Part I: Global, Postcolonial, and World Literatures
Arundhati Roy, in Capitalism: A Ghost Story (2014), states that âCapitalism is going through a crisis whose gravity has not revealed itself yetâ (p. 45). Royâs diagnosis of capitalismâs fault linesâof wealth hoarding, environmental toxification, falling growth rates, and increasing strikesâis unusual in its maximal overview of capitalismâs weaknesses, presenting a complex but compound series of cascading ecological and economic crises.1 Yet many accounts of capitalism-in-crisis have not attended to its longue durĂ©e, regional differentiation or cognisance that capitalism is the process and gravitational field through which environments are organised, labour commodified, and imperialism funded. Likewise, Marxist postcolonial scholar Timothy Brennan eschews a renewed fascination with the novelty of crisis, of its ââepistemic breaks,â âCopernican revolutions,â and âhistorical rupturesââ (2014, p. 11), noting instead that âa political break can be affected as much by historical continuities as by rupturesâ, or in Marxâs famous formulation that history occurs first as tragedy then as farce (2004, p. 85). That contemporary financial systems are too complex for even neoliberal technocrats to understand is a symptom, prima facie, of algorithmic convolutions, but also the almost sublime nature of global capitalism, and the difficulties involved in imagining a longue durĂ©e world-system structured by repeated cycles and speculative busts, especially in a period of economic decline and hegemonic transition. This general âcultural debilityâ (Mirowski 2013, p. 12), or the unimaginable totality of capitalism, is a consequence for Fredric Jameson of the âugly and bureaucratic representational qualificationsâ (2009c, p. 608) of a world that conditions its own horizons of understandings, and that finds its own demise incomprehensible.
This monograph is concerned with how with a combined crisis of capitalism is likewise registered in disciplinary and representational terms as an incapacity to narrate totality, alongside a dissatisfaction with postcolonial literary modes, and an attempt to âmake realâ capitalist globalisation and its worsening situation. Global fictions are here differentiated against world literature given the latterâs emergence from comparative literary studies and emphasis on âgreat worksâ of art.2 In contrast, global literature emerged from the massification of postcolonial literary studies, taking its germinal thematic focus from discussions of âafter empireâ while deploying transnational and deterritorialised narratives that mobilise postcolonial tropes such as âhybridity, diaspora, transculturation, subaltern, hegemony, deterritorialization, rhizome, mestizo, Eurocentrism and otheringâ (Gunn 2001, p. 18; see also OâBrien and Szeman 2001, p. 605).3 However, for OâBrien and Szeman, editors of a special issue on âThe Globalization of Fiction/The Fiction of Globalizationâ (2001), it âdoes not really make sense to search for a literature of globalizationâfor texts that explicitly thematize the processes of globalizationâany more than it does to search for particularly explicit examples of postcolonial literatureâ (p. 610) due to the breadth of globalisationâs definition as a mode of economic expansion, cultural homogenisation, and synonym for American dominance. But despite this critique global literatures can be negatively defined: unlike postcolonial studies and its concern with the socio-political legacies of empire, anti-colonisation movements, and institutional canonicity, the global novel unevenly registers the nation as an important category, has expansive geographical horizons, a long historical scale, and often thematises its leave-taking of postcolonial aesthetics and concerns while being âborn translatedâ (Walkowitz 2015) for a global literary audience based in Northern metropoles. Studies of global fictions are eclectic, focusing on the circulation and production of literary forms, or in studies of American narratives of consumption (Annesley 2006); in warnings about the reproduction of America in âglobalâ works that manufacture the local âas the worldâ (Brennan 2001, p. 661), or as Baucom ponders whether âExpansion contracts; contraction enrichesâ (2001, p. 169); or of globalisation as simply a long-standing, even ancient, consensual exchange of ideas, goods and people that expands literatureâs horizons of possibility (Gunn 2001, p. 20; Israel 2004, pp. 2â3). What most of these accounts share is an emphasis on the role hegemonic regions like North America and Europe still play in consecrating and disseminating such literatures; and how this reproduces American or âglobal northernâ literary works as the âworldâ.4
But for Gikandi postcolonial literatureâs global thrust gained currency exactly because of its emphasis on mobility and migrancy, a turn that risked ignoring an âother, darker, older narrative of poverty, of failed nationalism, of death, that will simply not go awayâ (2001, p. 639). Taking heed of such warnings, this monographâs conceptual apparatus is perversely not drawn from the same postcolonial ground from whence global literature emerged: such an approach would merely confirm the ongoing circulation and cachet of particular âpostcolonialâ tropes, like a scepticism towards socialist post-independence nation-states, a privileging of modernist stylistics, and a recirculation of questions of transnational belonging. The body of global works examined here by Salman Rushdie, David Mitchell, Rana Dasgupta, and Rachel Kushner, focused as intently as they are on post-colonial disenchantment, frictionless global circulation, and US empire, seem not to have much to say about the postcolonial as a body of critically urgent work that reclaims, as Bhagat Kennedy argues, âcultural, economic, and political sovereigntyâ (2018, p. 335). Compare the lively and sustained engagement with questions of postcolonial style, national development, and political possibility in Salman Rushdieâs Midnightâs Children (1981), against the cosmopolitan deterritorialisation of his global rock epic The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), the planetary coincidences and historical compression of Kamila Shamsieâs Burnt Shadows (2009), or US empire as a cipher for desire and repulsion in Mohsin Hamidâs The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007). Rather this monograph finds fecund critical ground in materialist world-literary studies that bring together world-systems theory, Marxist postcolonial approaches, and âsecond waveâ ecocriticism, to examine the narrative strategies of modes of realism and narratives of globalisation, conditioned as they are by ârationalâ attunements to capitalist reality, amidst a flattening of national differences, the diminishment of political possibilities, and imaginaries that tend to figure the end of the world sooner than the end of late capitalism (Jameson 2009b, p. 50).
To return to the idea of âdisciplinaryâ crises, a recent turn in world-literary studies towards historical capitalism rather than strictly colonialism emerged in part because of the omissions of postcolonial studies to account for the period of post-independence as one of continued asset-stripping through structural readjustment: or the new financial mechanisms by which formally colonised nation-states experienced shock integrations into the world-system, involving intensified rounds of privatisation, deregulation, and a collapse in subsistence economies, in ways that maintained ongoing structurally disadvantageous positions, or the status quo of core-periphery dynamics (Lazarus 2011, pp. 7â9; see also Brennan 2004; Lazarus 2004; Parry 2004a). A materialist world-literary theory thus responds to a perceived difficulty or conceptual incapacity in the field of postcolonial studies to grapple with a situation that exceeds anti-colonial temporalities or conditions and demands a new critical language to parse the complex and ongoing oppressions of an uneven world-system, rather than an over-determined use of the âpostcolonialâ. Such work takes capitalism as the âinterpretive horizonâ of literature (Brown 2005, p. 1), with the spread of European colonialism and capitalism producing a âbaseline of universalityâ (p. 2) of experiences and sensoriums throughout the world. Most notably the Warwick Research Collective (WReC), marry Brownâs insights with Morettiâs account of the âone, and unequalâ world-literary system (Moretti 2004, p. 149; WReC 2015, pp. 7â9), and Fredric Jamesonâs equation of modernity to âworldwide capitalismâ (2002, p. 12), to describe their method as an analysis of âthe literature of the modern capitalist world-system [âŠ.] modernity is both what world-literature indexes or is âaboutâ and what gives world-literature its distinguishing formal characteristicsâ (p. 15). For such critics, world-literary analyses involve reading for the formal disjunctions of fictions that register the alienating affects of capitalist modernity, especially in the peripheries and semi-peripheries of the wor...