Patricia E. Chu’s Race, Nationalism and the State in British and American Modernism, addresses the politics of modernism to account for perspectives and scholarly approaches afforded by the advancement of postcolonial theory and subaltern/subordinate agency theories. In accordance, Chu examines the ways in which British and American modernism has been formed by the expansion of state administrative technologies.

Acknowledging the difficulties in defining modernism as a historical and an aesthetic phenomenon, Chu argues modernism is an expression, “most usefully understood as a response to specific characteristics of governance in the 20^th century.” Chu explains the self-consciousness of the modern(ist) artist created in concert with historical, social and technological developments of the State, developed from and thereby interpretable through an examination of the political subject in Britain and America.

This conception of modernism as a product of the modernisation of the Sate is grounded in Foucault’s idea of “governmentatlity.” Indeed, Chu seems indebted to this way of seeing and interpretation. Governmentality, when applied to advanced liberal democracies, which Britain and America can be considered to be among, where power is de-centered and its members play a citizen-subject role in their self-government, can be defined as an understanding of power from which the idea of government is not limited to state politics, rather captain to a complex of control techniques, which are implemented through a variety of institutions and mechanisms. As such, the conditions and restrictions imposed by State administrative technologies influence the sphere of stimuli - economic, social, technological, bio-political, psychic - being responded to and in-place during modernism. Accordingly, postcolonial and subaltern theories assist our understanding of modernism as their canonical or lack-of canonical presence or literary management (the branching off of group modernisms into separate fields, i.e. African American studies, gender studies) represent the presence of State administered constructs of race and gender, thereby a limited conception of modernism, meant to control and divide the populate.

In terms of negotiating these ideas, Chu breaks her book into five chapters. Each chapter is focused on a different aspect or voice in modernism. The artists Chu examines - Victor Halperin, T.S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Sara Jeanette Duncan, Rebecca West, Jean Toomer, D.W. Griffith, Zora Neale Hurston - represent a cast of perspectives and deal in several themes - race, colonialism, empire, primitivism, women’s studies, regional and dialect studies - which does well in reconstituting the role of the “Other,” subjugated peoples, in modernism and the modernization of the State. Beginning with an excellent and echoing reading of Victor Helperin’s 1932 film White Zombie - set during the US occupation of Haiti - Chu is able, in each of her chapters, to give agency to a variety of “others,” to demonstrate that they maintained an active, not a passive, role in modernism and the modernization of the State.

The shame of Chu’s book is her failure to expand upon these chapters and ideas - at times extended discussion is needed. Regardless, Race, Nationalism and the State in British and American Modernism, by measure of its broadening of modernism and application of particular theory, posits itself as a useful addition to contemporary discussions in modernist literary studies.