Filibusters in Birmingham: a Conference on Wyndham Lewis
In his travelogue Filibusters in Barbary(1932), the modernist painter and writer Wyndham Lewis evoked the fantasy of being ‘thoroughly unanchored’ from London, from controversy, from recognizability: from his life as he lived it at the time, in effect. The fantasy compels not only because it’s a typically contrarian move made by an unapologetic contrarian, but also because it invites reflection on the very Lewisian problem of autonomy itself.