Jodi A. Byrd and Michael Rothberg, “Between Subalternity and Indigeneity”

Thursday, February 24, 2011

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[The Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory has a long history of publishing edited books and special issues derived from events. In the latest of these, Michael Rothberg, former Director of the Unit, and Jodi Byrd, on the faculty of English and American Indian Studies, collaborated to produce a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postocolonial Studies from the Unit's 2008 conference, “Decolonizations: Subaltern Studies and Indigenous Critical Theory.”]

We are pleased to announce the publication of "Between Subalternity and Indigeneity," a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postocolonial Studies (13.1, 2011). This special issue, which we have edited together, derives from the spring 2008 conference “Decolonizations: Subaltern Studies and Indigenous Critical Theory,” co-organized by the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory and the American Indian Studies Program. The special issue features an introduction by the co-editors and essays by Elizbeth A. Povinelli, Jodi A. Byrd, Gaurav Desai, Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, and Robert Warrior. This event was one of the first ever to explore the relation between postcolonial studies, American Indian Studies, and indigenous studies. We hope the publication of this special issue will contribute to an ongoing dialogue.

Below is the opening paragraph of our introduction, “Between Subalternity and Indigeneity: Critical Categories for Postcolonial Studies.” The remainder of the introduction and the special issue essays can be found here (log in required).

In bringing together the categories of "subalternity" and "indigeneity" this special section of Interventions seeks to inaugurate a conversation that has been waiting to happen for at least two decades--at least since the definitive entry of subaltern studies and postcolonial theory into the North American academy around 1988. In that year alone, Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak published their co-edited anthology Selected Subaltern Studies, Spivak put out her own essay collection In Other Worlds, which included her first translations of Mahasveta Devi’s stories as well as her influential essay on Devi, "A Literary Representation of the Subaltern", and, perhaps most consequentially, Spivak’s "Can the Subaltern Speak?" appeared in the collection Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson. Some critics cynically read the inclusion of a school of historiography dedicated to the non-elite histories of the Indian subcontinent within the very different context of the Reagan/Bush I-era American academy as the expression of a depoliticized appropriation of radical thought, yet the travels of the subaltern concept have been very much a part of its history from the beginning. Drawing inspiration from Antonio Gramsci’s writings on the "Southern Question" in Italy, which adapted the military term "subaltern" to describe uneven national development, as well as from structuralist and poststructuralist theories of discourse, subaltern studies took shape in the 1980s as a project for rewriting the history of South Asia outside the bounds of colonialist, elite nationalist, and Marxist frameworks. The subaltern studies scholars sought to bring attention to peasant insurrections that had remained invisible in dominant and even much leftist historiography by developing alternative models of history and politics attuned to the agency of subordinated social groups. Spivak’s appreciative but critical engagement with the subaltern studies project brought the work of the collective to the attention first of postcolonial scholars and soon thereafter to scholars and activists engaged with ethnic and minority critique on a global scale. Read more

Berlin Diary: For A Democratic Culture

Monday, September 29, 2008

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Written by Michael Rothberg, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory

Greetings from Berlin, where I’m spending several months of my sabbatical. Among other things, I hope to use my time here to provide an outside-the-US perspective on some of the questions of theory, culture, and politics that concern us at Kritik and at the Unit for Criticism. I composed the following thoughts before reading the excellent forum around the work of Roberto Dainotto, but this post might be taken as part of a further thinking of “Europe,” here observed from a slightly different—and perhaps more optimistic—angle.

Berlin is an extraordinary city in many ways, and it’s impossible not to be fascinated by the intensive layering of histories that characterizes it. This layering is especially obvious when you move through the city on a bicycle, the preferred means of transportation. Within a few minutes you can pass from West to East, riding over the site of the former wall and moving from a reconstructed city-center-cum-mall like Potsdamer Platz through the late eighteenth-century Brandenburg Gate and on to the former East Germany’s main drag, Unter den Linden. On the way, you pass Peter Eisenman’s recently constructed Holocaust memorial, the new American embassy, and government buildings like the Reichstag, a late nineteenth-century colossus topped with a beautiful Norman Foster-designed glass dome. If you continue down Unter den Linden, you’ll come to the Humboldt University, where Hegel lectured and Du Bois studied, and the Pergamon Museum, which houses an enormous altar taken from what is now Turkey. And that’s just one small, albeit central, part of the city.


[Peter Eisenman's "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe"]

What is most interesting to me about Berlin, however, goes beyond architecture: it has to do with the particular intellectual culture one finds here. At its best, the city’s intellectual life represents a kind of critical and reflective embodiment of the historical layering one finds in the urban environment.


[Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum, with the East German television tower in the background]

Let me give an example. A couple of weeks ago I attended a small conference on “Antisemitism in the Context of Migration and Racism.” The outgrowth of a study on this topic by the group “amira”—a research project sponsored by Berlin’s Verein für Demokratische Kultur e.V. [Association for Democratic Culture]—the conference was primarily directed at social workers involved with migrant youth (of primarily Turkish, Kurdish, and Arab background). The conference itself featured academics, activists, and civil servants as well as social workers and teachers of varied ages and backgrounds, and consisted of a day of presentations, discussions, and workshops. As all involved agreed, the topic of the study itself is a sensitive one—the alleged presence of antisemitism among young minorities who themselves suffer daily the effects of racism, poverty, and marginalization. Many expressed discomfort with the possible impact of such a discussion in a moment of heightened anti-Muslim racism (or “Islamophobia,” as it’s come to be called by some), in Germany and elsewhere. Personaly, I was never fully convinced of the premise of the event—i.e. that a problem exists that is best addressed in terms of particular ethnicized populations, as opposed to at a more holistic, societal level.

Yet, despite these apparent shortcomings, the conference struck me as successful. It created the space for a complex, searching discussion that brought together many layers of the social topography of the city, the country, and indeed the “new” Europe as a whole. It moved back and forth between the most practical questions of pedagogy and more conceptual issues about how to frame the problems of antisemitism and racism in a society both fractured and held together by a diverse population.

As a scholar, I was particularly struck by the degree to which the discussion confronted what I have come to call “multidirectional memory”—the fact that collective memories circulate between social groups and that those groups do not maintain unique possession of “their own” pasts. Remembrance is a social process in which disparate histories intersect, catalyze, and shape each other; it is not, despite what is often believed, a zero-sum game defined by scarce resources. At the “amira” conference, the discussion turned again and again to the relation between different histories of suffering and to the non-obvious but necessary question of how to adjudicate between them. It was not a “competition of victims” but a multidirectional confrontation with the past and present of a stratified and layered social situation—a “post-National Socialist” context, as one of the participants called it, that is also analogous to, but not identical with, postcolonial contexts in other European countries. It was a confrontation that involved addressing delicate questions of “speaking for others” and “speaking as an X,” but somehow it also seemed to avoid the particularly American problem of identity politics and the moralization of the political that too often accompanies it.

As is often the case—but perhaps even more so when one is out of one’s most familiar element and questions of translation are unavoidable—I found myself listening from a double perspective. As I, along with the other audience members and participants, reflected on the topic at hand—the situation in Berlin today—I kept thinking at the same time about another context: the United States. I thought in particular about the name of the event’s sponsoring agency—the “Association for Democratic Culture.” That, I thought, is precisely what we need in America: a renewal of democratic culture. Although my thinking of late has certainly been influenced by the sorry state of electoral politics in the US, I was not, obviously, thinking of the Democratic Party. I was thinking instead of what the conference set in motion: a multidirectional confrontation with history and actuality that was free of excess pathos, resentment, and accusation, and that took place in a context of reasonable disagreement and debate.

I don’t want to idealize the situation in Germany by any means; the very fact that it is still necessary (as it most definitely is) to talk about antisemitism and racism more than sixty years “after Auschwitz,” a half century after the first “guestworkers” arrived, and almost two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall indicates that democratic pedagogy has not been as fully successful here as it might sometimes seem. But it is precisely the decades of confronting its own racist past that has made Germany—and Berlin in particular—a space where serious and non-reductive conversations about social injustice and intersecting histories can take place, at least occasionally, in the public sphere.

What will it take to build that kind of self-critical democratic culture in the United States?
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Defining the Humanities

Thursday, July 10, 2008

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Written by Michael Rothberg, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory

It’s not clear to me that there is a consensus definition of the humanities, especially among non-humanist colleagues, administrators, and citizens, but even among some humanities scholars themselves! According to the Oxford American Dictionary, the humanities are: “learning or literature concerned with human culture, esp. literature, history, art, music, and philosophy.” In our context, it is probably worth adding that the “learning or literature” we’re concerned with is comprised of academic disciplines that study human culture.

Does this question of definition matter? I believe it does. Together with many of you who responded to the discussion of the “crisis of the humanities,” I think that the humanities disciplines will be stronger when they work closely with non-humanities disciplines and remain open to the blurring of the bounds of knowledge that has been central to interdisciplinary cultural scholarship for decades. But I also think we cannot afford to sacrifice the specificity of our forms of knowledge—both for reasons of disciplinary self-interest and, more important, because those forms are essential to the future of our planet. This post arises from my sense (and I could cite evidence) that a fuzziness about the precise contours of the humanities (even if those contours are themselves fuzzy) characterizes a lot of important decision making about the future of the humanities both here at Illinois and, most likely, in other places, too. There may be opportunities to exploit in such fuzziness, but there are also significant dangers.

With that context in mind, here’s my own attempt to formulate a definition:

The humanities are academic disciplines that employ critical, historical, interpretive, and speculative methods to study the meanings, values, and effects of human endeavors.

*By critical, I mean the close analysis of texts, concepts, contexts, and events as well as the self-reflexive scrutiny of the investigator’s own methods of analysis.

*By historical, I mean an understanding of meanings, values, and effects as situated in complex—but at least partially understandable—contexts and as varying and changing according to time and place.

*By interpretive, I mean that meanings, values, and effects are not self-evident, fixed, or inherent in texts, events, or contexts, but rather must be disclosed in discrete acts of critical analysis that will produce varied results (i.e. diverse interpretations).

*By speculative, I mean that the meanings, values, and effects that humanities scholars study are non-obvious and not always empirically verifiable, although they sometimes are and although questions of evidence remain crucial.


I do not presuppose that all humanities disciplines and all humanities scholarship will make equal use of these four characteristics or will makes use of them equally in every work of scholarship. Nor do I presuppose that non-humanities disciplines do not make use of some or all of these characteristics. But I do think that a family resemblance characterizes the humanities and meaningfully distinguishes them from the non-humanities along the lines of the definition offered above.

Does this definition (and set of sub-definitions) describe the humanities for you? If not, what changes would you propose? Please keep in mind that an effective definition will have to be concise, even if its terms are open to further elaboration (as I’ve tried to demonstrate here). Perhaps most important, how can we use such a definition to return to our earlier question: how to defend the humanities at a moment when knowledge is increasingly being corporatized and instrumentalized? I think we can (and need to) use such a definition of the humanities and the value of the humanities in discussions with university administrators and others.
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Crisis of the Humanities?

Thursday, June 26, 2008

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Written by Michael Rothberg, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory

Is there a crisis of the humanities? If so, how do we characterize it and what can we do about it? If not, why is the rhetoric of crisis so persistent?

Duke University Romance Studies scholar Roberto Dainotto takes an approach to these questions that I think runs nicely against the grain of current common sense. In his recent book Europe (In Theory)—which is not primarily about the crisis of the humanities, but rather, as its title suggests, about the construction of Europe—Dainotto writes: “The problem . . . is no longer whether the humanities with their tools—rhetoric, philology, historicism—will be adequate or relevant to the technologized, quantified, and statistic-oriented sciences, but whether the latter are still capable of responding to the humanities” (9).

Is this a useful starting point for considering either the crisis of the humanities or the rhetoric of crisis? How can we reframe the rhetoric so as to avert the crisis?

The questions I’ve posed here are not meant simply as “rhetorical” questions, although questions of rhetoric are obviously at the heart of the issue of “crisis.” University administrators, state legislatures, and that vague entity known as “the public” are constantly asking us to justify ourselves—and not just in Illinois, I’m sure.

In a couple of weeks I’ll be attending the first meeting of a Humanities Board convened by our Provost. We need to develop lines of argument adequate to these times without betraying the importance of what we do. This ought to be a collective effort, so please let me know what you think.
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Secular Collectivity

Thursday, April 24, 2008

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Written by Michael Rothberg, Unit for Criticism

[This short piece was originally presented at the “Erich Auerbach and the Future of Criticism” conference on April 18, 2008 here at Illinois as part of a roundtable on “Auerbach and Edward Said.” The other panelists were Jed Esty and conference co-organizer Manuel Rota. The conference focused especially on the legacy of Auerbach’s great book Mimesis, which he wrote while in exile from Nazism in Istanbul. In American critical discourse, Edward Said’s many discussions and invocations of Auerbach and the circumstances of the writing of Mimesis have helped make the German-Jewish scholar a recurring topos for discussions of comparative and world literature.]

I am interested in how Said draws on Auerbach as a model for the intellectual and as a point of departure or Ansatzpunkt for issues of commitment and cultural legacy. In the relation between Said and Auerbach I see a series of tensions that remain unresolved: between the individual and the collective; between part and whole; between home and homelessness; between critique and affirmation; and ultimately between what, with a nod to Jean-Luc Nancy, I would call common being and being-in-common. At stake is the question of whether commitment and cultural legacy can be rethought from the grounds of being-in-common instead of common being—that is, from the grounds of a community without essence.

In a 1998 essay in Critical Inquiry, Aamir Mufti has most convincingly drawn out the implications for the discussion of Auerbach as an intellectual model for Said, and he refers, rightly, I think, to Said’s 1983 essay “Secular Criticism,” the introduction to The World, the Text, and the Critic. Mufti emphasizes “Auerbach in Istanbul” as Said’s privileged figure of the secular, minority, exiled intellectual. Since Emily Apter’s essay on Spitzer and Auerbach in Istanbul (now collected in The Translation Zone), the empirical picture of Auerbach’s exile has appeared more complicated—and I’m sure that Kader Konuk’s forthcoming work on the writing of Mimesis in Istanbul will give us the definitive account of this moment. My own concern here is less with the historical context of Auerbach’s exile, however, than with its significance for Said and its role in his argument for a secular criticism.

For Said, as Mufti, Bruce Robbins, and others remark, secularism as a critical ideal is not primarily the opposite of religiosity, but rather a skeptical stand toward all forms of nationalism, identity politics, and dogma. (I’ll return to the question of nationalism at the end of this post.) Here is how Said defines criticism:

On the one hand, the individual mind registers and is very much aware of the collective whole, context or situation in which it finds itself. On the other hand, precisely because of this awareness—a worldly self-situating, a sensitive response to the dominant culture—that the individual consciousness is not naturally and easily a mere child of the culture, but a historical and social actor in it. And because of that perspective, which introduces circumstance and distinction where there had only been conformity and belonging, there is distance, or what we might call criticism. A knowledge of history, a recognition of the importance of social circumstance, an analytical capacity for making distinctions: these trouble the quasi-religious authority of being comfortably at home among one’s people, supported by known powers and acceptable values, protected against the outside world. (The World, the Text 15-16)


But if distance and discomfort are central to Said’s conception of the intellectual, they alone do not constitute secular criticism for Said. The opposite, proximity, is also necessary. A few pages later, he writes, “Criticism in short is always situated; it is skeptical, secular, reflectively open to its own failings. . . . To stand between culture and system is therefore to stand close to—closeness itself having a particular value for me—a concrete reality about which political, moral, and social judgments have to me made and, if not only made, then exposed and demystified” (26). To be “situated” as a secular critic is to be both distant from and proximate to culture. Said captures this paradoxical situatedness in the figure of Auerbach’s tenuous exile at the edge of Europe, in Istanbul.

Said’s favorite figure of this situated, secular intellectual comes from the end of Auerbach’s essay on “Philology and Weltliteratur,” in which, after identifying “the earth” as the philologist’s home instead of the nation, Auerbach goes on to dispossess the critic of any claim to home. He famously cites what Said calls the “exilic credo” of Hugo of St. Victor: “The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is a foreign land” (qtd. in The World, the Text 7). In Said’s multiple citations of this passage he makes Hugo a little less unhomely for his readers than he appears in Auerbach’s essay by citing him in English rather than Latin.

The minority intellectual who emerges from the chain of citations linking Hugo to Auerbach to Said is an incredibly compelling figure of engaged dissent or proximate distance, and Said’s summation of this position is all but irresistible: “criticism must think of itself as life-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse; its social goals are noncoercive knowledge produced in the interests of human freedom” (29). In a contribution to a special issue of boundary 2 (2004) on “critical secularism,” Stathis Gourgouris calls such secular criticism an “experimental” attitude and likens it to the genre of the essay, a reference to Adorno’s account of his own aleatory approach in “The Essay as Form” (Adorno is another key minority exile for Said).

But somewhere around here I start to worry about the absolutely anti-systemic tendency of the account of criticism that Said takes, in part, from the model of Auerbach. Auerbach becomes the occasion for Said’s refusal to affiliate with any theoretical movement or critical ideology: he writes that “criticism modified in advance by labels like ‘Marxism’ or ‘liberalism’ is, in my view, an oxymoron” (SC 28). I have two questions about Said’s refusal of system, method, school, and theory and they both turn on questions of collectivity:

First, does Said’s refusal of system risk becoming a methodological individualism? For me, this would be one of the real limits of the figure of Auerbach in Istanbul: it’s a heroic, or perhaps melancholic, but in any case individualist model of the exile, even if the intellectual project involves the reconstruction of various cultural totalities through the synecdochal model of beginning from textual fragments.

Second, does the combination of the secular critique of identity with a methodologically individualist skepticism of system risk writing out the collective energies that theory can represent and that are encoded in the texts of “religiosity,” broadly conceived? Is ideology not a necessary component of political movement and collectivity? The negative critique of secular criticism needs supplementation by the kind of recognition Fredric Jameson offers in the too-little discussed final chapter of The Political Unconscious, which takes up “The Dialectic of Utopia and Ideology.” Jameson provocatively suggests that “all class consciousness—or in other words, all ideology in the strongest sense, including the most exclusive forms of ruling-class consciousness just as much as that of oppositional or oppressed classes—is in its very nature Utopian. . . . insofar as it expresses the unity of a collectivity. The achieved collectivity or organic group of whatever kind—oppressors fully as much as oppressed—is Utopian in itself, but only insofar as all such collectivities are themselves figures for the ultimate concrete collective life of an achieved Utopian or classless society” (PU 289, 291). No doubt, we can hear in Jameson’s use of “figure” in this passage an echo of his teacher Auerbach’s thought, and particularly of the notion of “figural realism” in which the representation of the everyday here and now connects vertically to another realm, here secularized as classless society. While I have some questions about the residually Christian framework of even this secularized model of figuration, I also think it would be worth exploring how Jameson’s insights might provide a way of thinking about the Eurocentric canon represented in Mimesis as a utopian figuration anticipating an even more worldly collectivity—as I believe Said would want us to see it as well.

My questions for Said and Auerbach, then, are these: How do we get from criticism back to collectivity? Can we imagine moving from minority critique to something that we might not want to call majority but that is also not simply oppositional? Is it possible to imagine not just secular criticism but secular collectivity, a being-in-common that does not presuppose common being?

Postscript

After I gave the talk posted above I read Robert Warrior’s fascinating essay “Native Critics in the World: Edward Said and Nationalism,” his contribution to the 2006 collectively authored book American Indian Literary Nationalism (written with Jace Weaver and Craig S. Womack). Drawing on his own experiences studying with Said, Warrior makes a compelling case that one can be—and indeed that Said was—both a secular critic and a nationalist, and he makes a provocative allusion to the figure of Auerbach in Istanbul:

Said’s articles were included in the one box of research papers and two boxes of books that I mailed to myself when I moved to Pawhuska on the Osage Reservation to draft my dissertation in the spring of 1990. I can . . . remember comparing what I was doing to Said’s description . . . of the impact of exile on Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis.
In his monumental study of western literature, Auerbach describes the difficulty of composing so ambitious a book after having fled from Nazi Europe to Istanbul, a great city, but one with no library to support such an effort. In moving to Pawhuska, I was the opposite of an exile, someone returning home to do what Taiaiake Alfred would later advocate for Native American Studies, that it come from ‘someplace Indian.’ . . . Thinking in Pawhuska of Auerbach in Istanbul and the importance of that to Said’s self-conception of exile in his life of criticism, I thought of the ironies of how I had come home to the national capital of the Osages only to be reminded of the underdeveloped nature of our life as a nation without, among other things, a library. . . . Reading and rereading The World, the Text, and the Critic as I worked in Pawhuska helped me to learn one of the enduring lessons I took from my work with Edward Said. That was the idea that it is possible to be a critic, a nationalist, a cosmopolitan, and a humanist all at the same time. (191-92)


Although my own project is not a nationalist one, Warrior’s vision of “Native nationalism,” inspired in part by Said, is one that sounds very much like the secular collectivity I call for above—it involves, among other things, a community open to negotiation with internal and external difference. Perhaps most inspiring to me, though, is the fascinating itinerary that is traced here: from the German-Jewish exile in the Islamic world, to the Palestinian Christian based in New York (one of the great “Jewish” cities of the world!), to the cosmopolitan Osage nationalist and critic.

Kader Konuk’s work on Auerbach in Istanbul demonstrates that Auerbach was not the isolated figure there that he is often made out to be; rather he was part of a lively, modern, secularizing, conflicted society that was also host to a large community of refugees. A new vision of the multiply affiliated intellectual that emerges from Auerbach, Said, Konuk, and Warrior seems like a good Ansatzpunkt for thinking further about the possibility of secular collectivity.
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Forum on World Literature (IV)

Introduction II: The Institutional Mundane

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

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Written by Michael Rothberg, Director of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory

This multi-part series concerns the problem of how to think about literature in relation to national, transnational, and global frames of reference. The stakes of these questions are simultaneously theoretical, methodological, and practical. They encompass issues about world systems and global flows, about syllabi and research projects, and about mundane, seemingly extra-literary institutional structures. Here I want to pose a few questions about the institutional mundane and about the medium of literary study that I hope others will want to take up in the comments section. Although my formulations grow in part out of the “geography” of the Illinois campus, I’m curious to hear how these issues translate to other terrain.

History, habit, and bureaucratic logic have conspired to divide the field of literary study at the University of Illinois into two “worlds”: on one side of the Arts Quad, the so-called Foreign Languages Building (FLB), now the School of Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, and on the other side, the English Building. What are the effects of this institutional structure, some version of which is probably common across US universities? How does the opposition between “English” and “Foreign Languages” structure research programs and pedagogical opportunities? It’s no secret that resources and prestige are allocated unevenly across departments and schools. Do administrative units in the American academy obey the same competitive, hierarchical logic that nations do in Pascale Casanova’s “World Republic of Letters”? Is there an “Illinois Republic of Letters” that mimics Casanova’s “World Republic,” but with the location of Greenwich Mean Time shifted from “Paris” to Wright St.? If so, how can we realign the relations between center and margin on a local basis?

Another set of questions concerns the medium of our discipline: language. Our campus—and, of course, the larger world we live in—is markedly multilingual. Yet, the organization of literary study remains trapped in what Yasemin Yildiz, following the linguist Ingrid Gogolin, calls a “monolingual habitus.” A product of nation-state formation, our too frequently monolingual habits impose unconscious limits on our approach to far more heterogeneous texts, intellectual traditions, and student bodies. How can national literature departments—especially, but not only, the hegemonic English Department—multilingualize themselves? What should be the roles of translation and basic language study in breaking the monolingual habitus and promoting transnational literacy? What are the possibilities for collaboration instead of rivalry in this area?

One of my secret hopes for this pair of panels has been that it might produce conversation about and across the “Foreign languages”/”English” divide. That may seem like an unnecessary task given the extent of cross-border traffic—after all, many of us regularly traverse these boundaries for all sorts of reasons, personal and professional. Yet it still seems to me, following Franco Moretti, that the Illinois literary system is “one, and unequal” (“Conjectures” 56): a gulf exists that divides our Republic of Letters—and probably the literary republics of many other institutions of higher learning as well. This forum is meant to prompt critical reflection that is simultaneously local and global, theoretical and practical. Read more

Forum on World Literature (I)

Introduction: National? Comparative? Global? Literary Methodology Today.

Monday, February 4, 2008

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Written by Michael Rothberg, Director of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory

The following series grows out of two spring 2008 Unit for Criticism panels on world literature and literary methodology. The idea for this series crystallized when I was reading Through Other Continents, a recent book by the Americanist literary critic Wai Chee Dimock. A brilliant and original thinker, Dimock attempts to invent a literary study attuned to the geographical scale of the world-system and inspired by what she calls the “deep time” of geology and astronomy (6). She argues of American literature that “[r]ather than being a discrete entity, it is better seen as a crisscrossing set of pathways, open-ended and ever multiplying, weaving in and out of other geographies, other languages and cultures” (3). Dimock wants Americanist critics to be conversant with “Persian literature, Hindu literature, Chinese literature,” and with “written records going back five or six thousand years, and oral, musical, and visual material going back further” (3, 6). As a natural born comparatist—or, at least, as someone who has trouble concentrating for too long on any single nation-state—I’m sympathetic to this move toward a world-system of literature. I can only salute, if with a certain amount of anxiety over the work ahead, the call for linguistic competence beyond Europe and for historical competence beyond modernity. But what struck me as odd in Through Other Continents—and what served as the stimulus for this forum—is the simultaneous boldness of Dimock’s call for a radically extended literacy and the simple fact that her book remains a study of “American literature.” Ultimately, a project that marks itself as innovatively comparative and global maintains somewhat traditional ties to the national scale: American literature may now be defined as “a criss-crossing set of pathways,” but for Dimock it is still an “it,” which certainly sounds like a “discrete entity.” That “it” made me wonder: is Dimock’s return to the national an inevitable one? What are the limits to literary study’s attempts to globalize itself? Can comparative methodology provide an alternative to this vacillation between the national and world scales?

This online series will explore the implications of the tensions between national, comparative, and global concerns in contemporary literary methodology that Dimock’s work makes visible. Dimock is by no means the first person to think about literature on a world scale, a tendency that goes back at least to Goethe and Marx in the nineteenth century and has lately exercised many fine critics and theorists, including Emily Apter, Pascale Casanova, David Damrosch, Franco Moretti, and Gayatri Spivak. How do we explain and evaluate the recent efflorescence of thinking about world literature? Such a tendency probably follows naturally from the more general rise of globalization as a category of critical analysis, a rise that is itself a seemingly direct result of the geopolitical and geo-economic shifts of the post-Cold War period. As such, the move toward world literature can be understood either as a necessary transcendence of Euro-American parochialism, as a symptom of unipolar American hegemony, or, if you believe Parag Khanna’s thesis in last week’s New York Times Magazine about the imminent extinction of that hegemony, as a symptom of a newly emergent tri-polar world in which China and a transnational Europe loom ever larger. Whatever one thinks about the specific merit of these possibilities—and others I haven’t mentioned or thought of—it is clear that the new focus on world literature has borrowed heavily from discourses on globalization, and especially from world-systems analysis by scholars such as Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein.

These arguments about globalization and world literature have obvious merit, but I’d also like to highlight at least one other more “local” genealogy of recent discussions: I would argue that, at least in the American academy, the world literature debates of the early twenty-first century sublate—preserve and negate—the canon debates of the 1980s and early 1990s. Controversies about the “deconstruction” of Great Books programs, the “multiculturalization” of literature syllabi, and the invasion of American campuses by politically correct hordes armed with Stalinist thought-control techniques dominated the cultural-political imaginary of the Bush I moment, as many of you will remember. Was too much reading of Toni Morrison and Gloria Anzaldúa subverting the grandeur of Western Civilization? Unfortunately not. And yet, while residual complaints of these sorts persist, I think the canon debates were largely won by the liberal multiculturalists, if not by the more radical avatars of critical multiculturalism. An open, hybridized canon has become common sense—in theory, if not always in practice.

But in the meantime, the issues mutated. Having more or less won the ideological battle over inclusiveness, we found ourselves faced with new methodological challenges. The problem involves not only our incorporation into a corporate logic of diversity and the management of difference (as Walter Benn Michaels and others have argued), but also methodological concerns about our approach to world literature, whether in the classroom or in scholarship. As Franco Moretti puts it, “The question is not really what we should do—the question is how” ("Conjectures" 54-55). Having successfully opened up the canon, we are suddenly faced with the limits of the syllabus, the sedimentation of disciplinary structures, and the finite nature of our own linguistic, cultural, and historical expertise. I don’t think the debate over world literature is in any way post-political or non-ideological—nor would I want to discourage ideological-critical analysis of these matters—but I do think recent writings have drawn us into a necessary and productive methodological detour. The shift to methodology raises a series of questions that I hope we will begin to address in this forum. For instance, what do we think about Moretti’s suggestion that we need to abandon close reading for “distant reading” and quantitative methods? Where do we stand on the question of translation and the sacredness of the original text? Can we—or should we—avoid the apparently unequal division of labor between the theorist and the national literature specialist?

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