Sarah Fekadu-Uthoff

What has changed, what has happened, what has put the writer now at such an angle that he cannot pour his mind straight into the old channels of English poetry? Some sort of answer may be suggested by a walk through the streets of any large town. The long avenue of brick is cut into boxes, each of which is inhabited by a different human being who has put locks on his doors and bolts on his windows to ensure some privacy, yet is linked to fellows by wires which pass overhead, by waves of sound which pour through the roof and speak aloud to him of battles and murders and strikes and revolutions all over the world.1in spite of the mysterious and inexplicable conflict of faiths and races in the world, it was still a world in which miracles happened.2Both the quotation from Virginia Woolf s seminal essay "Poetry, Fiction and the Future" and the one from the white Dominican writer Phyllis Shand Allfrey (1915-86) tackle the issue of crisis and conflict with a strong global consciousness. Woolf sees the circulation of news by means of new media like the radio as one of the reasons why the metropolitan individual cannot dissociate itself anymore from the violent rebellions and suppressions that happen elsewhere in the world. She considers the simultaneousness of global connection and local alienation as the defining characteristic of the modem condition and regards it as the task of modem fiction to represent precisely this simultaneousness. Allfrey foregrounds the global nature of religious and racial conflicts, that, in her account, are not restricted to a single nation or continent but pertain to the whole world.Of course, a strong sense of global turmoil and crisis is not an exclusive characteristic of twentieth-century thought and literature.3 Yet, the earlytwentieth century has been identified as a time of significant acceleration and intensification of global connections. Elleke Boehmer regards this as the consequence of imperial politics that not only brought in contact different cultures but also triggered anti-imperial action which impinged in different ways on the European metropolises.4 Extending Fredric Jameson's view that modernism arose in response to the experience of spatial disjunction in the British Empire - an argument that he elaborates in "Modernism and Imperialism" (1988) - Boehmer sees the cultural and political exchanges between the socalled colonial centre and periphery as characteristic of the period:Globalized empire at the turn of the twentieth century, in other words, had for the first time in history made of the world an intermeshed, criss-cross network of communication link-ups, and cross-cultural and political relationships.5Other, equally strong factors that contributed to the intensification of global connections at the beginning of the twentieth century include the increase in world travel, the global acceptance of the Greenwich Meridian, the development of international laws and regulations, and a growing sense of global conflict.6In the context of an emerging global consciousness and politics, modemist literature merits special attention because it does not simply reflect political developments on a thematic or aesthetic level but must also be seen as one of the generative sites of the global imagination. As Melba Cuddy-Keane argues, modemist literature can be taken as an example of the close relationship between the critical paradigms of globality and modernist aesthetics at the beginning of the twentieth century:The crucial stylistic modernist features of perspectivism, reflexivity, parataxis, and ambiguity parallel the complex interactive systems of globalist thought, leading us to consider both how modernism models globalism and, conversely, how increasing global connections exerted a formative influence on modernist styles.7Hence, at the beginning of the twentieth century, economic, political, and cultural developments mutually influenced each other and took an equal share in the formation of a new global consciousness. …

Samuel Johnson's most widely known and discussed contribution to the genre of travel writing is undoubtedly his A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775). This chapter, however, touches only briefly on his Scottish travelogue and focusses instead on Johnson's earlier A Voyage to Abyssinia (1735). Although Johnson never went to Abyssinia (today Ethiopia) himself, and although the text represents a translation of a travelogue written by the Portuguese Jesuit Jerónimo Lobo on his travels in Ethiopia between 1621 and 1634, the book contains Johnson's most sustained contemplation of the role and ethics of the traveler (and travel writer), the fine line between exploration and domination, and the often precarious intersection of travel and religion. After an introduction to Johnson and his writings on travel, this chapter discusses the complex genealogy of A Voyage of Abyssinia and shows how Johnson, through his important Preface and through the ways in which he alters the travelogue, contributes his own evocative layer of meaning to the Portuguese source text. Although Johnson values Lobo as travel writer due to his truthful and impartial eyewitness account of his travels, he offers a sustained critique of travel that is done for the purpose of communicating the efficacy of a God or the superiority of a certain culture or confession. This reflects back on the combined impulses of discovery, expansion and exploitation that characterized eighteenth century Europe and that irrevocably changed the ways Europeans interacted with the world.

This essay is concerned with modes and possibilities of representing the Anthropocene in a literary genre that has also been defined as potentially descriptive and transformative, committed not only to analyzing histories and discourses but also to changing them: the postcolonial novel. Postcolonial literature and the concomitant studies have habitually been associated with uncovering the workings of history and time rather than with the pursuit of the timeless, with a focus on migration and displacement rather than on place, with the foregrounding of processes of cross-fertilization and hybridization rather than of preservation, and with an interest in political rather than in meteorological climates.  The essay takes as its focus Tayeb Salih’s novel Season of Migration to the North (1966) in order to show that even a novel from the early days of colonial independence is not only concerned with ‘writing back’ to imperialist discourse but also attempts to articulate a more capacious understanding of the relationship between history and a nonhu-man realm whose temporality is withdrawn from human control, thus offering an occasion for experiencing the disjunctions that mark the present age in an aesthetic mode.

This chapter engages with postcolonial memory, amnesia, and the politics of experimental cinematic form in Steve McQueen’s film Hunger (2008). By focusing on the brutal treatment of Irish Republican prisoners in the Northern Irish Maze prison before and during the 1981 hunger strike, as well as on the prisoners’ ways of resistance, the film takes up one of the very violent, yet largely forgotten chapters of recent European colonial history, thereby posing questions that concern the politics of Europe’s postcolonial historical archive and its tactics of inclusion and exclusion. This chapter pays specific attention to the multisensory, visceral aesthetics of the film that become particularly apparent in its treatment of prison space and the body. By drawing on Laura U. Marks’ theory of haptic visuality, this chapter argues that the visceral aesthetics of Hunger point toward alternative forms of visuality that are both capable of excavating repressed memories of state-imposed violence and of destabilizing the historically dominant visual regimes of distance and surveillance characteristic of colonial discourse.

»I always think of my books as music before I write them«, schrieb Virginia Woolf 1940. Was macht die Musik für sie und andere angloamerikanische Autoren des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts so attraktiv?
Offenbart sich in der Auseinandersetzung mit Musik das ästhetizistische Erbe der Modernisten oder steht sie im Zeichen einer radikal neuen Ästhetik? Sarah Fekadu untersucht die Bezugnahmen auf Musik im Schreiben dreier Hauptvertreter der angloamerikanischen klassischen Moderne: Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound und Virginia Woolf. Jenseits der dominanten (Selbst-)Deutung der modernistischen Ästhetik als visueller Ästhetik, so die These, bildet die Musik einen der Dreh- und Angelpunkte modernistischer Selbstpositionierungen. Wie bereits für die Literatur der Romantik hat sie auch für die Literatur des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts eine zentrale Funktion.