History, Imperialism, Critique

New Essays in World Literature

Asher Ghaffar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367587321
• eBook ISBN: 9781315440224
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book examines anti-imperialist thought in European philosophy. It features an international group of both emerging and established scholars who directly respond to Timothy Brennan's far-reaching call to rethink intellectual histories, literary histories, and the reading habits of postcolonialism, in relation to the anti-imperialist tradition of critique. Each contributor rethinks postcolonial and world literature, Continental thought, and intellectual history in relation to anti-imperialist histories and traditions of critique, through geographically diverse analysis.

This book provides a forum for the next generation of scholars to draw on and engage with the marginal yet influential work of the first generation of dissidents within postcolonial studies. It will appeal to researchers and students in the field of postcolonial studies, world literature, geography, and Continental thought.

Part I

Intellectual history

1 World literature, the Geist, and the East, 1907–1942

Auritro Majumder

The utopian impulse in thinking is all the stronger, the less it objectifies itself as utopia . . . Whatever was once thought . . . can be suppressed; it can be forgotten and can even vanish. But it cannot be denied that something of it survives.

(Theodor Adorno, ‘Resignation’ 168)

I

While the idea of a transnational republic of letters has a long European history, memorably expressed by Dante in the fourteenth, Erasmus and More in the sixteenth, and Goethe in the nineteenth centuries, it is only in the twentieth century that its promise is realized and, more crucially, displaced on a world scale (Said). The latter includes such events as the establishment of the World Literature Publishing House in the Soviet Union in 1918, the All-India Progressive Writers Association in British India in 1936, and the Afro-Asian Writers Association founded in Sri Lanka in 1958 and finalized in Egypt in 1962. These institutions and the ideas they traced, albeit little recognized today, constitute a vast corpus of anticolonial aesthetic and literary theory. Disparate texts present aspects of this demotic humanist vision: such as the Indian Rabindranath Tagore’s lecture on visva-sahitya (world literature) in 1907; the Hungarian Georg Lukács’ ‘Narrate or Describe’ in 1936; the Chinese Mao Zedong’s Yenan Forum talks on literature in 1942; the German Erich Auerbach’s ‘Philology and Weltliteratur’ in 1952; and lastly, the Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o-led Kenyan group’s (with Taban Lo Liyong and Henry Owuor-Anyumba) ‘On the Abolition of the English department’ in 1972. I mention the nationalities of these writers for no other reason than to illustrate the transnational reach of their argument. Here, broadly speaking, one finds an emphasis on the coevality of imperial and colonized cultures; the focus on the oral, the vernacular, and the folk; the unity of thought and action; and lastly, the centrality of creative, purposive human agency in the task of social transformation. Extending the intervention of Brennan’s Borrowed Light into recent debates in world literature, this essay engages with Tagore and Mao. I elucidate Rabindranath Tagore and Mao Zedong’s innovative, if largely forgotten, contributions to the development of a twentieth-century Asian trajectory of dialectical criticism and philosophy of literature, and how these might nuance currently dominant configurations.

Academic literary criticism, exemplified by books such as Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters and essays such as Franco Moretti’s ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, has injected fresh vitality into the life of weltliteratur: a concept developed by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in a number of essays and letters in the early nineteenth century. What is common to Casanova and Moretti, despite their different foci, is a shared interest in locating diverse national literatures within a world system: tracing transmission, production, circulation, and reception of literary forms and genres. To the extent that such discussions are rooted in a materialist understanding of style (and are not simply reiterations of the traditional model, describing the diffusion of stylistic influence from the metropole to the periphery), they represent a break with the past. By materialism, I mean that world literature scholarship by and large has moved beyond the 1980s and 1990s trends of literary and cultural theory: on one hand, the poststructuralist insistence on seeing literature as a randomly assembled order of signs, signifiers without signifieds, as well as the influential corollary; on the other hand, of postcolonial criticism that claimed that ‘Western’ conceptual tools were simply inadequate to deciphering the non-Western world, and as such any unitary (Enlightenment, humanist) model of interpretation perforce would have to be discarded in favour of a deconstructive, colonial discourse analysis. As I have argued elsewhere, nestled within the so-called ‘transnational turn’ in literary studies, what has returned, unanticipated and mostly unacknowledged, is cultural materialism (Majumder). In today’s mix of distant and surface reading, world systems theory, and major and minor literary traditions, one traces “the experienced tensions, shifts and uncertainties, the intricate forms of unevenness and confusion” that mark “lived experience” and its mimetic representation in literature (Williams 131, 129).

To invoke Raymond Williams is to suggest that current theorizations of world literature have their roots in traditions of cultural materialism, best encapsulated in Williams’s work and others such as the Brazilian Marxist critic Roberto Schwarz. It is also to say that such influences have been largely ignored, effaced, or misrepresented. Thus, Schwarz, undoubtedly one of the key theorists of dependency in Brazilian literary criticism, finds no mention in Pascale Casanova’s recent discussion of dependency in the Latin American novel, nor in her much-quoted notion of the “Greenwich meridian of literary taste” (92–101, 232–234). In turn, Moretti, discussing the export of metropolitan literary forms of the novel and their interaction with diverse local contexts in the colonial and non-colonial peripheries, has this to say about Schwarz:

Now, that the same configuration [of export of ideas] should occur in such different cultures as India and Japan—this was curious; and it became even more curious when I realized that Roberto Schwarz had independently discovered very much the same pattern in Brazil.

(58)

Schwarz’s originality however is neither “independent,” as Moretti wants us to believe, nor can Schwarz be adduced so easily to Moretti’s (supposedly un-American) “distant reading” model as he claims (57–58). Roberto Schwarz, as anyone who has read him would know, belongs to the tradition of dialectical materialist criticism; one that includes his teacher at the University of Sao Paolo, the formidable literary critic Antonio Candido, as much as the key figures of interwar Western Marxism, Georg Lukács and Theodor Adorno (López). While Moretti sees Schwarz’s dialectical method as the precursor to his own model of distant reading, I believe—and genuinely want to emphasize—that they are quite opposed, and further that such appropriations are less innocent and far more complex. The way current scholars read past critics has a lot to do with how genealogies of thought are legitimized: in other words, what is permissible, and what is censored as non-transferable and contrarian to the present order of knowledge. All of this is of course shaped by dominant ideologies as much as by the conditions of unevenness in global knowledge production. In that respect alone, one needs to be on guard against appropriation under the sign of interpretation: Adorno’s pithy remark in Minima Moralia, “Advice to intellectuals: let no one represent you” (128), is rather relevant in this context.

To take Schwarz as an example: in his influential essay, ‘Brazilian Culture’, commenting on the problem of cultural ‘imitativeness’ in Brazil, Schwarz observes that “the painfulness of an imitative civilisation is produced not by imitation—which is present at any event—but by the social structure of the country” (15). Rather than seeing literary production in the nominally independent yet structurally dependent periphery (Brazil) as testifying to an ontological lack, a “copy” of an “original” as compared to European “norms,” Schwarz sees Brazilian literature as articulating a social structure of unevenness, of mixed norms. Significantly, Raymond Williams theorized a similar “structure of feeling” in describing the changing literary role of the countryside in Britain. In Schwarz’s study of nineteenth-century Brazil, a tiny Europeanized intellectual class imbued with modern ideas of liberty and progress struggled to express the social reality of a country undergirded by slave labour and an export-oriented plantation economy. The distinctive form of social relations in Brazil—constituted by an enlightened elite, an intermediate group of agregados or free men and women dependent on favours, and the directly enslaved—is part of capital’s unevenly universalizing narrative. The condition of “backwardness” and “national dependency” in such a peripheral context is “of the same order of things as the progress of the advanced countries” in the metropolitan core (14); “our ‘backwardness’,” Schwarz claims, is “part of the contemporary history of capital and its advances” (16, original emphasis). Drawing, above all, from Adorno, Schwarz contends that it is literary form more than thematic content that best captures the contradictions of social and historical totality. As Schwarz shows in his study of Machado de Assis, the pre-eminent nineteenth-century novelist, the narrative structures of Machado’s novels come to formally articulate the peculiar shape of Brazilian modernity. Narrativizing a society different from but also beholden to contemporary France or England in key aspects, Machado departs from the nineteenth-century conventions of European naturalism, as his work combines and takes on the dual character of modernist experiment with narrative form, and the realist critique of the bourgeois order.

Such departures need not be restricted to Brazil alone. The differential calibration of realism and modernism and aesthetics and politics in non-European, peripheral literatures will be familiar to current scholars even if many of them, curiously, are unfamiliar with Schwarz’s work. What is less familiar today is Schwarz’s partisan approach, in the old political sense of the word. For Schwarz suggests, rather emphatically, that the crisis of representation in the periphery can be resolved only through greater popular “access” to literature and “culture.” The peculiar contradiction of peripheral representation rests “on the exclusion of the poor from the universe of contemporary culture” (16). This is a generalizable point about capitalist culture tout court, and not simply in the peripheries of the world system. It goes further than arguments about economic justice for the “poor”: the dialectical suggestion is made that culture itself is also impoverished by being restricted to the “elite” and the “dominant class,” who are necessarily locked into a condition of dependence on the metropolis since they are “the beneficiaries of . . . [the] given situation” (15). The poverty of culture as it exists goes beyond “cultural transplantation,” Eurocentrism, or even ways of reading.

What Schwarz testifies to by way of dialectical criticism is the partisan nature of cultural activity, that which is immanent within the present but which is activated only by purposive labour, with the “workers gaining access” to their conditions of existence and “re-defin[ing] them through their own initiative” (16). Situated squarely within the realm of human practice, the outcomes of such processes are both local and global, “either promis[ing] . . . or catastrophic.” The form of Schwarz’s argument is itself dialectical: successively invoking nativist or indigenist, postmodern, and ontological reading practices (all dominant theoretical positions in the US academy, I should point out), only to reveal their inadequacy. If dialectical criticism is posited as a “contrar[ian]” method it emerges only in opposition to prior available options. Dialectics must fold within itself the present order of things—what Hegel describes in the Phenomenology as the schema of negation, fulfilment, and sublation—for another, better future to emerge; so must the literary critic.

What is left out of the current genealogy of world literature, arguably, is the concern with substantive rather than nominal democracy. Such a concern animates the thought of Goethe, writing in the shadow of the French Revolution, and equally occupies the thought of Adorno, Williams, and Schwarz—as well as Tagore and Mao who I discuss below—in the twentieth century. This is of course a non-representative list of thinkers (along gender lines, for example) in the cultural materialist tradition. A preoccupation with emancipation is a defining feature of these progressive intellectuals, and both these terms—emancipation and progress—have been complicated endlessly ever since, to the point where they have disappeared as respectable intellectual goals. If it is at all worthwhile to recount their intervention, especially, in registering world literature to the collectivist desire for emancipation, it is imperative to ask—at this point in the twenty-first century—what is still relevant in that move.

This is the crucial significance of Timothy Brennan’s Borrowed Light: Vico, Hegel, and the Colonies, to which the present essay (and this volume) serves as a response. Borrowed Light argues that Vico nuances and in many ways prefigures Hegel’s concept of the Geist or Spirit as the self-realization and actualization of human freedom. Brennan posits Vico as the largely unacknowledged master, politically and philosophically, of Western Marxism. In doing so Brennan, a student of Edward Said, provides a remarkable remapping of the roots of contemporary Marxist humanism and anticolonial thought. He draws our attention to a less-discussed aspect of Said’s oeuvre, namely his affinity to Vico, especially the latter’s insistence that the earliest human knowledge is expressed through oral myth and poetry (literature), and that it is the human imagination, at work, that grounds social and political change, rather than positivistic science or instrumental rationality. In foregrounding the political implications of debates in modern Western philosophy, Borrowed Light resituates one of Said’s—a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Intellectual History
• Part II Literary History
• Part III Poetic History
• Afterword
• Acknowledgements
• Index