Mara de Gennaro’s Modernism after Postcolonialism: Toward a Nonterritorial Comparative Literature is ambitious in both its scope and its implications, offering a novel approach to literary comparison that emphasizes underexplored relations between postcolonial and modernist writing. De Gennaro argues for what she calls “nonterritorial comparatism,” a “deliberately inchoate” method of literary comparison that resists territorial restrictions but “leaves open how to imagine what the not-territorial could be at different times, in different contexts” (14). The word “inchoate” is crucial here. For de Gennaro, finding a coherence between the compared texts is not the goal of such comparatism. Rather, “nonterritorial” comparisons stress what is “repressed, resistant, or excessive” within texts to reveal a sense of collectivity among seemingly segregated ideals (14). Putting her theory into practice, de Gennaro looks to Francophone and Anglophone writers and thinkers that are rarely discussed in tandem and places them in direct dialogue with each other. Because she emphasizes the “inchoate” in her comparatism, de Gennaro’s comparisons never feel forced. She unites texts across territorial boundaries by focusing on their shared absences and uncertainties, uncovering new possibilities for literary comparison.

Drawing from Édouard Glissant’s notion of the poetics of relation, de Gennaro focuses specifically on the relationship between postcolonial and Anglophone modernist literature to argue for “a theory of transnationalist literary modernism as a poetics of anxious mastery” (11). According to de Gennaro, it is through this “anxious mastery” that modernists compare the known to the alien, never fully rendering otherness communicable. De Gennaro utilizes theoretical frameworks from both Francophone and Anglophone postcolonial theorists, including Glissant, Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Gayatri Spivak, to engage in her own “nonterritorial” comparisons of postcolonial and modernist literature to argue that postcolonial literature and theory are necessary to understand the treatment of otherness in Anglophone modernism. Each of the monograph’s four chapters thus revolves around a pairing of two major literary works, one written by a canonical Anglophone modernist writer and one written by a prominent postcolonial author. Some of these pairings may appear disjointed at first glance, but de Gennaro masterfully weaves them together, using the postcolonial texts in combination with postcolonial theory to generate truly original readings of canonical Anglophone modernist works that are rarely analyzed through a postcolonial lens.

The originality of de Gennaro’s treatment of modernism is evident in the monograph’s first chapter. Here, de Gennaro draws from Françoise Lionnet’s theorization of métissage to place “Melanctha,” the second of three stories in Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives, in conversation with J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace. Even scholars unfamiliar with Lionnet will be able to follow de Gennaro’s line of reasoning as she succinctly outlines Lionnet’s framework, which subverts the French colonial concept of métissage or racial intermixing by presenting métissage as a textual practice that embodies “a diversely constituted solidarity, in place of the isolation of sameness from otherness normalized through languages of imperialism and white supremacism” (27). Pushing back against critical readings of “Melanctha” and Disgrace as racist, de Gennaro instead argues that Stein and Coetzee question racist norms in these texts both through literal métissage, as both texts feature mixed-race characters, and through a poetics of métissage that rejects traditional claims to knowledge shaped by racist dichotomies. De Gennaro claims that “Melanctha” offers the possibility of an “as-yet-unimagined community” unbounded by racist claims to knowledge “by representing its absence from the narrative language at hand” (60). For de Gennaro, such possibility is only revealed when reading “Melanctha” intertextually with Disgrace and placing both within Lionnet’s theorization of a poetics of métissage. The implications of such an argument thus extend beyond just a clarification of Stein’s racial politics. Through her application of Lionnet’s theories to Stein’s work, de Gennaro emphasizes the insufficiency of reading canonical Anglophone modernism within a Eurocentric context, presenting a convincing argument for the necessity of postcolonial theory as a means of reading modernism.

In the next three chapters, de Gennaro continues to draw parallels between seemingly disconnected texts, pairing Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in chapter 2, E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India with Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco in chapter 3, and Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas with Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones in chapter 4. Through each pairing, de Gennaro effectively demonstrates the power of postcolonial thought at unraveling the complexities and uncertainties of Anglophone modernism. Even for those modernist texts such as A Passage to India, where postcolonial readings are intuitive, de Gennaro still breaks new ground by utilizing the “postcolonial corpus of black transnationalist and Francophone creolist historiography, cultural theory, and literary theory” to supplement more standard Anglophone postcolonial readings of Forster’s novel (103). The ease with which de Gennaro intertwines Francophone and Anglophone postcolonial theory is commendable and reinforces her monograph’s central argument in favor of a “nonterritorial comparatism.” De Gennaro’s approach is a refreshing take on comparative literary practices that refuses to be restricted by traditional dichotomies, uniting myriad thinkers and writers into a new archive of modernist literature and postcolonial thought. Modernism after Postcolonialism thus features a unique kind of literary comparison that emphasizes the neglected relations between surprisingly compatible texts, resulting in an innovative exploration of the modernist and postcolonial literary canons and offering valuable new insights to scholars of comparative literature, modernism, and postcolonialism alike.