Sharae Deckard

Postcolonial studies and world literature

A spectre is haunting the discipline of postcolonial literary studies – the spectre of “world literature.” If the materialist strand of postcolonial studies developed from a political grounding in the anti-colonial liberation movements of the late 20th-century (Lazarus, Postcolonial Unconscious 21–32), the re-emergence of “world literature” in the first decade of the 21st century parallels the ascendancy of neo-liberal capitalism and its attendant discourses, just as its first emergence in Goethe’s cosmopolitan Weltliteratur and Marx and Engels’s anticipation of a literature superseding “national one-sidedness” paralleled the 19th-century expansion of the world market (Marx and Engels 84). In the last two decades, the fields of comparative and postcolonial literary studies have belatedly acknowledged an epistemological crisis in their failure to address the historical changes in the world-system characteristic of late capitalism. However, their engagement with these changes has taken place predominantly under the banner of “globalization” discourses largely detached from critique of the world economy or through humanist modes of “worlding” literary criticism. The latter approach has involved extending the scope of metropolitan literary studies to include work from diverse literary traditions: “world literature” as the canon writ large (D’haen 152–53) or as those transcendent works that achieve “universal” recognition. North American literary comparativists such as Damrosch, Lawall, and Prendergast have presented “world literature” as an invaluable form of cultural capital – construed as a vital corollary to humanist cosmopolitanism – for the new “global” elites. Other embattled comparativists defending the linguistic boundaries of their discipline, such as Emily Apter in Against World Literature, have argued against world literature on the grounds of the “incommensurability” and “untranslatability” of texts from different linguistic traditions, criticizing the perceived “oneworldedness” of world-systemic approaches that insist on the totality of a singular capitalist modernity (Apter, “On Oneworldedness”). However, materialist scholarly approaches to worlding literary criticism have also emerged. These are more interested in critique of the underlying structures and conditions produced by the international division of labour, this serving as the “political horizon” of all literature (Brown 3). Encomiums to globalization as heralding a rising tide of prosperity that would equalize conditions between all in the “global village” have proved resoundingly hollow, as evidenced by the savage assaults launched on the livelihoods of the poor and the powerless in the wake of the global financial crisis. The world remains subordinated to the systematic logic of capitalist imperialism: it might be one world, but

Surviving Globalization: Experiment and the World-Historical Imagination in Rana Dasgupta’s Solo

Abstract:This essay investigates Rana Dasgupta’s Solo as an exemplar of world-mapping fiction that takes the system of global capitalism as its interpretative horizon. I argue that Solo invites world-literary criticism informed by world-systems and world-ecology perspectives because its “operative totality” (Tutek) is world history rather than the nation and its aesthetics self-consciously address the formal problem of representing global scales. I consider experimental writing in the context of structural narrative innovation and demonstrate how Solo’s diptych structure renovates the forms of the historical novel and the Zeitroman in order to represent successive revolutions in the capitalist world-ecology. I contend that the text answers Dasgupta’s question of how to survive globalization by manifesting a counter-history of capitalist modernity that restores history to the neoliberal present, from the perspective of narratives set in the former Soviet and Ottoman empires. I conclude by exploring how the generic divide between the realist and oneiric halves of the novel negotiates the problem of futurity and attempts to conjure a totalizing retrospect by dreaming the future.

“Nothing is truly hidden”: visibility, aesthetics and Yasmina Khadra’s detective fiction

This article examines the politics and form of Yasmina Khadra’s use of the detective genre to reveal invisible social conditions. I argue that the problem of visibility operates on multiple levels in Khadra’s crime fiction: firstly, at the level of genre, where the investigative impulse of the police detective novel is used to map the uneven socio-economic relations of the petro-state intensified by neo-liberalization; secondly, in catachrestic tropes of spectrality and invisibility which signal the seeming irreality of Algerian modernity and visualize the unrepresented atrocities of the civil war; and finally, in the ideological contradictions of the plots, where the emphasis on revealing occluded histories is contradicted by the texts’ erasures.

Capitalism’s Long Spiral: Periodicity, Temporality and the Global Contemporary in World Literature

This chapter examines representations of the temporality of historical change and the periodicity of capitalist crisis and anti-capitalist resistance in contemporary world literature. I argue that the aesthetics of globalist literatures such as David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas or Simon Ings’ Dead Water, which embody paralyzing neoliberal conceptions of empty time or determinist causality, should be read as symptomatic. In contrast, I contend that counter-hegemonic works of “world literature,” generated in proximity to struggle, deploy formal strategies insistent on the possibility of apprehending the uneven synchronicity of time—space sensoriums produced by capitalist development as well as anti-capitalist resistance. Using examples from Rita Wong, Lindsey Collen and Subcomandante Marcos, I demonstrate how counter-hegemonic texts evoke the periodicity of capitalist crisis and of revolution, but avoid the pitfalls of false universality and determinism, attempting to revitalize the possibilities for positive freedom through struggle in the present. Saturated with apprehension of a “signal crisis” of neoliberal capitalism, they imagine the contemporary as a spectrum that may or may not be a transit point to some new mode of production, but which is certainly no end of history.

Cacao and cascadura: Energetic consumption and production in world-ecological literature

Abstract This article compares literary mediations of the world-historical movement of cacao frontiers across the American hemisphere, and contrasts the imagination of food as resource and resistance in literature from Pablo Antonio Cuadra in Nicaragua, Samuel Selvon in Trinidad, Jorge Amado in Brazil and Merle Collins in Grenada. Cacao is considered both in terms of the energy required for its production, and as a high-calorie source of energetic consumption itself. The article’s aims are twofold: to survey key aesthetic and thematic concerns of the “literature of cacao”, particularly its tendency towards irrealism when mediating frontier violence; and, to explore how literary critiques of cacao extractivism are counterposed to representations of vernacular foodways and social reproduction. The article concludes that the aesthetics of provision foods are symbolically freighted, represented as “resourceful” modes of agriculture that repudiate the undervaluing of human and extra-human work in plantation monoculture.