction of empires as a modernist practice. What is particularly compelling about the differences between Eurasia and the rest of the world is that, in the modernist era, the state systems featured in this cluster not only encountered each other as empires in their own right, but they were encountered by Europe as empires. Despite the fact that they were going through, or had gone through, periods of crisis, instability, anti-colonial struggle, or collapse, these empires, particularly the Ottoman, Japanese, and USSR were still functioning as imperial states even when European political ascendancy began to encroach on the sovereignty norms of the Asian continent. In this sense, the Asian continent thus becomes a space which highly complicates the binary of colonizer/colonized that underpins much postcolonial inquiry.

As Revathi Krishnaswamy has noted, such binaries often mask the ever-shifting political hierarchies of overlapping imperial histories. Focusing on divisions within colonial societies, she urges scholars to think about “how a subjugated society can simultaneously be a subjugating society.”[19] This reminder is particularly useful when thinking through the functions of modernism and imperiality in empires featured in this cluster, as many held a dual status as both colonizer and colonized. Or, in the absence of explicit colonization practices, were both subjugated by Anglo-European polities while perpetuating practices of subjugation against their minority populations.

The complexity of experiences of colonization and coloniality take many different matrixes in the imperial formations under study. Pheng Cheah and Caroline S. Hau have argued that the Chinese experiences of colonialism do not fit the straightforward Western colonizer versus non-Western colonized binary or the progression from colonial bondage to political freedom, given that “the modern Chinese national awakening was not primarily directed against Western colonialism but against the effete Qing empire” (Siting Postcoloniality, 7). In the Japanese context, Kuan-Hsing Chen has highlighted that Japan played a central role in the imperialist Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere project, but also has contradictory attitudes of resentment and gratitude toward the United States (Asia as Method, 10). Similarly, in Ottoman Studies, the work under the umbrella of Orientalism a la turca or Ottoman Orientalism has emphasized how the Ottoman state pursued models of sovereignty which increasingly mirrored European colonial discourses and practices of rule towards imperial subjects on the peripheries of the empire.[20]

Expanding the literary study of imperialism beyond the colonizer/colonized binary makes the inter-imperial framework a particularly apt one for the study of modernisms on the Asian continent, as it renders visible the negotiations of power between a given empire’s internal center/periphery dynamics, while foregrounding that same state’s imbrication within hierarchies of power between empires. These contradictory impulses at work in the interaction of empires is the second contribution of the essays in this cluster to a renewed focus on modernism and imperialism, which demonstrate models of colonial or paracolonial interaction produced when different empires encounter one another. C. T. Au’s focus on Hong Kong as a specifically imperial melting pot remind us that, while an Anglo-European imperial focus typically associates Hong Kong with a particularly British imperialism, in the mid-century there was an overlap of multiple imperial powers, including the US and Japan, as well as ideologies of communism coming from mainland China. In this context, Au examines a modernism that responds fluidly to these competing loyalties, highlighting a modernism interested in political positioning and political awareness, rather than aesthetic autonomy. Similarly, Mark Byron’s focus on Australian artist Margaret Preston’s modernist “transculturation” imagines a horizontal understanding of aesthetic borrowing across Asia-Pacific. Byron offers up Preston’s work as a counter to the traditional relationship of Japonism to modernism, arguing that such work disregarded or downplayed Japan’s rapid industrialization, while Preston’s prints deploy traditional Japanese technique to reframe Western considerations of Japanese culture as lagging.

Individual essays put forward a range of methodologies and model useful approaches to trace how such negotiations between empires and between cultural residues of heterogeneity register aesthetically in the literatures, locations, and time periods under study. Both Leah Feldman and Emily Laskin address imperialism’s concerns with aesthetic hybridity. Feldman investigates how peripheral imperial aesthetics use satire to critically reflect the cultural value of hybridity back to imperial centers in the work of Abkhazian novelist Fazil Iskander, while Laskin explores how Tajik fiction deploys genres drawn from multiple imperial heritages to provide a model of imperial subjectivity formed by competing global powers. The entanglement of imperial legacies and the creep of US neo-colonialism features in Au’s contribution, which questions how the colonial vulnerability of post-war Britain and the forging of a new world order contribute to the emerging aesthetic practices in Hong Kong modernism as found in the Wenyi xinchao journal. Byron also highlights the shifting nature of imperial powers in the Pacific Rim through Margaret Preston’s Australian ukiyo-e prints, which adapt Japanese aesthetic practices to Australian subjects, including mounting a critique of the dispossession and mistreatment of Indigenous Australians. Kenan Sharpe’s piece reflects upon how poets writing in the former Ottoman imperial center navigate the legacy of imperial aesthetic practices, exploring how Turkish poets reinvigorate poetic symbols of the Ottoman divan poetry, despite a pervasive rhetoric of rupture between Ottoman and Turkish identity. Finally, Karen Lui’s essay records how contemporary engagements with modernist aesthetics reactivates the history and memory of imperial entanglements in Malaysian fiction.

I propose the framing of Asia’s Other Empires to remind us that how we know what we know about empire, imperiality, and its relationship to modernism has been impacted by a disciplinary reliance on Euro-American imperiality. This focus helps to expand how we conceive of modernism’s globality in the wake of the field’s global turn. Spatially, examining Asia in this way allows us to see how these other empires are interconnected, encompassing a band which spans from the Ottomans to the Eurasian empires of Russia and the USSR to the Japanese empire that serves as a counterweight to continental thinking surrounding European imperiality as such. Temporally, a focus on Asia can also help us to rethink the periodization of modernism on a global scale through introducing a new, expanded timeframe for decolonization’s relationship to modernism, with some anticolonial nationalist movements, such as those in Georgia and the Ottoman Empire, occurring well before the more famous mid-century movements against European empires.[21] On the other hand, as the essays in this cluster which focus on Singapore and Hong Kong demonstrate, the modernisms of these locations expand well into the Cold War neo-imperial formations; they negotiate between not only local but also international modernist aesthetics a key place for examining empire’s relationship to modernism.

Collectively, essays in the cluster address the ways in which the study of modernisms related to Asia engage imperiality to better understand literary modernism’s relation to the nexus of asymmetrical and multidirectional global power relations. They ask how the plural modernisms produced on the Asian continent deal with the emergent norms of cultural heterogeneity and inter-imperial interaction in the long twentieth century. The literatures featured in this cluster present the opportunity to reflect upon how European imperial practices have overwhelmingly shaped scholarly understanding of the relationship between modernism and imperialism. In highlighting the vestigial ambitions, aesthetic legacies, and colonial practices drawn from Ottoman, Russian, Soviet, Chinese, and Japanese imperial traditions, essays in this cluster set their study of imperiality within larger global frames to trace how the relative waxing and waning of imperial power centers impacts aesthetic practices across the twentieth century.