Transatlantic Cultural Institutions, 1930-1970
FAIN: FA-54685-09
Peter Joseph Kalliney
University of Kentucky (Lexington, KY 40506-0001)
This project is a study of mid-century literary institutions that were involved in the formation of both modernism and postcolonial writing. Several organizations central to modernism, such as the BBC, influential publishers, and university English departments, became important sites in the emergence of postcolonial literature. How did some of modernism's leading figures of the 1930s, such as T.S. Eliot, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender, become admirers of late colonial and early postcolonial literature in the 1950s? Likewise, why did the first generation of postcolonial writers--including Derek Walcott, V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o--actively seek alliances with metropolitan intellectuals? My original archival work on modernist cultural institutions demonstrates that this disparate group of intellectuals had strong professional incentives to see one another more as fellow literary professionals, and less as political or cultural antagonists.