ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the transactional relationship between the peripheral colonial amateur and the metropolitan centre of Modernism. Deploying the figure of C. L. R. James as an example of the colonial amateur,Saikat Majumdar explicates how James’s aspiration for metropolitan modernity culminates in a ‘delicately fractured relationship with the ethos and practices of high Modernism’ in which James’s passionate engagement with literary culture transmutes into ‘a critique of the lifestyle fetishised by the metropolitan literary establishment’. Paradoxically, Majumdar contests, the valorisation of the metropolitan centre in Modernist narratives of artistic migration lies seemingly at odds with a Modernist obsession with provincialism.
