Mara de Gennaro's study is ambitious and impressive. It pursues a rich variety of ideas, it chooses texts for reasons familiar to modernist and postcolonial scholars but pairs them in surprising ways, and its innovative close readings justify these pairings. De Gennaro's methodologies require parsing before my discussion of how she illuminates works by four major modernists, four major postcolonial figures, and various anglophone and francophone theorists.
Though de Gennaro does not gather the following aims into a mission statement, they undergird her analyses.
—Modernism After Postcolonialism synthesizes an anticolonial and antiracist project spanning global literature and theory throughout the modernist and postcolonial epochs.
—It critiques anxiety, including its indirect textual manifestations. As de Gennaro explains, anxiety for what Heidegger called a “reassuring world picture” leads people to build walls and to oppress or conquer others. Writers might, to their credit, display anxiety, for example, by depicting protagonists who...
