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This book fundamentally rethinks a pervasive and controversial concept in literary criticism and the history of ideas. Primitivism has long been accepted as a transhistorical tendency of the "civilized" to idealize that primitive condition against which they define themselves. In the modern era, this has been a matter of the "West" projecting its primitivist fantasies onto non-Western "others." Arguing instead that primitivism was an aesthetic mode produced in reaction to the apotheosis of European imperialism, and that the most intensively primitivist literary works were produced by imperialism's colonized subjects, the book overturns basic assumptions of the last two generations of literary scholarship.
Against the grain, Ben Etherington contends that primitivism was an important, if vexed, utopian project rather than a form of racist discourse, a mode that emerged only when modern capitalism was at the point of subsuming all human communities into itself. The primitivist project was an attempt, through art, to recreate a "primitive" condition then perceived to be at its vanishing point. The first overview of this vast topic in forty years, Literary Primitivism maps out previous scholarly paradigms, provides a succinct and readable account of its own methodology, and presents critical readings of key writers, including Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, D. H. Lawrence, and Claude McKay.
— Nicholas Brown
"Literary Primitivism is a highly original, detailed, and compelling investigation of a series of canonical works of modernist literature, one that proposes a novel refashioning of the primitivist impulse."
— Nick Nesbitt
"The book... forwards the provocative thesis that primitivism, when properly periodized and reconceptualized, can have a politically progressive and decolonizing effect. This is an audacious, against-the-grain theoretical move that transforms primitivism from something offensive or misguided that is to be wholly avoided into an aesthetic and political tool that can be effectively deployed in decolonizing struggles against a racist and imperialist capitalism."
— Victor Li
"Long deployed as the centrepiece of arguments about modernism's racist, imperialist impulses, it has become easy to dismiss [primitivism] out of hand as a classic instance of what we would now call Western cultural appropriation. Ben Etherington's Literary Primitivism offers a powerful and persuasive rebuff to this conventional wisdom."
— Alys Moody
"Literary Primitivism now deals squarely for the first time with the sociological and historical underpinnings of modern literature's search for an unmediated primitive. Ben Etherington sets out to regain what aspects of the primitivist project survive post-structuralism and postmodernity, with their devastating critique of mediated (manipulated) representation. He concludes that the most successful and relevant works move beyond representation and seek instead to re-enact the experiential process by which the nonsynchronous primitive remnant (Ernst Bloch) is activated, perceived in its immediacy and transformed in its trajectory through the text.....Marxist criticism at its best."
— Erik Camayd-Freixas
"The issue of primitivism is a briar patch, no matter how one approaches it, and Ben Etherington's Literary Primitivism does not shrink from the task....Etherington wants nothing less than to revise from the ground up, so to speak, seeing literary primitivism as not an imperialist act against oppressed peoples but as a subversive aesthetic that the colonized themselves conceived in order to undermine Western imperialist hegemonies."
— Gary Edward Holcomb
"To challenge 'the consensus view that primitivism is only a bad thing', [Etherington] approaches the notion as a utopian project of restoration that does not rely on the Other, but on its opposition to global capitalism....Literary Primitivism's claims seem to us to be particularly important in offering a fruitful response to contemporary debates, such as that concerning cultural appropriation. B. Etherington not only succeeds in reappraising the concept in a manner that is relevant, responsible, and historically situated, but, above all, he makes it into a tool for a decolonizing and decolonial critique. Insofar as it serves a project of emancipation, the use of the term "primitivism" in literary theory is given new and stimulating horizons."
— Jehanne Denogent and Nadeja Magnenat
"A landmark work of dialectical criticism, this bold study should be a required reading for any scholar of primitivism, postcolonial studies, Marxism, or world literature, and indeed for anyone interested in twentieth-century literary, intellectual, and cultural history more broadly."
— Glyn Salton-Cox
"Etherington salvages the aesthetic project of primitivism from the critical disrepute into which it has fallen....[He] makes a compelling case for understanding primitivism as an example of what philosopher Ernst Bloch terms concrete utopia, or the real possibility of another world buried in the historical misery of the present."
— Christian P. Haines
"Ben Etherington has revisited the important and highly visible, yet curiously neglected, topic of literary primitivism Etheringtonis properly respectful of the cultural turn represented by Said but resists the tendency to such sweeping judgements. Indeed, he makes the case for a serious use of primitivist motifs precisely by discriminating it from more naïve or defective instances. For this purpose, he gives close readings in turn of Aimé Césaire, D. H. Lawrence and Claude McKay Etherington offers [The Plumed Serpent]as the primary instance of Lawrence's primitivism Etherington is surely right to see it as a complex and illuminating instance of modern primitivism. It is best read as a utopian thought experiment although this constantly conflicts with the mode of historical realism in which it is conceived. Or to express the same point more positively, it is the work in which Lawrence pushed his primitivist speculation to its limits and tested it within, or against, the realism of the novel form."
— Michael Bell
The preface introduces the book's central thesis, that literary primitivism was an aesthetic project whose emergence coincided with the climax of European imperialist expansion, and explains that its purpose accordingly is to change the object to which primitivism refers. The preface details the historical and critical methodology of the book, with reference to the concept of totality in particular, and conducts a short reading of Aimé Césaire's short poem "Barbare." It suggests that the current phase of globalization and the critical concern with "world literature" have opened up the possibility for reconceiving of primitivism as a utopian project, albeit a vexed and problematic one.
Chapter 1 focuses on the conceptual and theoretical problems that pertain to literary primitivism. It surveys the breadth of previous scholarship and points out that a comprehensive study that proceeded according to received usage would be hopelessly vast owing to the ahistorical presuppositions that have tended to inform its use. It sets out the terms by which the book redefines the term—especially, that primitivism was an aesthetic project specific to the historical moment when the possibility of primitive experience was perceived to be at the point of obsolescence. Transformed thus into an inherently speculative notion, it fell to the capacities of art to revive and reanimate the remnants of "primitive" (i.e., noncapitalist) social realities. The chapter reviews the previous postmodern generation of scholarship on primitivism, arguing that the historical nature of primitivism was obscured when scholars, employing the methods of poststructuralism, restricted their inquiries to questions of representation.
Chapter 2 advances the historical side of the argument by drawing a distinction between "philo-primitivism" and "emphatic primitivism." It finds that the philo-primitivist ideal of the "noble savage" was the product of earlier periods of European colonial expansion when there yet existed social worlds beyond the perimeter of the capitalist world-system. As the "primitive accumulation" of noncapitalist societies accelerated, so the ideal of the primitive became entirely speculative and utopian. Emphatic primitivism's emergence coincides with the period that political economists at the time labeled "Imperialism," a concept explored with reference to the work of Rosa Luxemburg in particular. The chapter ends with a discussion of the notion prevalent at this time that the "primitive" was in fact the product of "civilized" sublimation. Other writers and artists discussed include John Dryden, George Catlin, Charles Darwin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robert Louis Stevenson, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Chapter 3 considers a range of manifestoes and essays that articulate the primitivist project. Anchoring the discussion with Ernst Bloch's conception of objective and subjective "nonsynchronicity," it goes on to look at the ways in which artists appealed to the remnants of "primitive" societies when forming anticapitalist aesthetic programs that aimed to revive the possibility of primitive experience. It is argued that this program appealed above all to the colonized "conscripts" of capitalist modernity, something clearly in evidence in the early manifestoes and theorizations of "négritude." Across the board, it is found that the primitivist project was conceptualized in terms of an idealized immediacy that could be reached only by breaking through the mediations of a totalized capitalism. Artists and writers discussed include Carl Einstein, T. E. Lawrence, Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, René Ménil, and Alain Locke.
Chapter 4 reconsiders the question of primitivist representation in light of the theoretical and historical arguments presented in Chapters 1 through 3. Discussing works by Emil Nolde, D. H. Lawrence, Langston Hughes, and Jacques Roumain, it argues that primitivism has an inherent tendency to transcend any fixed notion or representation of the primitive, and that it is the work itself that must produce the sought-for primitive experience. Thus we find a vacillation between concrete representations of "primitive" remnants and an abstracted, nonspecific ideal of the primitive to come.
Chapter 5 is the book's central literary study. It "slow reads" Frantz Fanon's epochal essay "The Lived Experience of the Black" as a critical dramatization of Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land). Reconstructing the full literary and philosophical context of the essay, the chapter argues that Fanon's riposte to Jean-Paul Sartre's misreading of the primitivism of the negritude poets consists of himself enacting Césaire's primitivism. In Fanon reading Césaire, we observe literary primitivism achieving consciousness of itself as a historical phenomenon. The chapter argues for the centrality of Césaire's achievement to literary primitivism, at the heart of which lies a poetics of passionate sarcasm.
Chapter 6 presents a detailed consideration of the style and narrative structure of D. H. Lawrence's major primitivist work, Women in Love. It begins with Wyndham Lewis's attack on Lawrence's primitivism in Paleface, a book that undertakes an ironic defense of white supremacism, before considering how Women in Love pursues its own kind of "blancitude." Finding that Lawrence's prose "techniques of immediacy" are not sufficient in themselves to bring about primitivism's end, it traces the narrative logic that pushes Lawrence's characters to seek spaces beyond the perimeter of imperial civilization. The chapter closes with a discussion of Lawrence's attempt to narrate a primitivist insurrection in his late work The Plumed Serpent.
This chapter considers Claude McKay's novels Home to Harlem and Banjo as attempts to undertake literary primitivism's project of immediacy by means of a musical aesthetics. Exploring his relationship both to the negritude poets and to Lawrence, especially the latter's Aaron's Rod, it argues that of all the writers discussed in this book, McKay's work most strenuously attempts to enter the immediate mode. In McKay's novels the hope for a reconciliation of reflexivity and immediacy, the primitive and the civilized is enacted simultaneously at the level of prose style and narrative structure. This allows us to identify a number of fissures and contradictions that beset the aesthetics of primitivism, especially the pitfalls of a utopian racialism.
The conclusion recapitulates the central claims of the study, especially with regard to the phenomenological notion that primitivism was a "project," and points to areas for further research. It also discusses in greater depth the politics of primitivism, especially the notion that it had a "decolonial horizon." This is undertaken through a brief comparative discussion of two accounts of the Haitian revolution written in the 1930s, Guy Endore's Babouk and C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins. It finishes by considering in what respects literary primitivism might be considered an event of "world literature."