Desiring the Metropolis: The Anti-Aesthetic and Semicolonial Modernism

Abstract

This essay argues that one of the lasting legacies of British modernism is a concern with the motifs of banality and boredom. The banal, moreover, has not only been an aesthetic category, but it has also carried with it a specific set of political implications, often linked to the power structures and conflicts involved in colonialism and its aftermath. Reading fiction by two canonical modernists - James Joyce from Ireland, and Katherine Mansfield from New Zealand, in this essay, I seek to show how local conceptualizations of banality and boredom have embodied critiques of colonial domination and markers of hybrid postcolonial identities within modernist traditions across the British Commonwealth.