After the Debate Over World Literature

Aamir R. Mufti, Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2016. xii + 292 pp. $35.00.

Warwick Research Collective (WReC), Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015. ix + 196 pp. $34.95 paperback.

For those literary critics who have yet to formulate a coherent position for or against world literature, I bring good news: recent evidence suggests that the polarity is not worth the trouble, and I receive this as good news for us all. It comes in the form of the two books that I welcome warmly here, and not only because each one makes a meaningful contribution to scholarly debates over world literature. Taken together, they place “world literature” among other ways to describe the hegemonic forces— for example, globalization, gravity, imperialism, and the United States—that govern our world, whether we like them or not. Seeing the sheer facticity of world literature in this context, Aamir Mufti’s Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures and the Warwick Research Collective’s (WReC) Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature trace its causes and effects with ecumenical uses of Marxist, postcolonial, and world-systems theory. That synthetic approach heralds a new era in a critical conversation that has become moribund, even though the question at its center remains pressing: what is the best way to read literature on a global scale?

This question has become central to literary scholarship in the U.S., but progress toward answers has been slow, and not always for good reasons. The scholarly conversation that advances it halts more regularly than most, allowing literary critics to posture, as we tend to do when we invest our critical terms with more currency than definition. That imbalance plagues the English translation of weltliteratur, whose prominence in the titles of literary conferences, monographs, and talks goes unmatched by any consensus about what it means. Its referents include, among other things: the aesthetics of toothless globalism evidenced in bad novels and Miramax movies; the homogenization of local cultures under global capital; the blindness of critics to the interpretive complexities that attend literary translation; and a methodology that comes with a profit motive, for maximizing the sale of textbooks in a global market. In all these guises, however, “world literature” elicits frowns from the faculty of literature departments, because it suggests degrees of quietism about the status quo. More precisely, it evidences an unsavory complicity with the expressions of neoliberalism that make life more ugly and difficult for humanists who work at universities in the U.S. today.

The resonance between “world literature” and “neoliberalism” is more widely assumed than carefully argued, and it has implications beyond the obvious. These critical terms work in tandem for literary study in an era of globalization and they connote each other; yet they also share a rhetorical function that should give us pause. That function is illuminated in “Six Theories of Neoliberalism” by media theorist Terry Flew, who used digital technologies to cull a huge swath of research published in the U.S. between 1990 and 2007 to show how “neoliberalism” emerged as a dominant “rhetorical trope” for the humanities (52).¹ While our colleagues in economics and political science honed rich vocabularies to theorize monetarism, for example, in relationship to the new right, humanists placed undue weight on neoliberalism to gesture broadly toward “the way things are” but should not be (Flew 51). This breadth of reference rendered neoliberalism useful “as an all-purpose denunciatory category,” a bogeyman to make its opponents look good by contrast. This indiscriminate usage was predicted by economists like Andrew Gamble, who warned against a nascent and unhelpful “tendency to reify neo-liberalism and to treat it as a phenomenon which manifests itself everywhere and in everything” (134).² That tendency is rife in the discursive community that Flew studied, the very same community that Mufti and the WReC enter, and not a moment too soon. What humanists did to “neoliberalism,” we did to “world literature,” too, emptying the term of specificity to make it signify everything we are structurally disposed to dislike.

Aamir Mufti and the WReC step into this breach to bring new clarity to world literature as a category of literary analysis, with different points of emphasis and notable points of disagreement, but also with a lot in common. Chief among these commonalities is their shared investment in historicizing world literature among the cultural logics of European imperialism and capitalist modernity. Deploying a wide variety of theoretical tools that suit that purpose, they show how literature works in a world where nations and corporations collude to ensure the untrammeled exploitation of the poor for the enrichment of the already rich. Those arguments rest on a premise that seems to me as unimpeachable as it is refreshing to see in this context: world literature is the artifact of a globe that is unequal by design because it is designed to make global capital go.

The WReC studies a hyphenated “world-literature” that is relatively recent and, by definition, singular. For them, “the literature of the world-system—of the modern capitalist world-system” (8) is a body of work that bears a record of “capitalist development,” one that “does not smooth away but rather produces unevenness, systematically and as a matter of course” (12). Unifying regions and markets in its networks and flows, this global system is also distinctly modern, because it did not exist as such before European imperialism produced “the capitalisation of the world” and “the full worlding of capital” (15). This fullness is imagined geographically on a globe that combines all the “alternative modernities” that register imperialism’s profits and losses (8). Intelligible only in this globality, the object of the WReC’s study demands a lens big enough to see it: “the literary ‘registration’ of the world-system” in its entirety (20).

That object of study is not quite as big as it sounds, though. The WReC reads fictions that they select carefully from far-flung literary traditions, choosing authors as apparently dissimilar as Iceland’s Halldór Laxness, Spain’s Pio Baroja, and South Africa’s Ivan Vladislavic. Across other differences, these authors interest the WReC because they “plot with particular clarity and resonance the landscape of the world system: its hills and valleys, nodes and contours, lines and textures, balance and compaction” (20). That criterion yields a body of literature that the WReC reads through a prismatic lens as a body of evidence, illuminating the relation between literature and capital on a global scale.

When the WReC reads The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (2008), for example, by Russia’s Victor Pelevin, they show how his nation’s “rapid conversion into an authoritarian petro-state” authorized his creation of a new genre: “semi-peripheral resource fiction” (98). The conventions of the modern novel needed this adaptation, the WReC argues, to give literary form to the condition of “oil shock, the violent impact of petroleum extraction and reorganisation of socio-ecological relations, not only in its content, but in its aesthetics, particularly its use of phantasmagoria and lycanthropy.” Here and throughout, the collective authors in the WReC take care to explain why they chose this text among the infinite variety that are written in every language, nation, and culture: because it has some particular purchase on a world governed by combined and uneven development. And they take care, too, to say that the criterion for legibility as world-literature is a matter of form as well as content.

In one of their most intriguing claims, the authors coin the term “irrealist” to place the stamp of world-literature on the “anti-linear plot lines, meta-narratorial devices, un-rounded characters, unreliable narrators, [and] contradictory points of view” that are conventionally understood as characteristics of Western modernisms and cosmopolitan modernity (51). “[W]e understand these techniques and devices more broadly,” they write, “as the determinate formal registers of (semi-) peripherality in the world-literary system, discernible wherever literary works are composed that mediate the lived experience of capitalism’s bewildering creative destruction (or destructive creation).” This irrealism has its roots in realism as defined by Marxist theorists and particularly by Georg Lukács, who foregrounded the politics inherent in what gets lost in the space between a realistic representation and the social reality it represents. By making that space apparent, the irrealistic texts the WReC reads also represent their own imbrication in the network of power relations that they depict. They show what literature has to offer a globalized world and they show what literature needs.

This is a compelling argument, and the WReC makes it in compelling ways. Each chapter is full of provocative but sweeping claims that invite a skeptical reader to think of counterexamples and further questions, even as she is mostly convinced. And a body of literature as big as the world yields a lot of counterexamples and further questions. Could the WReC’s account of world literature include analysis, for example, of how the ghazal form translates from Arabic traditions into contemporary Anglophone literatures via the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali (Shahid), or how it has been adapted by Adrienne Rich and W. S. Merwin, among others? If it can’t, what explains that exclusion? These questions and their unanswerability within the scope of Combined and Uneven Development testify to the degree to which the authors’ tight focus on the novel disables a sustained analysis of the poetic forms crucial to the literary cultures to the south and east of Europe. Their inattention to the limits of that framework evidences in turn a confinement to literatures that appear in the Anglophone world. The members of the WReC read only texts that are translated into English, which effectively universalizes the Anglophonic as the center of the global. That is a significant problem.

Aamir Mufti takes this linguistic hegemony as his primary problem in Forget English!, which theorizes the politics of the English language in the literary world. Mufti reads the rise of global English as a product of the imperial projects that paved the way for globalization as we know it, and his argument aligns readily with the WReC’s when he declares his intention “to restore Marx to the contemporary discussion of world literature” (36). But his restoration of Edward Said is more sustained and will have a greater impact. “[W]orld literature was from the beginning an eminently Orientalist idea,” Mufti writes, because the modern world becomes imaginable as such only through the cultural logics of Western imperialism that also install the English language as the lingua franca of a global economy. The grand narratives that advance the Western conquest of the East also render a new universality to a world that becomes newly imaginable “as an assemblage of ‘nations’ with distinct expressive traditions, above all ‘literary’ ones” (35). That presumed universality is the central object of Mufti’s critique, so he hones the critical terms he needs—Anglicism, linguistic indigenization, vernacularization—to show how this universalism works literarily.

To do that, Mufti reads texts written in Hindi, English, Urdu, and, in many cases, combinations of those languages, focusing particularly on their linguistic variation and literary translation. His aim is to trace the processes by which global English is imbued with a “loss of tradition (and even with debauchery and perversity),” while the “vernacular” that is English’s opposite becomes by contrast a marker of authenticity (157). A subtle and hitherto unrecognized form of Orientalism explains this vernacularization of a local language, which obscures how it “is itself implicated in a colonial genealogy and cannot sustain its claim to an ‘authentic’ position uncontaminated by the colonial process.” This species of Orientalism rests at the foundations of world literature as Mufti reads it and remains operative and relatively unappreciated among Anglophone critics today. Even as we grow familiar with Edward Said and the lineages that follow from him, Mufti argues, we have yet to uproot the Orientalist habits of thought that “continue to structure the practices of world literature” (19). Italicizing the verb, Mufti emphasizes the longevity of those cultural logics, which persist through the contemporary period “in transformed and updated forms that do not allow the continuities to be perceived immediately as such.” Mufti writes with the goal of their exposure, seeing “the need for a genealogy, that is, a critical-historical examination of a certain constellation of ideas and practices in its accretions and transformations over time” (19–20).

The new and subtler form of Orientalism that Mufti describes is evident, among other places, in the WReC’s failure to read beyond the limits of the English language. Blind to the ways in which global English subtends the unevenness they describe, they are blind also to the hegemonic status of their own language, which appears—following the laws of hegemony—everywhere and nowhere at once. The ubiquity of English appears to Mufti among the most important developments in the modern literary world, so he contends that any theory of world literature “must thus actively confront and attend to this functioning of English as vanishing mediator, rather than treat it passively as neutral or transparent medium” (16).

Mufti stages that confrontation by beginning in India, where nationalists constructed modern Hindi in opposition to an Urdu that was nonindigenous, following “the logic of linguistic indigenization: for the native speaker, the route to the discovery of that which is meant to be properly one’s own is a circuitous one, leading through precisely that which is to be rendered foreign and alien” (127). Mufti shows how this logic works via incisive readings of writers ranging from canonical Anglophone novelists to Shahid. His reading of Shahid is particularly revelatory, illuminating how the poet “performs a series of relays between ‘English’ and ‘vernacular’ spaces or practices, thereby helping us to bring to the fore the submerged network of relations between the cultural system of English and vernacular spaces in, for instance, the subcontinent” (195).

That particular “submerged network of relations” stays buried for members of the WReC, who remain startlingly sanguine about their own subject positions—not only as speakers of English, but as residents of an English department at a university in England. This thoroughgoing Anglicism is taken for granted in their analysis, which acknowledges its authors’ indebtedness to translators only once, with the concession that some cultural and linguistic nuance is lost through that debt. The larger implications of that loss go unremarked, but they are worth noting. Confined to reading only literature translated into English, the WReC produces an account of the world that has already been bought and sold for an English-speaking audience. And they do this work in an English department they presume to be a reliable locus for study because, they contend, “‘English’ has never been ‘national,’” and Anglophone critics have always been “deeply invested in the worldliness of language and literature, in their political instrumentality and social power” (24). That is a lot of faith to place in literature professors. We might be trustworthy insofar as we argue predictably against neoliberalism and for the causes of social justice, but it is only by a feat of magical thinking that we can trust those arguments to do political good in the world as it exists outside the university.

As the members of the WReC place unearned trust in English professors categorically, they profess a similarly excessive faith in the novel as a source of insight about the literary as such. David Damrosch raises this point in a trenchant critique of Combined and Uneven Development to which the WReC has replied that it reads the modern novel “paradigmatically, not exemplarily,” drawing a theory of the whole from the part (“WReC’s Reply” 535).³ They chose this part of world literature for their focus, they argue, because it is in the novel that “combined and uneven development is manifested with particular salience, due in no small part to its fundamental association with the rise of capitalism and its status in peripheral and semi-peripheral societies as a ‘modernizing’ import” (535–36). This is a startling claim. For the WReC, the novel is so thoroughly bound up in the cultural and economic processes that subtend global capitalism that it is equally reliable as a site of capitalism’s critique. But this logic would be more convincing were it to be framed in the interrogative and leavened with doubt: under what conditions can literary genres critique the structures and processes they need to survive? And how can a genre that underwrites the Western conquest of the East be trusted without reservation to represent “combined and uneven development” evenly all over the world?

Obscured by the novel’s privileged status in the literary traditions of the modern West, this question does not present itself to the WReC, yet it is precisely the species of blindness that Mufti aims to expose when he contends that “[h]idden inside world literature is the dominance of globalized English” (13). This dominance enables a false presumption of the universality of cultural formations indigenous to the West, like the English language and the realist novel. Acting on that presumption, critics who are otherwise attuned to the workings of hegemonic power “leave[ ] intact the Western literary cultures in their normative structural role” and consolidate their authority over “the forms of development against which all literary languages have to measure themselves” (95). That consolidation is antithetical to the WReC’s stated aims and it is surely unintended in their work, but it happens anyway because they take the globality of English for granted.

In other respects, however, the WReC scholars are articulate about the ways they are caught up in power relations they are unable to escape, and they model a necessary institutional reform with their collaborative authorship. The WReC comprises seven scholars at various stages of their careers and the book begins with a note on their “collaborative method”: “This book is the product of intensive discussion and debate,” they write, but “the process of collaboration should never be mistaken for the harmonious reconciliation of differences” (ix). On the contrary, they note, “[s]everal of our disagreements and divergent emphases are sedimented in this work.” The reader is left to wonder where that sediment lies and how it shapes the book’s biggest claims, some of which are notably ambitious. But the result is an analysis that is as richly textured as it is attentive to its status as a product of intellectual work. Frustrating the market imperative that makes every book the property of a single author who can cite it as a line on a CV, Combined and Uneven Development is refreshingly devoid of self-aggrandizing rhetorical gestures that make arguments against neoliberalism valuable as commodities in the neoliberal university.

Mufti is adept at those gestures and he writes alone in more ways than one. His monograph is published under his name only, consistent with the practice by which humanists cite our scholarship. But if that practice is as widespread as it is obligatory for most of us most of the time, Mufti does more than hew to the conventions that isolate us from our colleagues as writers. He also thematizes that isolation early on, when he constructs an authorial persona as a naughty boy, blushing with false modesty as he allows that what he has “to say in this book might be misconstrued as the (heavily footnoted) flashing of a middle finger at existing practices in the discipline of literary studies and the ways in which it conceives of the contemporary literary world” (55). Fashioning himself against his colleagues in a fuck-you pose, he disavows that punk-rock gesture falsely via a larger disavowal: “Dear Reader, avoid that temptation. There is no polemical intent here, just an attempt to think critically about our concepts and categories or ‘the way we think now’ about the world in which we live.” This reader pauses, then stops.

Of course there is a “polemical intent here,” just as there is in most scholarly monographs. Mufti posits his antagonists as colleagues who cultivate the cultural logics of Orientalism unintentionally under the rubric of world literature. His argument against them is a polemic and a good one, rhetorically and theoretically. It follows the conventions of scholarly writing well, which is also to say that there is nothing particularly punk rock about it. Protesting too much, Mufti imputes to his implied reader an overestimation of the damage he could do as a scholarly cowboy, with rhetoric that is diametrically opposite to the WReC’s. Their collaborative method obscures the individuality of their members, while his self-fashioning exaggerates his singularity among other scholars in his field. This strikes me as a peculiarly gendered species of swagger.

It is a momentary distraction, but it is also consistent with a pattern of citation that is similarly gendered. Mufti omits feminist thought with near entirety and refers with only the greatest brevity to writers and critics who are women. His reliance on the great men of literary criticism makes sense—he makes substantial use of Erich Auerbach, Franco Moretti, and Edward Said—but his scant mention of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak does not. She has written significant volumes on the subjects Mufti takes up here, but her name appears only once, in support of Mufti’s claim for the hegemony of American English in the world literary system. Spivak’s substantial bodies of work on vernacular languages on the Indian subcontinent go unmentioned, as does her work on the utility of Marxism to postcolonial theory. This absence is notable because both of these subjects are important to Mufti too.

Spivak’s arguments for the gendered quality of imperial power are even more pointedly ignored. Mufti might have used them as prompts to read some women writers in the traditions he studies. Shahid provides Mufti with a strong body of textual evidence to show how “the relationship of English to the Indian vernaculars in our own time replicates and updates the cultural logic of the colonial state” (39); Nadeem Aslam, Mulk Raj Anand, Salman Rushdie, and Tayeb Salih are all well chosen too. But in a long list of men, Arundhati Roy appears only in her capacity as “a celebrity writer and intellectual with global reach,” when Mufti notes that her media presence provides sufficient protection for her activism in the political sphere (188). His mention of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) is so brief that Ali does not appear in Mufti’s index. This near total exclusion of women is sad to see in a study of world literature, and the WReC does only marginally better than Mufti on this score.

The exclusion of women from world literature is of significance beyond these two cases because the debates over this critical term provide the terrain for a more urgent and far-reaching conversation about the ethical and political work that the humanities might do. To be excluded from the debates over world literature categorically, then, is to be excluded from something much bigger. Eric Hayot gestures toward the stakes that accrue to world literature with his contention that “the status of the concept of the world” acquires “rhetorically unmatched prestige” “in literary criticism” of the contemporary period, because the “imaginaries and implications of the history of globalization” function as “a sign of political, social, and economic engagement (by both the critic and the artwork).”⁴ Following this logic, Hayot argues, the critic who develops a strong theory of world literature also develops a strong justification, “implicitly, [for] the continued importance of the humanistic study of culture.” The future of the humanities gets written through the debate over world literature, as Aamir Mufti also argues. In the epilogue, Mufti places “world literature” in scare quotes for the first time to make this case: the critical discourse of world literature “resurface[s] from time to time at critical moments in the history of the bourgeois world, moments in which precisely the range of human social and cultural experience comes yet again to be at stake” (243).

No wonder, then, that these debates have cohered best as an archive of non sequiturs and false equivalences, linked by the subtextual anxieties that hold the texts of world literature together. Those anxieties take shape within universities in the U.S. in a form particular to this time and place, among humanists who have become obligated to justify the value of our work in an economy that pegs its values to the dollar. It seems meaningful that a period witnessing the intensification of corporate practices in U.S. universities should also witness a rise in scholarly references to “neoliberalism” and “world literature.” Each of these terms enables a theater of activism where activism seems truly warranted, enabling critics to position themselves rhetorically against the world as it is without challenging much of anything or risking the status we need to do our work.⁵ The claims we make for world literature become legible, then, as claims for the relevance of that work—not only to our colleagues, but to the administrators and legislators who fund it, often grudgingly.

These stakes are high, and they are material as well as theoretical, so we might do well to ask, by what logic or evidence do we invoke “world literature” to make claims about political and economic realities? The Marxist theorists Sarah Brouillette and David Thomas frame this question in a different way in a forum on Combined and Uneven Development convened by Comparative Literature Studies. Balancing their generally positive response to the WReC with skepticism about the enterprise of reading literature seriously at all, Brouillette and Thomas ask, “Is there any good reason, aside from the fact that we are trained in literary studies and teaching literature, and working in situations in which literary study is, as a whole practice, under threat, to persist in treating literature as offering any unique insight into the dynamics that are identified in this study?” (512).⁶ That is, if literary critics want to see the landscape of combined and uneven development, why do we look for it in literature rather than in the world?

This is a serious question and others follow from it. If literary critics want and need to justify our intellectual work, why do we marshal those arguments against neoliberalism instead; and if we want to argue against neoliberalism, what does literature have to do with it? Aamir Mufti and the WReC provide different and very useful ways to move the debate over world literature out of this rhetorical dead end. Historicizing the relation between literary work and the global economy that subtends it, they pave the way toward a moment when we can talk about world literature and know what we mean.

Queens College

City University of New York