Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow, and the editor or coeditor of four collections, most recently, Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism.
Abel applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Odd Affinities: Virginia Woolf’s Shadow Genealogies, and reported the following:
Page 99 occurs during a chapter of Odd Affinities that explores unexpected echoes of Virginia Woolf in the work of James Baldwin. The page opens a section titled “London and Paris” that focuses on the differences between the material and cultural environments through which Jacob, the protagonist of Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922), and David, the narrator of Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956), seek to navigate their paths toward an adulthood that could accommodate their ambiguous sexuality. Whereas Jacob glides seamlessly from the elite masculine precincts of the Higher Sodomy at Cambridge to an eighteenth-century Bloomsbury room in an orderly, well-preserved London, David must traverse a decomposing Paris punctuated by gay bars that flaunt a flamboyant femininity. Although page 99 foregrounds Jacob’s smooth passage from the university to the city, it also forecasts David’s more torturous trajectory.Learn more about Odd Affinities at the University of Chicago Press website.
By zeroing in on the inverse relation between two texts whose titles (Jacob’s Room, Giovanni’s Room) signal an odd affinity, page 99 captures the spirit of cross reading that animates Odd Affinities. The Page 99 Test thus succeeds in offering both a methodological capsule of the book and a glimpse of one of the four central figures through which the book traces Woolf’s shadowy genealogies. The book’s first half, “Woolf’s Room in African American Modernism,” tracks Woolf’s echoes through Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room to illuminate a recessive strain of African American modernism that embraced a poetics of psychological and social interiority and the strategies Woolf devised to render them in Mrs. Dalloway. In its second half, “Woolf’s Retreat in Late European Modernism,” the book turns from Mrs. Dalloway’s tight formal strategies to the ruptured form and elegiac affect of Woolf’s next novel, To the Lighthouse, as a frame for elucidating the sense of intractable loss figured by maternal death in the late work of Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida, 1981) and W.G. Sebald (Austerlitz, 2001).
Expanding on the break titled “Time Passes” that divides the two narrative portions of To the Lighthouse, the two halves of Odd Affinities offer a new twist on the critical consensus that, rather than being displaced by postmodernism, modernism went dormant during the middle decades of the twentieth century and underwent a revival toward the century’s end. By reading the formal modulations of this “long modernism” through the optic of Woolf’s oeuvre, Odd Affinities maps modernism’s twentieth-century evolution through two mutually traversing trajectories: the arc of Woolf’s career as it intersects and is intersected by a genealogy constituted by her shadowy and shifting presence. By uncovering the travel of Woolf’s narratives across the boundaries of gender, race, and nationality, Odd Affinities seeks to dislodge her from her fixed iconic place as the founder of a female literary genealogy and to offer instead her defamiliarizing presence in traditions where we least expect to find her.
--Marshal Zeringue
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