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This chapter discusses that Cornelia Sorabji was at the center of debates about the role that the zenana, and by extension the precints of house and home, should play in shaping modern Indian culture. It adds that Sorabji, a Parsi Christian who was trained as a barrister at Oxford in 1889-1892, aimed to improve the conditions for purdahnashin and publicizing those conditions to reform-minded audiences in Britain and India. It narrates that she used her legal skills and her official connections to investigate the homes and detail the lives of hundreds of “secluded” women in the first three decades of the 20th century. It tells of Sorabji's biography as well as her family's history. It suggests that Sorabji's determination to preserve her Purdahnashin in the domain of memory signals the uneven and unlooked-for terrains of colonial modernity itself.

“Scattered Souls” situates the main argument of this book within broad studies of modernism and modernity, gender and sexuality, colonial and post-colonial literature, and the politics of formalism. It reads Kipling's Kim as an exemplary text in which colonial anachronism and uneven development provide the symbolic basis for an anti-teleological model of subject formation. Kipling's novel of youth thus introduces the analysis of a central, yet surprisingly under-explored, nexus between modernist aesthetics and modern colonialism: the disruption of developmental time in reciprocal allegories of self-making and nation-formation. Separating adolescence from the dictates of Bildung, modernist writing created an autonomous value for youth and cleared space for its own resistance to linear plots while registering the crumbling of various western discourses of progress. Although a sedimented logic of organic development lingers on necessarily in the bildungsroman's ideology of form, modernist writers take account of the genre's own aging and transformation, objectifying its progressive conventions with an unprecedented degree of ironic distance. The novels at the center of this study give vivid narrative form to the central contradiction of modernity, a contradiction made most conspicuous in the colonial contact zones of the last century, i.e. that modernity is a state of permanent transition. Its most trenchant literary incarnation is the story of unseasonable youth.

This chapter examines some of the key terms and contextual concerns within East Asia. It attempts to provide a limited genealogy of the “nativizations” of modernity, which it sees as problematic if they are to be conceptualized as alternative sets of modernities that have come about due to their Otherness to their Western colonial origins. Given the book's central concern with the recognition and misrecognition of the Asian relationship with the Anglo-American West and the assumption that new modernities manifest themselves in old ways, the chapter addresses the relation of the West to East Asia. It looks at how the perceived “rest of the world” for the West produced and still produces itself out of the very same postcolonial experiences. The chapter examines the former European empires to see their transformations and adaptations, as well as some of the parts of colonial modernity that have led to the emergence of the New Asia.

Chapter 2, “Mourning the Erotic in René Maran’s Batouala,” places erotic practice and imagination at the heart of Afro-diasporic and African relations. Maran was born in Martinique and wrote Batouala (1921) while a French colonial official in Central Africa. The novel centers on a love triangle that involves Batouala, the village chief; Yassigui’ndja, his first wife; and Bissibi’ngui, a young man newly emboldened by the possibilities colonialism offers for social advancement. The climax of the novel features a sexual dance, at the heart of which is Yassigui’ndja penetrating a young woman with a dildo while the community around her watches and celebrates, before being stimulated to engage in an orgy, where “every perversion” is permitted. Throughout the novel, Maran depicts Banda erotic desires and practices as incessant, insatiable, multiple, communal, and same-sex, and critiques colonialism for disrupting these erotic diversities. I argue that while the novel is set in colonial-era Africa, its representations of Banda erotic practices mourn the loss of African gendered and erotic diversity under colonial modernity. Whereas the genealogical imperative in black diaspora studies has mourned the loss of hetero-kinship, Maran’s novel mourns the loss of a broader range of libidinal freedoms. In situating erotic diversity as a site of loss and mourning, Maran provides an affective location for rapprochement between Afro-diasporic and African populations that skirts a genealogical imperative.

This chapter demonstrates that in colonial Bengal, history and history-writing emerged through a re-articulation of the ‘problem’ of practice. ‘Primitives’ were incapable of valid practice. Literary theories today distinguish the symbol from figures like irony and allegory precisely in terms of its temporal significance. Rabindranath’s poetics and critique of nationalism stopped short of becoming a political strategy of resistance to universal forms of knowledge and representation. Bengali middle classes continued to imagine poetics as a site removed from the everyday of colonial unfreedom, and continued to imagine it as a surrogate of nationalist practice. Despite the poetic and potentially political insight—that ‘primitives’ were the last inappropriable location in colonial modernity—the Bengali discourse of poetics as practice failed to produce an alternative politics of time, which, as Rabindranath thought possible, would free the nation from the debilitating linearity of progress.

Elaborating upon the concept of the “post-mandarin” and its historical context, the introduction draws the connection between post-mandarin intellectuals, masculinity, and altered gender and sexual relations during colonial modernity, while situating these claims within the fields of Vietnam and Southeast Asian studies, as well as modernist and postcolonial studies.

This chapter focuses on colonial modernity and on debates concerning domesticity in British Bengal. It aims to provide a better understanding of nineteenth-century Bengali contestations over received bourgeois models for relating the personal to the public world of civil and political life. The chapter describes how the Bengali modern has negotiated the distinction between personal/domestic and communal/public in reconstituting itself within a world system fashioned by imperialism.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book identifies the way the banality of everyday life and the boredom that often accompanies it paradoxically shape a narrative instinct along the margins of the global British Empire from late colonial modernism to the present day, as revealed in the fiction of four writers: James Joyce from Ireland, Katherine Mansfield from New Zealand, Zoë Wicomb from South Africa, and Amit Chaudhuri from India. This is a body of English-language fiction in which the banality of everyday life comes to define a globally mappable narrative impulse that has mostly been understood in a linear continuity with the formal innovations of metropolitan modernism. Instead, the book proposes a reading in which this impulse narrativizes a colonial problematic that significantly shapes the innovative aesthetics of literary modernism. If narrative is triggered by the tremor, velocity, and eventually the excitement of the event, the temporal and affective lack embodied in the banal in these late colonial and postcolonial fictions comes to shape a narrative impulse that is aesthetically oppositional. It is this oppositionality that has primarily been interpreted in terms of literary modernism's radical aesthetic. Rather than being driven predominantly by the subjective idiosyncrasy of formal experimentation, it is suggested that the narrative energization of banality is just as significantly rooted in the social experience of colonial modernity.

This chapter tries to clarify the unfinished nature of both the work of colonial modernity and its critique. As the nation seeks to ‘liberalize’ its economy and mirror the trajectory of global capital, it claims the purity and righteousness of cultural conservatism. It is noted that by the 1930s, the colonized, by way of reclaiming ‘modern’ knowledge-disciplines from the colonizer, hinted at his/her own marginality and lateness in the present. The temporality of re-presentation neutralizes the temporality of encounter, and therefore the temporality of collective practice. Peoples like the Santals became ‘primitive’ in colonial modernity not only because of colonial strategies of other-ing but also because the colonized themselves tried to assume the representational location necessary for modern monetary and epistemological rationalities. Social practices need not necessarily generate others in any epistemological sense.

Studying the history of Japanese colonialism in Korea is a challenging exercise because it has traditionally fallen along two lines of inquiry: colonialism as a form of exploitation or modernization. As a new paradigm to study the period, colonial modernity carefully distinguishes the many layers of life that emerged from diverse forms of behavior, practice, and thought to develop multifaceted and nuanced conceptions of reality that complicate the dichotomous modes of analysis of modernization versus exploitation. However, because studies of colonial modernity have configured modernity only as a linear form of development that emphasizes the secular, bourgeois / proletariat, urban spaces, and industrial capitalism, any movements that do not fit this definition of modernity have been labeled anti-modern, such as the YMCA, Presbyterian, and Ch’ŏndogyo rural movements. Overcoming the mischaracterization of certain movements as anti-modern requires a careful reconceptualization of modernity by studying the YMCA, Presbyterian, and Ch’ŏndogyo rural movements’ emphasis of the present as a key component of being modern.

The introduction situates the book in relation to existing scholarship on colonial modernity in India, the making of publics and the public sphere in late colonial India, and the relationship between cinema and modernity. It then outlines how a focus on reception and elite discourses about cinema can not only provide a new and important perspective on cinema’s role in making publics but also generate a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between cinema and modernity. The chapter explains the author’s conceptual approach to colonial modernity, early cinema, vernacular modernism, and the public sphere. It ends with an overview of the subsequent chapters.

Children’s literature in Korea emerged in the early twentieth century under Japanese colonial rule. This literature was marked by what Korean writers called the child-heart, the conflation of nature and culture whose shaping and interaction was deeply implicated in colonial modernity. The Introduction argues that what made children’s literature possible was a combination of internal and external factors, including influences from Japan and educational and psychological theories of childrearing from the West. Children’s literature was recognized as important enough to warrant censorship, and as key to shaping ideologies of gender and politics. The movement of the child from the periphery of culture to the center and the interest in visual culture combined to produce a range of visually compelling magazines for children. Writers conveyed their visions of the past and present, and their future aspirations at a time of growing uncertainty about the fate of the Korean nation.

This introductory chapter outlines the main themes of the book—local Egyptian middle-class modernity articulated by and embodied in the category of the efendi—and sets them within existing historiographical traditions. A “history from the middle” is proposed to fill the gap in histories written from the perspective of political elites or the subaltern. “Representation,” while often a crucial site of historical evidence, is cast aside in favour of working with concepts of social experience and social context. The book’s key themes and arguments are outlined through a thick reading of a key text of modern Egyptian literature, Yahiya Haqqi’s The Saint’s Lamp. Read contextually along countless non-canonical texts, the content of this novel encapsulates the social experience of becoming an efendi. Read as literary act, it represents a cultural practice (one of many) through which a rising efendi social formation made and expressed itself.

Korea’s colonial modernity (1910-45) notably produced both female pop stars and legions of sex workers, a sex-industrial development which reached its zenith in the “comfort women,” the Japanese military’s wartime system of sexual slavery during the Asia-Pacific War (1931-45). The concurrent rise of the female voice in Korean popular music and the rise of colonial sex industries are not the result of opposing forces of modernization and barbarism, but deeply intertwined parts of the search for the place of women in colonial modernity. This chapter, through a detailed analysis of the references to popular music and dance in the testimony of former Korean “comfort women,” seeks to reconstruct the place of these performing arts in the “comfort women” system.  Legitimization of colonial modernization, the commodification of women, and new opportunities for women enabled by the figure of the colonial female pop star can also be found in her dystopian sibling, the “comfort woman.” The musical life of the “comfort women” system provides a stark example of the deeply ambivalent place of entertaining women in emergent Japanese and Korean popular cultures, and of the grain of the voice of East Asian colonial modernity.

This chapter examines the transnational movement of bodies, fashions, phantasies, and memories between colony and metropole by focusing on the fiction of Tirto Adhi Soerjo and Louis Couperus as “situated testimonies” in fin-de-siècle Dutch and Dutch Indies literary archives. It compares Dutch metropolitan culture as portrayed in Couperus's novels of Den Haag with Dutch Indies colonial culture as depicted in the novellas and short fiction of Tirto. It explores the themes of colonial modernity and sexual degeneracy that permeate the works of both authors, producing dread and melancholia in Couperus's writings and haunting anxiety in Tirto's fiction. It also situates Tirto's Malay-language writings in another kind of minor literature: that written in the Sino-Malay language, or what Pramoedya Ananta Toer calls lingua franca Malay. Finally, it discusses the implications of Couperus's study of melancholia and darkness for scholars of psychoanalysis, colonialism, and Sigmund Freud.