Nicholas Brown. Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth-Century Literature

African American Review, Winter, 2007 by Edward Dauterich

Nicholas Brown. Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth-Century Literature. Princeton: Princteon UP, 2005. 243 pp. $60.00/$26.95.

In Utopian Generations, Nicholas Brown provides readers with both a sound theoretical framework for his comparison of modern and African literature and a strong argument against the concept that either British modernism or African literature during the period that he considers can be understood without fully grasping the rift that capitalism creates in the relationship between the two. Brown warns against positing either literature in a hierarchical context and against seeing the relationship between the two in terms of literary influence, which would ground the debate in subjective views of literary history. Instead, Brown suggests that the goal is to examine "what is historical about the works themselves" and to "point to another, richer set of connections between both sets of texts and the societies from which they emerge" (2). His project examines a dialectic that alternates between the "utopian horizon" of literature (as seen through the lenses of subjectivity, history, and politics) and the concrete production of a political subject, a point at which literature ceases to be literature and theoretically brings the dialectic to an impasse, after which he eventually claims that music may be the next area in which to consider the utopian impulse in a postmodern era.

Brown fully realizes that it is not profitable to discuss either modern or African literature in terms that traditionally belong to one group or the other, and denies trying to create a theory of African literature or canonical modernism that would be based on "literary" or "universal" history. He claims that any such attempt "carries with it an inherent falseness" because it considers one set of texts with a biased set of terms linked to the opposing texts. What is of the greatest importance, for Brown, is to see that both literatures are "mode[s] of approaching problems and possibilities that are endemic to the development of capitalism" (4). While the approach does not bar discussion of an African or modernist tradition in its entirety, it does ban any attempt to discuss them without seeing their relationship to the historical contexts of capitalist encroachment that heavily weighs on the production of texts in both literatures, ultimately restricting them in their attempts to reach a utopian horizon.

To situate his attempt, Brown considers what he calls the "eidaesthetic itinerary." He explains the origins of the modern concept of literature and traces its connections with concepts of philosophy and theory, working with Kant, Lyotard, Hegel, and Lukfics to develop ideas about the sublime, utopia, and the direction of modern European and African writing. Brown does a superb job of tracing the history of his terms and justifying the way that he intends to use them in his argument. This is particularly valuable in light of the contested nature of "utopia," "sublime," and other terms since, as Brown himself remarks, "It might well be asked why we need another sublime on top of the pile of sublimes that have accumulated in recent decades" (15).

As Brown works through his terms in the introduction, he acknowledges the problems with interpretation that develop because of the overlapping aspects of the different types of literature and theory he uses, but as he points out, "what the preceding pages have attempted is not a description of two positive entities, but the exploration of a negative one, the rift that separates them" (31). He maintains that the best way to explore the rift is to consider individual texts in relation to three "possible axes" (politics, subjectivity, and history), and the rest of his study does this while recognizing that although these categories are not always equally central to a text, it is the nature of their individual centrality that opens the possibilities of interpretation for each text.

Brown divides the remainder of his book into three sections. In the first, "Subjectivity," he argues for the centrality of that term in discussions of James Joyce's Ulysses and Cheikh Hamidou Kane's L'aventure ambigue. Brown suggests here that Joyce's novel can be seen in its allegorical content as "reification itself," and claims that the novel points to the idea that the modernist sublime--the attempt in this case to move beyond the divide between subject and object created by thwarted efforts to intervene in the object world and achieve a subjective totality--"gains a utopian valence." This "modernist defamiliarization" attempts to move subjective experience to the sublime where it would "signify the immediate presence of Being itself," but the gesture risks becoming a failure because Being defined in these terms is empty of content save for that gained from the impulses that spurred it into existence (41). Brown states, "Rather than signifying totality, modernist defamiliarization stands in for the lack of a concrete conception of the social totality, and its ideological nature is revealed in its infinite repeatability" (41). In the long run, however, what Joyce does is to show that the overthrow of language as information rather than meaning, is what the text itself relies on, which according to Brown makes it a "supreme example" of the modernist sublime in action.