Urmila Seshagiri

Bio: Urmila Seshagiri is an academic researcher from University of Tennessee. The author has contributed to research in topics: Postcolonial literature & Narrative. The author has an hindex of 4, co-authored 6 publications receiving 113 citations.

Modernist Ashes, Postcolonial Phoenix: Jean Rhys and the Evolution of the English Novel in the Twentieth Century

Abstract: “It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born again,” muses Anna Morgan, the emigre narrator of Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark. 1 This 1934 novel about a Creole demimonde illuminates a complex but overlooked genealogical moment in twentieth-century literature: the point when the exhausted limits of modernist form revealed the lineaments of postcolonial fiction. Rhys’s semicanonical tale of a chorus-girl-turned-prostitute has generally been read as a key to pre-War London, a novel of female flânerie, or one among the author’s several fictions of feminine self-destruction. 2 In this essay, I argue that in order to understand the English novel’s “postcolonial turn” in the middle of the twentieth century, we should revisit Voyage in the Dark and its interventions into British literary modernism. The novel’s complex transnationality—the contrapuntal geography that oscillates between England and the West Indies—gives rise to its transitional literary quality: Rhys produces a new geopolitics that challenges the continued relevance of modernist formal accomplishments, and, simultaneously, inaugurates what would soon become the central goals of postcolonial literature in English. And although Voyage in the Dark has been overshadowed by Rhys’s 1966 masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea, it is the earlier novel that shows us a crucial transformation in the aesthetic priorities and political thrust of twentieth-century English fiction. As this fleeting, slight work gradually renders obsolescent the longstanding modernist worship of form, it announces the visionary and revisionary work of a nascent postcolonial literature.

Making it New: Persephone Books and the Modernist Project

Abstract: This article articulates the significance of Persephone Books, an independent feminist publisher in London that recuperates lost modern writing. Persephone’s 100 titles restore long-obscured continuities and connections in modern literature and arts; the unexpected success of this publishing venture illustrates modernism’s continuing appeal to readers. The recuperative work of Persephone Books enables us to recast the modernist literary field so that we (1) understand canonical authors anew, (2) restore neglected authors to their places in modernist literary genealogy, and (3) further our understanding of modernist cultural production in the fields of literature, visual arts, textile and fashion design, and war propaganda.

Orienting Virginia Woolf: Race, Aesthetics, and Politics in To the Lighthouse

Abstract: Wide-ranging aesthetic and political racialisms inform Virginia Woolf's narrative technique in To the Lighthouse (1927), producing radical departures from literary tradition. In dismantling patriarchy's social and novelistic conventions, To the Lighthouse extends the English formalist doctrines that lauded autotelic art-forms from East Asia, Africa, and South America. The novel's narrative fluidity and abstraction re-invent the racial philosophies of Roger Fry's formalist tract Vision and Design (1920), as well as the racially marked modernite of the Omega Workshops' art-objects. The well-known feminist politics and formalist aesthetics that answer this novel's questions depend on the often-overlooked narrative position of racial identity.

Race and the Modernist Imagination

Abstract: Race has long been recognized as a formative element of American modernism, but its role in England is less clearly understood While critics have examined race in the works of British writers such as Kipling, Conrad, and Forster, they have done so mostly from a postcolonial perspective In Race and the Modernist Imagination, Urmila Seshagiri finds that race-as a matter apart from imperialism-served as an engine for the creation of new literary forms by a wide range of writers, including Oscar Wilde, Ford Madox Ford, Katherine Mansfield, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf In Seshagiri's view, race provided these writers with a set of tropes and plots that rejuvenated the British aesthetic tradition: new ideas and fresh forms found their way into British literature through characters and settings that evoked other peoples, other places In addition to her readings of a fascinating array of works-The Picture of Dorian Gray, Heart of Darkness, The Good Soldier, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and the short stories of Mansfield and West-Seshagiri considers examples that fall outside the usual purview of British modernist literature, such as Sax Rohmer's Dr Fu Manchu tales, the avant-garde review BLAST, and Vita Sackville-West's travel writings Throughout, she places her subjects within their social and cultural contexts: British Chinatowns, avant-garde cabaret clubs, exhibitions of African art, and dance performances by the Ballets Russes Urmila Seshagiri's interdisciplinary study reveals a common core of race in the modern imaginary and, more broadly, establishes race as a crucial concept for understanding the cultural field of modernity

What is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and invention of the Canon by Ankhi Mukherjee (review)

Abstract: 255 Notes 1. Lindon Barrett, Blackness and Value: Seeing Double (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Blackness and Value grew out of Barrett’s doctoral dissertation, completed at the University of Pennsylvania; all references to the text come from this edition, page numbers internally noted. 2. See Hortense J. Spillers, “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 427–70.

Geography Lessons@@@Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter

Abstract: List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Locational Feminism3Pt. IFeminism/Multiculturalism15Ch. 1\"Beyond\" Gender: The New Geography of Identity and the Future of Feminist Criticism17Ch. 2\"Beyond\" White and Other: Narratives of Race in Feminist Discourse36Ch. 3\"Beyond\" Difference: Migratory Feminism in the Borderlands67Pt. IIFeminism/Globalism105Ch. 4Geopolitical Literacy: Internationalizing Feminism at \"Home\" - The Case of Virginia Woolf107Ch. 5Telling Contacts: Intercultural Encounters and Narrative Poetics in the Borderlands between Literary Studies and Anthropology132Ch. 6\"Routes/Roots\": Boundaries, Borderlands, and Geopolitical Narratives of Identity151Pt. IIIFeminism/Poststructuralism179Ch. 7Negotiating the Transatlantic Divide: Feminism after Poststructuralism181Ch. 8Making History: Reflections on Feminism, Narrative, and Desire199Ch. 9Craving Stories: Narrative and Lyric in Feminist Theory and Poetic Practice228Notes243References281Index303

The New Modernist Studies

Abstract: In our introduction to bad modernisms, we traced the emergence of the new modernist studies, which was born on or about 1999 with the invention of the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) and its annual conferences; with the provision of exciting new forums for exchange in the journals Modernism/Modernity and (later) Modernist Cultures; and with the publication of books, anthologies, and articles that took modernist scholarship in new methodological directions. When we offered that survey, one of our principal interests was to situate these events in a longer critical history of modernism in the arts. In the present report, we want to attend more closely to one or two recent developments that may be suggestive about the present and the immediate future of the study of modernist literature. Part of the empirical, though certainly far from scientific, basis of our considerations lies in our recent service on the MSA Book Prize committee (Walkowitz in 2005, Mao in 2006), through which we became acquainted with dozens of recent contributions to the field.

Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern

Abstract: Janet Lyon. Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Janet Lyon's study of the most polemical discursive form in the modern public sphere, the manifesto, seeks to understand the relationship between that ardent and sometimes scurrilous artifact, and political modernity itself. Her discussion, rendered with a view to the manifesto's historical conjunctures, begins with the mid-seventeenth-century Digger movement, wends through Jacobinism and female suffrage, and ultimately lights upon Donna Haraway's postmodern, self displacing address to cyborg consciousness. Her purpose is to convince anyone interested in the definition of the modern political subject that the history of the manifesto is also the history of that subject's evocation. With a confident voice and a host of examples, Lyon illustrates the topsy-Curvy logic by which these tracts not only amplify the intentions of activists and revolutionaries but define and enact new identities. The manifestic format, in other words, doesn't merely serve an entity called "the People," but also elicits it. As she writes, the manifesto "is both a trace and a tool of change." It evokes the agents of change by positing a new speaking position while repudiating the very fact of its newness. There is an implicit rhetorical violence embedded in the moment when the manifesto registers its bombastic "we," what Lyon calls the manifesto's "seizing control of first causes"; it then galvanizes these enacted identities into action. As she illustrates, the manifesto positions itself within the evolving framework of new republics, new democratic ideals, women's enfranchisementsucceeding as a way of scripting new voices into the political sphere. Some of these voices sparked and then seemed to fade. Lyon not only resurrects them but reinserts them into a history of modern contestation, the results of which we live with today. For example, her book fills in vital gaps in our understanding of the avant garde by highlighting female artist-polemicists, namely Mina Loy and Valentine de Saint-Point, who were eclipsed by the legacy of their male compatriots. Her reconsideration of their manifestoes bridges a gap between their polemics and second-wave feminist thinking, continental and stateside; were this gap to persist, we would be left with an incomplete understanding of the "nonessentializing feminist aesthetic" the latter group sought to perfect. One cannot fault Lyon for failing at what should be an impossible task. …