Note: This is a talk I gave at the last ASEEES conference. It informs part of my book project, but
I also kind of like it as a stand-alone piece. I hope you enjoy.
World literature is postsocialist literature; or, more precisely, world
literature as a disciplinary paradigm is possible only in a postsocialist
world. The paradigm is predicated on the (imagined) frictionless exchange
and political homogeneity of a globe deprived of its “second world,” bereft
of political alternatives, and unquestionably in thrall to markets and their
paradigms. In this sense, world literature is how we imagine literature in
a specifically postsocialist world. Or, if you like, it is comparative
literature at the end of history.
First, the unexamined assumptions of the paradigm.
If you pick up any book on world literature, you’ll find that the
recent revival gained steam around the same time. Emily Apter in
Against World Literature, for instance, writes, “World Literature,
as a disciplinary rallying point of literary criticism and the academic
humanities, became increasingly prominent from the mid-1990s on,” connecting
the timestamp to the journal World Literature Today and the publication of
Pascale Casanova’s landmark World Republic of Letters. Franco Moretti’s
2000 article “Conjectures on World Literature” suggests that “it’s time we
returned to that old ambition of Weltliteratur: after all, the literature
around us is now unmistakably a planetary system.” Moretti declines to specify
what he means by “now” or how this unmistakable planetarization has come about.
David Damrosch, in the 2010s, writes, “The cultural and political realignments of
the past two decades have opened the field of world literature to an unprecedented,
even vertiginous variety of authors and countries,” without further elaboration of
what those “cultural and political realignments” might have been.
Moretti’s “now,” Damrosch’s “recent decades,” and Apter’s “mid-1990s on” all refer to
the same historical moment, a moment that—though, curiously, none of them mention it—
was characterized more than anything else by the end of the Cold War and by the triumphalist
promise of free markets, liberal democracy, and the new world order. That promise is not
hard to discern in the world literary paradigm; indeed, the paradigm would not be possible
without it. World literature is liberal, market-based, and uni-polar. It is even based on
Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems theory in both Moretti’s and Casanova’s versions.
Though all of the founders of this paradigm explicitly place the rise of this unipolar
market paradigm just at the moment that global socialism faded (and Moretti even remarks,
in an aside that “the way we imagine comparative literature is a mirror of how we see the
world”), none of them examine the political context that, I would argue, is the very condition
of possibility for the creation of this paradigm. Acknowledged or not, then, a postsocialist
globe is a prerequisite for the current vision of world literature.
I’ll sketch two of those consequences now.
The first has to do with the marketization of culture worldwide and especially in the
post-socialist world, which has both economic and aesthetic consequences. The former
“Second World’s” transition to capitalist markets of cultural exchange meant the entrenchment
of a global consensus on the mechanisms and standards for the valuation of cultural texts
based on market success. Think of the bestseller, billboard, or blockbuster status, and also
indirect market principles such as those embodied by literary and other cultural prizes. In
this way, the postsocialist moment is not merely a time of often very painful transition
for the former “Second World,” it is also a period of global transition, when the socialist
counterweight to capitalist modes of thinking falls away, and a global neoliberal consensus
begins to feel inevitable. Though this transition has often been discussed in the political
and economic realms, it affects cultural exchange no less. Markets for cultural goods have
globalized through both direct import and exchange, while modes of cultural valuation have
also merged through the former socialist world’s imitation of the West (often framed as
“catching up”). The result is a global system of culture premised not only on the assumed
freedom of exchange across national borders, but also—and perhaps more important—on the assumed
fungibility of cultural value across different contexts. In other words, a Japanese or Italian
bestseller, publishers assume, will become a hit when translated into English or Russian, crossing
national borders successfully in a way that a 1950s socialist realist novel might not have. The
assumed fungibility of cultural value that makes Haruki Murakami and Elena Ferrante so attractive
to publishers worldwide depends not only on world markets, but also on similar modes of evaluating
culture across national contexts—modes of evaluation that assume globalized “structures of feeling”
(to borrow from Raymond Williams) among widely divergent readerships. Not only world markets, but
also shared modes of cultural evaluation and assumed similarities of audience responses are, in
large part, effects of the post-1989 world. The mechanisms that allow for understanding world
literature as an uninterrupted network (Moretti) or a world republic (Casanova), or as something
always translatable across cultures—a notion against which Emily Apter argues—these mechanisms are
born of a largely unexamined political and economic consensus with serious aesthetic consequences.
The second consequence I want to touch on is more explicitly political and more polemical.
As all its proponents hasten to emphasize, world literature is a decolonizing paradigm. It is interested in voices from beyond Western Europe and Anglo-America; it cracks open curricula, syllabi, and anthologies to make room for Asian, African, minority, and indigenous literatures; it reads across national borders in order to constantly, in Moretti’s words, “be a thorn in the side, a permanent intellectual challenge to national literature—especially the local literature.” In this way, world literature positions itself as continuing the work of postcolonialism; but it has also—in many ways—taken over from that paradigm, and it is hard not to see that take over as a channeling of authority away from the periphery and into the center. Instead of Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and Achille Mbembe, writing—at least initially—from geographically distant locales, we have Franco Moretti’s Stanford Literary Lab and David Damrosh’s Institute for World Literature at Harvard. This consolidation of symbolic capital reproduces precisely the colonial paradigms it pretends to fight, channeling resources away from the peripheries and towards already rich and powerful centers, and (no less important) away from scholars of color and toward some of the most academically pedigreed Euro-American academics.
Perhaps the re-colonizing of postcolonial studies is not so unexpected; But what makes the world literature paradigm different is that it not only appropriates the subject matter, moral authority, and ethical imperative from postcolonial studies, but it also changes the mechanism of the decolonizing work it intends to continue.
Postcolonial studies, from Frantz Fanon and Edward Said to the present day, has been born out of revolutionary Marxist traditions of the relentless critique of entrenched systems of power and their relationships to cultural production. Many postcolonial writers and scholars played active roles in ongoing political struggles. As an academic paradigm, postcolonialism has explicitly called for left politics that would allow for the formation of coalitions that cut across geographies. Postcolonialism, then, works to decolonize literary studies through the mechanisms of solidarity and critique. World literature, on the other hand, explicitly bases its planetary vision on models of globalized flows of capital, while nevertheless maintaining that it continues the decolonizing work of postcolonialism. In this way, world literature makes capitalism into the mechanism of decolonization, a notion that—though common to the neoliberal worldview—would horrify many anticolonial activists and thinkers (both within and beyond literary studies), and a notion that has become increasingly pervasive in, if not definitive of, the postsocialist world and its cultural paradigms.
In very brief conclusion, it is essential to understand world literature as predicated on a postsocialist world not only so that we can offer correctives to the paradigm as Jinyi suggested yesterday and as scholars like Rossen Djagalov, Harsha Ram, and Galin Tihanov have also recently argued, but also so that we can clearly see the consequences of this paradigm on both the aesthetics and politics of literature. Ultimately, just as we’ve moved beyond the end of history model of geopolitics, I think we need to move beyond the world literature model of letters and start to imagine different ways of thinking global aesthetics that would not be premised on assumed neoliberal hegemony.