Latchkey Home Book Reviews Essays Conference News Featured New Women
New Women: Who's Who GalleryThe Whine Cellar
Teaching Resources Bibliography
Contact us

BOOK REVIEW

Jade Munslow Ong. Olive Schreiner and African Modernism: Allegory, Empire and Postcolonial Writing. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018. 196 pp. ISBN: 978-1-138-93524-2, £105 Hbk.

Reviewed by Lena Wånggren.

Olive Schreiner and African Modernism: Allegory, Empire and Postcolonial Writing by Jade Munslow Ong is a fantastic read, and a vital addition not only to New Woman scholarship, but to modernist and postcolonial studies as well. In her book, Munslow Ong manages to conduct fine analyses of Schreiner’s work while making daring and innovative theoretical arguments regarding the politics of gender, race, imperialism, and canon construction. The book proves, in this reviewer’s opinion, one of the most important works of New Woman scholarship in the last few years.

Olive Schreiner – the starting point and main focus of Munslow Ong’s analysis – has long occupied a central place within New Woman scholarship, with her first novel The Story of an African Farm (published under the pseudonym Ralph Iron in 1883), in her influential experimental short stories and allegories, and, finally, in her many political writings on gender and society. Schreiner inhabits a particular place as a white South African woman writing in a scholarly field that has – until recently – mostly focused on a European and North American canon. While Schreiner’s works have been read (for example by Ann Ardis) as providing a proto-modernist aspect of the New Woman, Munslow Ong takes this line further and locates Schreiner as a modernist author whose aesthetics prefigure those of European modernist movements. Munslow Ong thus adopts a new geographical and historical vantage point in her study of modernism, focusing on South Africa (not Europe) and the late nineteenth (not the twentieth) century.

Munslow Ong expertly delves into the many sides of Schreiner’s authorship, concentrating on the literary and political novelty of Schreiner’s writing: its modernism and its postcolonial politics. The argument’s continual linkages between aesthetics and politics are most interesting. Examining the relationship between metaphor, postcolonial politics, and modernist experimentation, Munslow Ong shows how politics and aesthetics in African literature lean on allegorical structures (as opposed to European symbolism), and how South African authors rely on allegorical forms to respond to and to query the injustices of colonial exploitation. Key terms throughout the book are “allegory” and “primitivism,” two concepts which, according to Munslow Ong, carry a clear political significance, since allegory is deployed “to express anti-colonial counter-discourse” (11). Indeed, she writes, primitivist discourse – with land, history, animals, women as themes and motifs – in and as politicized allegory “provides the hallmark of South African modernism” (11). Schreiner thus uses modernist techniques to criticize imperialist discourse and to articulate a postcolonial resistance; form and function exist in a dialectical relationship in her works.

One main impetus of the book is the thesis that Schreiner’s modernism is not derivative of a European modernism, but, rather, registers experiences in a colonial context of capitalist exploitation, an experience South Africans lived much earlier than did the twentieth-century European modernists. As Munslow Ong sums up at the end of the book, Schreiner’s work represents an “intervention in the literary-historical narrative, in which Africa is no longer cast as the inert, reactive or belated partner of European literary innovation” (167). Rather, early African modernism “emerged out of a specific semi-peripheral context in distinct allegorical form to express anti-imperialist politics, and went on to influence the work of modernists at the imperial centre” (167). South African modernism, Munslow Ong writes, exists as a cultural production in dialectical relationship with the geopolitical and economic structures of capitalist modernity, as a response to the “uneven development of global capitalism,” and manifests itself in writing “prior to, or alongside” the work of European modernists (10). Working across established categories of modernism, Marxist, and postcolonial theory, Munslow Ong thus boldly revises historical and genre-based claims about African literature, linking modernism and anti-colonialism in Schreiner’s works.

The book is structured into five parts, with an introduction and four chapters. The first three chapters explore specific themes addressed in Schreiner’s three novels, and the last one focuses on Schreiner’s “afterlives.” The introduction sets out the theoretical underpinnings and main ideas of the book as a whole, defines key terms, and introduces Schreiner’s work and life as described in scholarship. The following chapters explore, in turn, one each of Schreiner’s novels by focusing on specific aspects of her writing. Chapter 1 examines the use of allegory and animal metaphors in her novel Undine (finished in the 1870s, but published posthumously in 1929) to construct a progressive politics in writing. Chapter 2 explores Schreiner’s use of the modernist techniques of allegory and of racialized primitivist discourse in The Story of an African Farm (1883), to formulate an anti-colonial and anti-imperialist resistance. While New Woman scholars so far have tended to avoid discussing the racist discourse in the novel, seeing it merely as a sign of the times, Munslow Ong directly addresses the racist language and descriptions of racial difference head-on (78-87). Chapter 3 explores the themes of evolution, gender, and race by focusing on Schreiner’s From Man to Man (published posthumously in 1926) and the author’s correspondence with those such as Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter, demonstrating Schreiner’s criticism of evolutionary racism, which was a feature of much New Woman writing of the time. Consequently, chapters 2 and 3 address two common criticisms of canonical New Woman literature by canonical authors such as Sarah Grand or Charlotte Perkins Gilman: its racist tendencies and its pro-eugenics thought. Chapter 4 hones in on Schreiner’s “afterlives,” tracing the political and literary legacies of Schreiner’s modernist practice in writers such as Solomon Platjee, H. I. E. Dhlomo, Richard Rive, Bessie Head, Doris Lessing, and J. M. Coetzee among others. Here, Munslow Ong returns to her claims in the introduction, reassessing the relationship between African literature and modernism. The book’s last chapter is arguably the most interesting in its linking of Schreiner to other South African writers, both those contemporary to Schreiner and those coming much later. Drawing connections between second- and third-generation white immigrants, local-born white people, black intellectual writers, and mixed-race writers, this chapter draws together many of the claims made throughout the book, and takes the argument a step further, discussing, for example, Schreiner’s reading of black American intellectual W. E. B. duBois and works by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, or  Schreiner’s correspondence with Edward Carpenter.

The main impetus of Munslow Ong’s argument is to challenge the dominant idea of modernism as “European” in origin. Rather than reading African modernism as the interpretation by African authors of supposedly European modernism, she claims the influence is the other way around. It is African authors like Schreiner, with her allegorical imagery, who come to influence European modernists, for example in their use of primitivist discourse. As she states, “in the use of primitivist modernism, it is in fact Africa, not Europe which leads the way” (3). Munslow Ong here cleverly not only lifts South African writers to the forefront of analysis, but, in so doing, criticizes and deconstructs the canon formation of literary scholarship, pointing out the Eurocentric view of modernism and of world developments that has dominated scholarship and politics for so long. In addition, she demonstrates the anti-colonial or anti-imperialist impetus of Schreiner’s aesthetics, which is echoed in later postcolonial works.

Olive Schreiner and African Modernism: Allegory, Empire and Postcolonial Writing is a welcome addition to literary scholarship, modernist as well as postcolonial, and, of course, to New Woman studies. It is a real gem, with an impressive theoretical, political, and historical framework laying out new linkages between works and authors. It is to be recommended to students and scholars alike for its sharp vision and for its excellent analysis that ties together aesthetics and politics.

Lena Wånggren teaches at the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Her research concerns gender and power in nineteenth-century literature and culture, as well as feminist pedagogy, literature and technology, and the medical humanities. Her book, Gender, Technology and the New Woman, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2017.