Cosmopolitan modernism : T. S. Eliot, Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott

This study challenges the dominant critical approach to the relationship between modernism and post colonialism, an approach that assumes colonialism is the underlying ideology of modernism. This theory of discrepant cosmopolitan modernism better accounts for the influence and adaptation of Eliot’s modernism around the world: it better describes Brathwaite’s and Walcott’s complementary contributions to an Anglophone New World/Caribbean aesthetic; and it better grounds this important theoretical redefining of cosmopolitanism in specific intertextual relationships. Modernism has become a “traveling culture” for twentieth-century writers, and it has been changed by the journey. Discrepant cosmopolitan modernism begins to map this migration and to understand the significance of more and more people writing in English but writing in it differently.