Taking the Detour, Finding the Rebels: Crossroads of Caribbean and Modernist Studies

Abstract

‘Where have all the rebels gone?’ With this question, Susan Stanford Friedman launches an illuminating analysis of the conflicting uses of the terms modern, modernity, and modernism (Chapter 1, 11 ). Friedman refers to student rebels of the 1960s, who found the study of literary modernism in accord with their own ideals. In her quest, however, she finds another kind of rebellion, one that continually unsettles the definitional order in modernist studies. She concludes her examination of the history and scope of these conflicts by resisting definitions and, instead, exposing patterns of contestation: order and disruption as necessary to one another’s meaning; the center’s dissipation even as it comes into being; the self-dismantling of modernity’s grand narratives; the invention of tradition in order to ‘make it new’ (30). On the terrain of these contradictory dynamics, we might explore again the question Friedman asks at the essay’s beginning. It seems that the rebellion surges beyond definitional control and perhaps beyond Friedman’s attempts to resist definition. For even in the patterns she locates, something else seems to brew alongside or beneath the conflicting impulses.