THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#18,DEC/2023-FEB/2024
Laura Winkiel is the author of Modernism: The Basics (Routledge, 2017, second edition 2025), a postcolonial approach to modernism; Modernism, Race and Manifestos (Cambridge UP, 2008); and co-editor of Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (Indiana UP, 2005). Her next book, Modernism and the Middle Passage, is forthcoming in Columbia University Press’s “Modernist Latitudes” series. Winkiel is an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She held the position of President of the Modernist Studies Association in 2017-18.
Brotherwise Dispatch – How do you define modernity and how does that relate to what you consider modernism?
Laura Winkiel – Modernity for me is the spread of global markets along with Western notions of development, science, and technology. The problem with modernity is that it is capitalist in orientation, which means that it’s a class- and race-based organization based on profit and accumulation for some and misery for the rest. That misery is especially experienced in Africa and its Atlantic diaspora. Peoples in the Global South were extracted (literally carried away as forced labor, particularly in Africa) and their labor and reproduction used to generate surplus for capitalists. Modernism, as Modernism, Race, and Manifestos argues, stands in critical relation to modernity. I define modernism as the art and literature of the early to mid-twentieth century. It is experimental either through its content that presents scandalous or new ideas or through its experimental form, something that comes across as not reflecting reality to its readers or viewers. Modernism strongly critiques colonialism, empire, and race and gendered subordination. At other times, right-leaning modernists criticized modernity from the polar-opposite direction of white supremacy, but they also wanted a different future.
BD – In what sense do you think we should revisit our thinking about 'manifestos', which you regard as "the modernist form par excellence"?
LW – Manifestos announce and enact a break from the past and a disruption to the political or social status quo. The genre’s significance stems from their use during periods of revolutionary historical transformation. This history begins roughly with Martin Luther’s “95 Theses” that he nailed to a church door and continues with French and Haitian Revolutionary manifestos, and, of course, with Marx and Engels’ 1848 “The Communist Manifesto.” Scholars have even written about the United States’ “Declaration of Independence” as a manifesto. They describe its manifesto-like qualities of bringing a new political state into existence by means of signing and issuing a document. I link this genre with modernism’s avant-garde tendency to break from the past and experiment with radically new ways of making art and literature. The artists and writers themselves wrote manifestos to explain and publicize what they were up to. They believed that their radical art and literature would allow us to perceive the world with new eyes and (ideally) shape it into what the manifestos and art envision. For instance, I write about how Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas functions as a manifesto as it condemns fascism in terms of its masculine dominance. Woolf, however, does not draw attention to fascism’s racial dominance, though gender and race are of course related. At the same time, Woolf’s essay/manifesto rhetorically and stylistically enacts a feminine and pacifist way of seeing and being in the world.
BD – How would you describe the process by which “staunchly pro-imperialist” manifestos “open a space for anticolonial contestations of Anglo-European racial myths”?
LW – In many ways, fascistic and pro-imperialist manifestos such as F. T Marinetti’s “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” and Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound’s “Vorticist Manifestos” reveal the circular logic of modernity. In order to assert themselves as leaders of a superior (white) nation, they depend upon the nation’s colonial subordinates (for Marinetti, his Sudanese wet-nurse; for Lewis and Pound, the assimilated colonial subject and the Jewish people, respectively). In effect though, we can read them as parasitic on the subordinated peoples that they despise which helps us to realize how artificial their dominance actually is. In addition, the very theatricality of their manifestos reveals the constructed--and hence eminently contestable--nature of white supremacy. For instance, Marinetti’s manifesto demands both forward-moving action--a break from the past--and performs its belatedness insofar as Italy’s attempt to become a colonial power occurred in the 1930s, centuries after most of the rest of Europe. This time-lag allows us to see how power grabs are rhetorical and not inherent in the superiority of a particular group. Turning to the British Vorticists, its journal Blast published a short story, “Indissoluble Matrimony” by Rebecca West, that upends racial and gendered categories. It tells the story of a Black woman’s strength against her weak, white, lily-livered husband George. In effect, the story undermines the right-wing position of the journal’s leaders, Lewis and Pound.
BD – What role do you ascribe to manifestos in relation to redefining racial difference?
LW – To be honest, the manifesto is simply a genre, a kind of document that announces a break from the past and a program for the future. The content that gets inserted into the form can range from white supremacist to Black power. So, to answer your question, I think the manifesto has no especial role in redefining racial difference. That said, the manifesto plays an indirect role in challenging racial categories. Because it is performative, it does something with words: by saying something, it brings it into being. For example, manifestos announce a new political organization as C. L. R. James in The Black Jacobins makes clear when he includes Haitian Revolution manifestos that declared the independence of Haiti, the first Black postcolonial state, from France. Manifestos can also demonstrate a new understanding of race, as in Rebecca West’s “Indissoluble Matrimony,” but they can equally declare the supremacy of the white race. My book reads the performativity of manifestos as making plain how these constructions of race are politically willed and historical.
BD – In what way would you describe how “the discourses of citizenship, modernity and whiteness intersect"?
LW – Modernity, the nation, and racial identity have a symbiotic relationship. The nation depends upon borders inside of which it has sovereignty over the (ethno)nationalist citizens who live within that territory. Its minorities, so the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) has it, are to be tolerated. What the nation does outside of its borders, should it be at war or have an empire, does not fall under the mandate to tolerate difference. Neither must a nation tolerate difference when subordinate groups are considered sub-human.
Let me back up and explain the ethno-nationalist rubric. As the nation constructs a narrative about its origins and identity, it singles out a particular group (in the US, European immigrants) to feature in its narrative. Hence, US history traditionally concerns the “founding fathers” and the pilgrims while subordinating (or erasing entirely) its racial others and their role in building the nation. Whiteness is singled out as the preferred group. It enjoys the privilege to own property and to vote and be represented in legal courts as citizens of the nation. White women are positioned somewhat anomalously insofar as they were denied the vote until the twentieth century, but they indirectly profited from their husbands’ privilege, and they were seldom viewed as being subhuman.
Manifestos are also found at the conjunction of race, nation, and modernity. In the early to mid-twentieth century, we find an explosion of anticolonial, white feminist suffrage, and antiracist manifestos. These movements contested the narrow definition of citizenship as a white male enclave. Their rhetoric probes the contradictions between the nation’s exclusion of women and people of color and, across empire, the denial of citizenship and self-governance to the people they ruled, and the massive contributions those excluded peoples have made to the nation’s wellbeing. These documents argue for these groups’ equal humanity as well as the strengths that their difference brings to the nation. My book also touches on pan-Africanist movements as a tradition of diasporic and African thought that eschews the exclusionary boundaries of the nation. There, citizenship is neither white nor ethnonationalist, but open to the good and belonging of all.
BD – This has been another one of our BROTHERWISE FIVE interview series, during which THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH interrogates intellectuals, artists and activists with five probing questions to the delight of our readers.
On behalf of Laura Winkiel and THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH,
Peace.
-A. Shahid Stover
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