The copyright world system: Modernism, colonial copyright, and literary authorship

Abstract

This dissertation pursues a line of argument about copyright, self-possession, and authorship. The expansion of copyright law to the colonised world, in roughly the century up to 1911, was an integral part of the globalisation of intellectual-property law. Colonial copyright proceeded according to a specific logic of cultural diffusion: works of culture would emanate from the imperium outward, with the colonies conceived primarily as export markets for publishers in London, Paris, and other metropolitan capitals. During the period of formal decolonisation and since, global copyright – in particular the continued adherence of postcolonial nations to the patchwork of international copyright laws – has served as a powerful force to preserve the structure of the literary world market as it existed in the colonial era. In addition to this ‘neocolonial’ dimension to global copyright today, there also exist conceptual affinities between copyright’s intellectual-property regime and colonial domination. The subject of copyright’s protection was, and is, conceived as something like a ‘possessive individual’. The author is constituted as not only the owner of their own person but, further, of the products of their own mind. Because self-possession is closely philosophically affiliated with freedom, in a sense the author or artist is figured as the freest kind of subject: owner not only of their self but of a portfolio of intellectual products that are intimate emanations of their self. The dissertation offers studies of two Caribbean poets a generation apart: Claude McKay and Aimé Césaire. Its focus is on how both poets crafted, at the beginning of their literary careers, a kind of authorship that responded to the challenges of the overdetermined author-figure bequeathed by colonial copyright. For these poets, the problematics of authorship as a colonial status, the idea of literature as the property of a self-possessing individual, served as both a source of inspiration and an irresistible foil. Beginning with the newspaper poems that introduced him to the Jamaican literary public in 1911, McKay worked to build, not a monolithic authorial identity, but a contingent and shifting set of personae that would respond to the expectations his various audiences would bring to his work. To do so, he experimented with dialect, with the presentation of sexuality, and with the address of the lyric subject to the reader, always with an acute consciousness of the various publication contexts in which his work as appearing. McKay’s poetry offered a labourist aesthetics which valorised work, not inspiration or personality, as the foundation of literary merit. And his most ambitious newspaper poems proposed to take literary Jamaican dialect – an idiom McKay adopted under the influence of his mentor Walter Jekyll, and with the inspiration of American and local predecessors – and turn it into the vehicle for a collective literary voice that might bear the frustrations and aspirations of the Black peasantry of the island. The dissertation then turns to Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, tracing the hypercanonical poem through its four primary published versions as Césaire worked on, revised, and republished the text between 1935 and 1956. I analyse the intense critical debates over those revisions, but try to sidestep any attempt to identify a ‘definitive’ or superior edition of the text. Instead, my argument is that, each time Césaire stepped in to re-shape his own work, he both further inscribed his own authorship – his authority to license changes to the work – and further prevented the poem from having any identifiable monolithic author-figure, by multiplying the voices that speak in the text. His experiments in revision are of a piece with a dialectical approach to authorship, strongly influenced by Hegel, that animates the text itself. Césaire notes the dispossessive logic of authorship-as-ownership, and responds by crafting a kind of authorship that is, simultaneously, a kind of divestment. Césaire’s project seems to move further than McKay’s toward the horizon of a speaking into existence a collective colonised Black subjectivity, a universal-in-the-particular, with, at its centre, the gutted and remodelled figure of author as it had been conveyed by colonial law.