E3W Literature | University of Texas

Maureen Moynagh, Ed.
Essays on Race and Empire
By Nancy Cunard
Broadview Press, Ltd., 2002
305 pages
ISBN: 1551112302
$19.95

Reviewed by Patricia Pearson

In Essays on Race and Empire, literary scholar Maureen Moynagh sets forth a handful of texts by modernist activist and “passionaria” Nancy Cunard, showing a deft and insightful editor’s touch in framing Cunard’s work. Culled from decades of Cunard’s writing in genres ranging from poetry to war journalism, this collection seeks to offer a window into a cause to which she devoted endless energy: racial justice. Cunard’s work also offers a view into the modernist, imperial, transatlantic world in which she moved in the early twentieth century. Thus Moynagh strives not simply to add Cunard to the canon of neglected women writers, but to “situate her writing on race and empire in a way that sheds light on relations between radical politics, gender, and modernism.”

Maureen Moynagh received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Texas in 1993, and currently teaches in the English and Women’s Studies departments at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada. As an “archive” or collection, Essays on Race and Empire is best consumed as a whole object of study. The introduction as well as the annotations and appendices thoughtfully survey Cunard’s activism for racial justice, while showing her to be a problematic figure for historical and literary analysis. As Moynagh demonstrates, Cunard as an intellectual figure complicates thinking about race, empire, modernism, gender, and the left. After the last page is read, the reader finds herself back in the early twenty-first century, pondering the compelling qualities of Cunard’s work and her relevance—where should Cunard be placed, set, or brought into literary and historical work?

Moynagh selects from Cunard’s myriad writings a seven essays concerning the entwined themes of race and empire. She groups these into three themes, presenting the essays out of chronological order and together with other texts and images, so as better juxtapose the consistencies and inconsistencies at the heart of Cunard’s thought and work. Included in the book are appendices of essays on similar topics by more well-known contemporaries and collaborators of Cunard’s. This provides readers with an initial opportunity for comparison and contextualization. The non-chronological approach may prove a little jarring to historians, but read straight through with the rationale laid out in the introduction in mind, the organization provides a structure and harmony for reflection on Cunard’s work as a whole.

The work of making sense of an archive can be immense; presenting, as this collection does, part of that archive to an audience in a way that is both comprehensible, useful, and academically inspiring is a feat. The slim and clean lines of this book belie the amount of research that Moynagh undertook to put the collection together. Nancy Cunard was a prolific writer. To go through her published work alone would constitute a major task, but Moynagh also spent time in Cunard’s papers in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center archives. She ably annotates many of the people and events in Cunard’s essays, giving the reader enough information to understand the pieces without interrupting their flow.

Cunard’s eclectic life and exuberant writings certainly lend themselves to being showcased. Nancy Clara Cunard (1896-1965) was the only child of an English baronet and an American heiress. Her father, Sir Bache Cunard, was the grandson of the founder of the Cunard shipping line, and her mother, after leaving her husband, presided over a brilliant political and artistic salon in London, frequented by Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. Highly educated from a young age and well-traveled, Nancy Cunard consistently demonstrated a passion for art, music, dance, reading, and languages. Later, she trained herself as an expert on the arts of Africa and embraced modernist aesthetics and primitivism. She led a glamorous and wild society life as a young woman in London and later Paris. She published volumes of poetry, set up her own short-lived press (the Hours Press, 1928-1931), and became an icon of the new woman, the “boyish vamp” of the 1920s. Never a stranger to scandal, Cunard refused to live her life within the boundaries of traditional society and propriety.

Socially and intellectually connected with modernist and leftist circles in London, Paris, and later the United States, Cunard socialized and collaborated with well-known figures including Ezra Pound, Aldous Huxley, and Claude McKay. Cunard believed strongly in personal freedom from societal restrictions, and she early developed a fascination for Africa and a passion for racial justice. She spent years on the creation and publication of a massive encyclopedia of black history, culture, and politics, published in 1934 under the title Negro. She traveled extensively for the project, soliciting contributions from a startlingly wide range of intellectuals, activists, writers, and Pan-Africanist leaders, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, George Padmore, Jomo Kenyatta, William Carlos Williams, and Theodore Dreiser, to select a few names. After Negro, she spent three decades working as a reporter, often focusing on racial issues, for an international range of mainly black newspapers. She wrote on behalf of the anti-fascists in the Spanish Civil War, and brought other radicals together to publish editions of the New Left Review and books of poetry and essays. She worked tirelessly on behalf of her causes. In memoirs of some of the figures she knew, Cunard described herself as an “eccentric rebel among minor characters in British cultural history.” Cunard is profiled in the new edition of the Dictionary of National Biography as a poet and political activist. Biographer Jane Marcus writes that Cunard, along with being an outlaw, was “that rare creature on the world stage, the woman public intellectual.”

Cunard’s work remained obscure to scholars until it was brought to light amidst a recent surge of interest in modernism. Especially significant was the inclusion of selection of her work in The Gender of Modernism, a collection edited by Bonnie Scott Kime (1990). In her introduction in Essays on Race and Empire, Moynagh points to this publication as bringing Cunard’s work to the attention of academics. Recent scholarship that takes the time to look a little more closely at Cunard has for the most part split into two camps. Some academics seek to integrate Cunard into the modernist canon, to rejuvenate a woman writer ignored by history, while others critique how Cunard is implicated within dynamics of class, race, gender, and empire—some to the point of condemning her. Cunard has been criticized for her “tourist gaze” and for complicitity in the racism of imperialism because she did not recognize her own privilege as a wealthy white woman. However, others argue that much of her work deserves more sympathetic attention: it was too radical for its time, if not radical enough for today. Cunard’s relative obscurity and the ways in which some of her writings strike jarring or uncomfortable notes with current readers informed by post-colonial theorists make presenting this modernist writer to a “modern” audience challenging and fraught with peril. One cannot ignore the elements of imperial tourism in Cunard’s gaze and writings, or her deep attachment to primitivism and racial essentialism—Jamaica, she avers, is for the black man, whites have no place there. Her attacks on the NAACP in her coverage of the Scottsboro Boys trial seem nonsensical without context. Her position can be given meaning, weight, and made interesting instead of odd by understanding her communist leanings and the complex relationship between the left and race at this time.

Moynagh neither champions nor condemns Cunard, but agrees with both camps that Cunard’s writing and politics are complicated by her subject position. She contends that gender remains the silent third theme in much of Cunard’s writing, always already present alongside more overt themes of race and empire. Moynagh argues for giving Cunard due consideration:
As problematic as her identifications were, what we learn from Cunard’s writing on race and empire—from her mistakes, if nothing else—are the ways national and imperial inscriptions of race and gender both informed and destabilized her political commitments. It is her desire to transform herself from imperial daughter to partisan in the cause for racial justice, a desire for filiation and engagement, that exposes the dynamics of race and gender.
Cunard occupied a contradictory social location as a writer: by birth and race in a position of privilege in the imperial economy, but at the same time, a conscious opponent of its exploitations. Moynagh suggests that this itself makes considering her work “a worthwhile endeavor.” As a woman, and as a woman who was political, radical, and an outspoken intellectual who rarely spoke about women or explicitly as a woman, Cunard presents a challenge for the academic. At the time, as a public figure—from the time she was a glamorous society girl to her years as a reporter—she was firmly embodied as a woman in her public image and through visual media. Famously photographed by Man Ray, Curtis Moffat for Vogue, and Cecil Beaton, she was also painted by Beaton, Wyndham Lewis, Barbara Ker-Seymer, and others. In The Gender of Modernism, Susan Stanford Friedman argues that Cunard’s gender is central to analysis of her work. Friedman writes of Cunard’s image:
Cunard seemed inseparable from her image—her wealth and glamour combined with bohemian exoticism and sexual freedom; her tall, thin frame complemented by her trademarks, kohl-encircled eyes, boyish bob, and heavy African bangles on her arms. This fetishization of her image was itself inseparable from her notoriety as a radical—her name associated with bohemianism, anarchism, communism, antifascism, and the movement against racial injustice.
Not simply a woman, nor only a modernist, Nancy Cunard is at once image and activist, one who represents and one who is represented.

Moynagh’s first thematic section, “Imperial Eyes,” juxtaposes two examples of political travel writing, “Harlem Reviewed” and “Jamaica—The Negro Island,” with a collaborative political piece explicitly on empire originally published as a pamphlet: The White Man’s Duty: An Analysis of the Colonial Question in Light of the Atlantic Charter. The first two pieces appeared first in Cunard’s mammoth edited work, Negro, while the third, co-authored with George Padmore, appeared nine years later in 1943. The tension between the privileged gaze of an imperial tourist and the commitment of a partisan marks all of her essays in different ways, quite notably in this section. Moynagh writes that Cunard:
at times seems to cast an imperial gaze on the subjects of her writing … the anti-imperial, anti-racist work she carries out is itself conducted under imperial eyes. Cunard’s activities, in other words, are shaped and constrained by the conditions of empire, even as she struggles to work against those same conditions … Travel in empire was not an innocent undertaking; it carried considerable cultural baggage, particularly for a woman.
“Harlem Reviewed” is at once travel narrative, ethnography, and cultural criticism. Cunard describes both her own experience and the illogical nature of American racism. Her writing in this text is compelling if not always politically correct: “Notice how many of the whites are unreal in America; they are dim. But the Negro is very real; he is there.” In her essay on Jamaica, Cunard rejects the British role in the island, asserting the essential blackness of Jamaica in what becomes an aesthetic critique. Both “Jamaica—The Negro Island” and her collaboration with Padmore take a strong partisan tone and seek to establish Cunard as firmly anti-imperial. In The White Man’s Duty, the title of which clearly alludes to Kipling, Cunard works in an interview style with George Padmore, using dialogue to draw conclusions about the future of colonial rule in the wake of the Atlantic Charter signed by Roosevelt and Churchill in 1941. As examples of anti-colonial writing, these essays also help, as Moynagh asserts, “to enlarge and rewrite the modernist project and chart the imperial connections” that underlay it. Cunard emerges as a distinct voice that can be read in myriad and significant ways.

The next pairing of essays, called “Miscegenation Blues,” provides the most direct evidence for Moynagh’s argument that gender intersected Cunard’s racial politics inexorably if not always explicitly. The two essays, "Black Man and White Ladyship: An Anniversary" and “The American Moron and the American of Sense—Letters on the Negro” are among the most personal in the collection. Both recount events in her life as starting points for analysis of race and politics. The former describes the public and permanent break with her mother over Cunard’s social and sexual relationships with black men, the latter a “sensational scandal” that erupted over allegations of interracial sex during her research for Negro in New York. Newspaper accounts of her activities sparked a flurry of personal and graphic hate mail sent to Cunard. Cunard carried her public preoccupations with matters of race and class into her private life and vice versa, rendering these boundaries all the more fluid. This ambiguity often heightened responses to her work on the domestic and international front, as her status as a white woman touched upon fears about both sex and race. Moynagh writes that Cunard’s relative silence on the subject of gender can be understood as a displacement of gender onto her preoccupation with race and class. Her political identifications must be understood in the context of contemporary social categories as well as their historical resonance: “Cunard explicitly presents herself as a class and race traitor … but there can be little doubt she would have been perceived as betraying her sex as well.”

The final grouping, “The Red and the Black,” looks explicitly at Cunard’s communist politics and sympathies. These essays respond to specific historical events, but present previously overlooked aspects of those histories while exposing the complexities and complications in Cunard’s own thought. “Scottsboro—and Other Scottsboros” takes on lynching in America without mercy. “A Reactionary Negro Organisation: A Short Review of Dr. Du Bois, The Crisis, and the NAACP in 1932” startles the reader at first—why is Cunard criticizing the NAACP, one of the most prominent civil rights organizations at the time? Reading these pieces shows how leftist politics, race, and communism performed an uneasy and intertwined dance in the years before the Second World War. Cunard’s use of Communist party rhetoric in her writings on race and empire has been read as evidence of her Eurocentrism, but Moynagh suggests that the historical links between Marxist movements and African diasporic struggles deserve attention. She writes that Cunard’s work should be “positioned at the intersection of these international struggles for racial and economic justice—an intersection that has been underplayed in most accounts of modern American cultural production.”

Cunard’s politics, writing, and person were directly implicated in early twentieth-century anxieties about race, empire, and sex. Through reading this book, one gains an appreciation not only for the work of Nancy Cunard, but for the need to further study how modernism intertwines with race and empire. As an archive, the book reflects its subject and its editor equally, as Moynagh’s preoccupations parallel Cunard’s. Essays on Race and Empire might be more accurately called Essays on Gender, Race, and Empire; despite leaving “gender” out of the title, Moynagh clearly sees it as integral to understanding Cunard and her work. This may have affected her selection of examples, and certainly comes through as a main argument in the introduction. This reader was thoroughly convinced that Cunard’s work on race and empire was “inexorably crosscut by gender.” Regardless of the inescapable influence of perspective and judgment, the texts remain worth reading on their own merits. A pleasure to read and intensely thought-provoking, Essays on Race and Empire introduces the reader to Nancy Cunard, and facilitates “tracing, through her texts, the processes of her political engagement across boundaries of social, cultural, and racial difference.” Moynagh argues that “we can learn about late imperial culture in ways that speak to our world as much as to hers.” The last selection in the book, included in one of the appendices, is particularly interesting: a short piece from Claude McKay’s autobiography, alluding to his correspondence with Cunard over some writing. In the essay, McKay both compliments and castigates Cunard, giving a feeling of closure and question to the end of the volume. We see a glimpse of how her contemporaries saw her, as we ourselves struggle over how to view Cunard in our own time, as a writer, an activist, a woman, and a modernist expatriate.