The horror of the 1932 Bela Lugosi film White Zombie (dir. Victor Halperin), released in the seventeenth year of the U.S. occupation of Haiti, lies in the anxieties it raises about the fundamental similarities of modern “democratic” colonial rule and ordinary twentieth-century governance of Western citizens “at home.” The film articulates and resolves these anxieties using aesthetic strategies we usually associate with the popular and generic (sentimental, gothic, linear narrative) rather than with modernism. Halperin detaches these aesthetic strategies from their original genres to make of them historical responses to the problem of holding and recognizing individual agency in a modernizing world. Analyzing this film in these terms produces a definition of modernism that is neither merely a set of aesthetic requirements nor solely focused on cultural content.

To substantiate the ways in which this reading of Halperin's film allows for a rereading of modernist literary history, I follow it with a discussion of a problem T. S. Eliot set for his own criticism – how to value Rudyard Kipling, “the poet of empire,” aesthetically. Eliot eventually comes to argue that the geopolitics in Kipling's work he originally claimed made it transitory actually marked it as prescient of how fundamental national identity and the state's uses of culture had become to the critical projects and social position of the “man of letters” in the twentieth century. In other words, my reading of White Zombie as modernist has a precedent in a little-noted avenue of Eliot's critical writing.