Genres of collectivity: Cosmopolitanism and belonging in global Anglophone literature

Genres of Collectivity: Cosmopolitanism and Belonging in Global Anglophone Literature argues that twentieth-century cosmopolitan narratives cross generic borders as a way of testing nativist models of collectivity. The writers featured in this project respond to the global violence of imperialism, anticolonial nationalism, and world war by harnessing generic conventions for political critique, deliberately conforming to or spectacularly deviating from formal norms to challenge readers' perceptions about social norms of belonging. While many current theories of "rooted cosmopolitanism" in philosophy and the social sciences attempt to reconcile transnational solidarities with local particularities, these writers treat rootedness as itself a paradox of collectivity rather than the harmonization of several scales of belonging. Their cosmopolitan narratives assert that repairing social relations at home and abroad demands an interrogation of rootedness, starting with the assumption that one can easily distinguish between a national culture's foreigners and natives, its outside influences and its innate traditions.;Genres of Collectivity approaches cosmopolitan narratives with a fittingly transnational, "heterogeneric" reading method that traverses turn-of-the-century colonial India, late imperial England, the Caribbean diaspora, and apartheid South Africa. Each chapter analyzes specific strategies of generic dislocation in relation to social critique and collective reformation, starting with "misfit" in Rabindranath Tagore's sentimental novels, "tarrying" in Virginia Woolf's antiwar manifesto Three Guineas, "estrangement" in George Lamming's collective Bildungsroman, and "appropriation" in Sophiatown's Drum magazine, whose syncretic house style used elements of American gangster film and hard-boiled detective fiction for a morally decadent portrayal of black township life in defiance of the crystallizing apartheid regime. The first half of the project shows how Tagore and Woolf, cosmopolitan individualists, developed sharp indictments of collective mobilizations that called for conformity and even coercion while the second half shows how partial nationalists like Lamming and the Drum coterie drew on elements of cosmopolitan individualism to rethink collectivity in more uprooted and more just terms.