Otherwordly modernism: magic, mediums, and coloniality
This dissertation investigates the magical interests, practices, and commitments of early twentieth-century authors, artists, and audiences to understand the production of enchantment, meaning, and repair in Anglophone modernism. Through the analysis of the literary, philosophical, and artistic projects of George and William Butler Yeats, Pamela Colman Smith, Jean Rhys, and Mina Loy, I demonstrate how these authors and artists seek “otherworlds” to revitalize their lives and art but how their conceptualizations of and attempts to reach such places depend on asymmetrical and extractive relationships to colonial “othered” worlds. Put differently, the promise of magic is made possible through the peril of others. To analyze these connections between the other and othered worlds, I draw on critical ethnic studies theory to develop a “mediumistic method” that is both sensitive to the benefits of magic—benefits that are accessible to some and in some ways but not to others—and to the conditions of possibility for such practices and epistemologies. This method articulates new concepts such as “nested extraction” and the “colonial fix” to analyze the asymmetry between the benefits and perils of modernist magic, and probes the roles that labor, consumption, and histories of colonialism play in producing enchantment. “Otherworldly Modernism” makes a three-fold intervention into literary studies: It furthers research in literary modernism by bringing unexamined and less examined voices to the conversation about modernist magic, and it contributes to the global turn in modernism by drawing on critical ethnic studies theory to analyze the production of such magic. For literary studies more broadly, this dissertation argues that modernist magic, especially with its focus on wonder and enchantment, offers a useful case study for analyzing the limits of postcritique. Finally, “Otherworldly Modernism” demonstrates that postcritique’s solutions to contemporary crises of meaning and purpose revert to ancient, Western, classical logics of hierarchy, and offers this analysis to critical ethnic studies as a (re)new(ed) terrain of struggle.
modernism, magic, medium, coloniality, ethnic studies, W. B. Yeats, George Yeats, Pamela Colman Smith, Jean Rhys, Mina Loy
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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