In Commonwealth of Letters, Peter J. Kalliney explores the ecosystem of mid-twentieth-century British literary culture, one inhabited and shaped by late colonial, early postcolonial, and modernist writers. This ecosystem consisted of professional networks among these writers, including coalitions and affiliations, and many forms of mutuality, such as “patronage, emulation, and competition” (118). Though their alliances shifted and dissolved over the course of the four decades between 1930 and 1970, they collaborated in multiple ways: through Nancy Cunard's Negro: An Anthology (1934); F. R. Leavis's literature classes at Cambridge, where Kamau Brathwaite studied (1949–53); Henry Swanzy's weekly BBC series Caribbean Voices (1943–58); the publishing house Faber and Faber, where T. S. Eliot served as a director (1925–65); and the Heinemann Educational Books African Writers Series (AWS), where Chinua Achebe served as the first editor (1962–72).
Starting with the establishment of Commonwealth Literature studies at the University of Leeds in 1964 and the creation of the Journal of Commonwealth Studies shortly after, this fruitful period of collaboration gave way to the polarization with which we are familiar, with high modernism in one camp and “full-blown postcolonial literature” (14) in the other. What is so remarkable about Commonwealth of Letters is the compelling argument that Kalliney makes, with an abundance of evidence to bear, that there was a time when such seemingly opposed groups worked closely and productively together. This mid-twentieth century “institutional context in which white, metropolitan, and nonwhite colonial intellectuals began working in closer proximity” made possible the “the doctrine of aesthetic autonomy,” namely the idea that a literary text should be judged by its own merits and free from external considerations (28). That does not mean that late colonial and early postcolonial writers did not believe in political action, but, like metropolitan modernist writers, many of them too sought “complete artistic freedom and detachment in their professional lives” (7).
Kalliney takes pains to show that writers from the metropole and the colonies worked together—with all the collaboration and competition that work entailed—on what was, for the most part, a level playing field. Here Kalliney signals C. L. R. James, who deployed the game of cricket as an “aesthetic practice” (22) in which “the racial hierarchies prevalent in all other aspects of social life were temporarily suspended” (24). The analogy of the ecosystem is as viable as that of the playing field: these writers had a symbiotic relationship with one another. For metropolitan modernists, writers from the periphery could revitalize the literary scene, regarded as lifeless and disintegrating following the loss of empire. Late colonial and early postcolonial writers in turn profited from entry into the modernist aesthetic realm, “one of the few areas in which racial discrimination and political subordination were not necessarily the orders of the day” (12). Together, all writers could turn Anglophone modernism into a “global enterprise” (11)—into a new commonwealth of letters.
The first cooperative effort that Kalliney examines is Cunard's Negro. Until this anthology was published in 1934, black and white writers were segregated into their own anthologies (38). Negro combines all writers on the basis of “shared aesthetic principles” (39), including fascists like Ezra Pound and left-leaning writers like Claude McKay. This massive anthology, with its 850 pages, signaled the beginning of the collaborations and combinations to follow in the coming decades. One of the most surprising pairings is that of the Cambridge don F. R. Leavis and the postcolonial intellectuals and writers Braithwaite and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. Braithwaite and Ngũgĩ made use of Leavis's notions of “minority discourse”—the Arnoldian idea that the true life of culture resides in the institutional margins (79)—and “organic folk community” (79). Both Brathwaite and Ngũgĩ became “Leavis's men” by practicing literary studies in postcolonial countries and by fortifying literature through the living languages of black West Indians (92) and African oral traditions (112–13).
From a major anthology and the academy, Kalliney moves on to the mass media, specifically BBC's Caribbean Voices, which nurtured interactions between West African and British intellectuals. Here again we see both groups benefiting from each other, with metropolitan cultural institutions being rejuvenated as a result of new talent and postcolonial writers capitalizing on their new connections and making themselves more competitive in the global marketplace (122). Chapters 5 and 6 treat major publishing ventures, Faber and Faber and Heinemann's AWS. In his fascinating discussion of the publication of Amos Tutuola's The Palm Wine Drinkard (1952) by Faber, Kalliney traces the vexed reception of the novel in a transnational context; he shows how the literary debate over Drinkard in terms of its “development” could turn into “a shadow referendum on the future of the colonial world” (152). Indeed, it was the former colonial world that kept English language studies alive and well, as Kalliney writes about the success of the AWS publications in sub-Saharan Africa. AWS was at the very heart of African English studies and helped to “consolidate English language and literary studies as a global enterprise” (36).
Along with his account of the mid-twentieth-century institutions that underwrote the collaborations among Anglophone writers, Kalliney shows how the writing of Brathwaite, George Lamming, Sam Selvon, V. S. Naipaul, William Conton, Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ, and especially Amos Tutuola reflect the tensions and ideas that emerge from these alliances. Kalliney then devotes the penultimate chapter to an analysis of the career and writing of Jean Rhys, whose collection The Left Bank was published in 1927, when white metropolitans prevailed, and whose major novel Wide Sargasso Sea was published in 1966, when white intellectuals began to be decentered by black writers from the postcolonial world. Rhys stands out as the lone woman writer treated in Commonwealth of Letters—a reminder that more work needs to be done with mid-twentieth-century Anglophone women writers. Kalliney's otherwise comprehensive book enjoins us to see the profound and extensive relationships between late colonial, early postcolonial, and modernist writers.
