Description
Book SynopsisBen Conisbee Baer provides a theoretical and historical account of the relationships between modern literature, representations of indigeneity, and educative practices in colonial zones from the 1920s to the 1940s, encompassing the central place of teaching and learning both in modernist aesthetics and on the part of writer-activists.
Trade ReviewIn this brilliantly researched book, Ben Conisbee Baer shows us the diversity of the dream of subaltern education shared by global anticolonialism and antiracism. Its relationship to Marxism is given in historical detail. Through meticulous close readings,
Indigenous Vanguards shows how the literary both represents and enacts these dreams. The readings of Césaire’s
Cahier d’un retour au pays natal and Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s
The Tale of Hansuli Turn are provocatively original. -- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University
Nothing short of a disciplinary milestone for new genealogies, epistemologies, and cartographies of the comparative humanities, this impeccably researched and carefully argued literary history maps the configuration of postindependence self-determination movements worldwide. In scope and intellectual sensitivity,
Indigenous Vanguards is a major contribution to postcolonial theory and the class stratifications of geomodernism. -- Emily Apter, New York University
Through a combination of the best of literary theory and an imaginative use of the archive, Baer provides brilliant insights into how anticolonial intellectuals inserted their political projects into what was supposed to be an autonomous aesthetic and, in the process, transformed the culture of the long twentieth century. Precise in its reading of cultural movements and texts, this book is a remarkable display of how a comparative approach makes modernism new again. -- Simon Gikandi, Princeton University
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
1. Harlem/Berlin: Shadows of Vanguards Between Prussia and Afro-America
2. Négritude (Slight Return): The African Laboratory of Bicephalingualism
3. Négritude (Slight Return) II: Aimé Césaire and the Uprooting Apparatus
4. Educating Mexico: D. H. Lawrence and
Indigenismo Between Postcolonial Horror and Postcolonial Hope
5. India Outside India: Gandhi, Fiction, and the Pedagogy of Violence
Notes
Index
