The Global Novel and Capitalism in Crisis

Contemporary Literary Narratives

Treasa De Loughry

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030393243
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030393250
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book examines how contemporary global novels by Salman Rushdie, David Mitchell, Rana Dasgupta and Rachel Kushner have evolved new aesthetics to represent global economic and ecological crises. Paying close attention to the interrelations between postcolonial, world, and global literatures, this book argues that postcolonial literary studies cannot account for global crises that exceed the national and anti-colonial. Advocating an interdisciplinary framework informed by a synthesis of materialist literary theory with world-systems theory, combining Fredric Jameson and Georg Lukács with Giovanni Arrighi and Jason W. Moore, this book examines how global literatures metabolise not only socioeconomic conditions, but also transformations in the world-ecology, and emergent developmental and epochal crises of capitalism.

© The Author(s) 2020

T. De LoughryThe Global Novel and Capitalism in CrisisNew Comparisons in World Literaturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39325-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Global, Postcolonial, and World Literatures

Treasa De Loughry¹

(1)

University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

Treasa De Loughry

Keywords

Global novelWorld literaturePostcolonial studiesCrisis and form

End Abstract

Part I: Global, Postcolonial, and World Literatures

Arundhati Roy, in Capitalism: A Ghost Story (2014), states that “Capitalism is going through a crisis whose gravity has not revealed itself yet” (p. 45). Roy’s diagnosis of capitalism’s fault lines—of wealth hoarding, environmental toxification, falling growth rates, and increasing strikes—is unusual in its maximal overview of capitalism’s weaknesses, presenting a complex but compound series of cascading ecological and economic crises.¹ Yet many accounts of capitalism-in-crisis have not attended to its longue durée, regional differentiation or cognisance that capitalism is the process and gravitational field through which environments are organised, labour commodified, and imperialism funded. Likewise, Marxist postcolonial scholar Timothy Brennan eschews a renewed fascination with the novelty of crisis, of its “‘epistemic breaks,’ ‘Copernican revolutions,’ and ‘historical ruptures’” (2014, p. 11), noting instead that “a political break can be affected as much by historical continuities as by ruptures”, or in Marx’s famous formulation that history occurs first as tragedy then as farce (2004, p. 85). That contemporary financial systems are too complex for even neoliberal technocrats to understand is a symptom, prima facie, of algorithmic convolutions, but also the almost sublime nature of global capitalism, and the difficulties involved in imagining a longue durée world-system structured by repeated cycles and speculative busts, especially in a period of economic decline and hegemonic transition. This general “cultural debility” (Mirowski 2013, p. 12), or the unimaginable totality of capitalism, is a consequence for Fredric Jameson of the “ugly and bureaucratic representational qualifications” (2009c, p. 608) of a world that conditions its own horizons of understandings, and that finds its own demise incomprehensible.

This monograph is concerned with how with a combined crisis of capitalism is likewise registered in disciplinary and representational terms as an incapacity to narrate totality, alongside a dissatisfaction with postcolonial literary modes, and an attempt to “make real” capitalist globalisation and its worsening situation. Global fictions are here differentiated against world literature given the latter’s emergence from comparative literary studies and emphasis on “great works” of art.² In contrast, global literature emerged from the massification of postcolonial literary studies, taking its germinal thematic focus from discussions of “after empire” while deploying transnational and deterritorialised narratives that mobilise postcolonial tropes such as “hybridity, diaspora, transculturation, subaltern, hegemony, deterritorialization, rhizome, mestizo, Eurocentrism and othering” (Gunn 2001, p. 18; see also O’Brien and Szeman 2001, p. 605).³ However, for O’Brien and Szeman, editors of a special issue on “The Globalization of Fiction/The Fiction of Globalization” (2001), it “does not really make sense to search for a literature of globalization—for texts that explicitly thematize the processes of globalization—any more than it does to search for particularly explicit examples of postcolonial literature” (p. 610) due to the breadth of globalisation’s definition as a mode of economic expansion, cultural homogenisation, and synonym for American dominance. But despite this critique global literatures can be negatively defined: unlike postcolonial studies and its concern with the socio-political legacies of empire, anti-colonisation movements, and institutional canonicity, the global novel unevenly registers the nation as an important category, has expansive geographical horizons, a long historical scale, and often thematises its leave-taking of postcolonial aesthetics and concerns while being “born translated” (Walkowitz 2015) for a global literary audience based in Northern metropoles. Studies of global fictions are eclectic, focusing on the circulation and production of literary forms, or in studies of American narratives of consumption (Annesley 2006); in warnings about the reproduction of America in “global” works that manufacture the local “as the world” (Brennan 2001, p. 661), or as Baucom ponders whether “Expansion contracts; contraction enriches” (2001, p. 169); or of globalisation as simply a long-standing, even ancient, consensual exchange of ideas, goods and people that expands literature’s horizons of possibility (Gunn 2001, p. 20; Israel 2004, pp. 2–3). What most of these accounts share is an emphasis on the role hegemonic regions like North America and Europe still play in consecrating and disseminating such literatures; and how this reproduces American or “global northern” literary works as the “world”.⁴

But for Gikandi postcolonial literature’s global thrust gained currency exactly because of its emphasis on mobility and migrancy, a turn that risked ignoring an “other, darker, older narrative of poverty, of failed nationalism, of death, that will simply not go away” (2001, p. 639). Taking heed of such warnings, this monograph’s conceptual apparatus is perversely not drawn from the same postcolonial ground from whence global literature emerged: such an approach would merely confirm the ongoing circulation and cachet of particular “postcolonial” tropes, like a scepticism towards socialist post-independence nation-states, a privileging of modernist stylistics, and a recirculation of questions of transnational belonging. The body of global works examined here by Salman Rushdie, David Mitchell, Rana Dasgupta, and Rachel Kushner, focused as intently as they are on post-colonial disenchantment, frictionless global circulation, and US empire, seem not to have much to say about the postcolonial as a body of critically urgent work that reclaims, as Bhagat Kennedy argues, “cultural, economic, and political sovereignty” (2018, p. 335). Compare the lively and sustained engagement with questions of postcolonial style, national development, and political possibility in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), against the cosmopolitan deterritorialisation of his global rock epic The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), the planetary coincidences and historical compression of Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (2009), or US empire as a cipher for desire and repulsion in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007). Rather this monograph finds fecund critical ground in materialist world-literary studies that bring together world-systems theory, Marxist postcolonial approaches, and “second wave” ecocriticism, to examine the narrative strategies of modes of realism and narratives of globalisation, conditioned as they are by “rational” attunements to capitalist reality, amidst a flattening of national differences, the diminishment of political possibilities, and imaginaries that tend to figure the end of the world sooner than the end of late capitalism (Jameson 2009b, p. 50).

To return to the idea of “disciplinary” crises, a recent turn in world-literary studies towards historical capitalism rather than strictly colonialism emerged in part because of the omissions of postcolonial studies to account for the period of post-independence as one of continued asset-stripping through structural readjustment: or the new financial mechanisms by which formally colonised nation-states experienced shock integrations into the world-system, involving intensified rounds of privatisation, deregulation, and a collapse in subsistence economies, in ways that maintained ongoing structurally disadvantageous positions, or the status quo of core-periphery dynamics (Lazarus 2011, pp. 7–9; see also Brennan 2004; Lazarus 2004; Parry 2004a). A materialist world-literary theory thus responds to a perceived difficulty or conceptual incapacity in the field of postcolonial studies to grapple with a situation that exceeds anti-colonial temporalities or conditions and demands a new critical language to parse the complex and ongoing oppressions of an uneven world-system, rather than an over-determined use of the “postcolonial”. Such work takes capitalism as the “interpretive horizon” of literature (Brown 2005, p. 1), with the spread of European colonialism and capitalism producing a “baseline of universality” (p. 2) of experiences and sensoriums throughout the world. Most notably the Warwick Research Collective (WReC), marry Brown’s insights with Moretti’s account of the “one, and unequal” world-literary system (Moretti 2004, p. 149; WReC 2015, pp. 7–9), and Fredric Jameson’s equation of modernity to “worldwide capitalism” (2002, p. 12), to describe their method as an analysis of “the literature of the modern capitalist world-system [….] modernity is both what world-literature indexes or is ‘about’ and what gives world-literature its distinguishing formal characteristics” (p. 15). For such critics, world-literary analyses involve reading for the formal disjunctions of fictions that register the alienating affects of capitalist modernity, especially in the peripheries and semi-peripheries of the wor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Global, Postcolonial, and World Literatures
• 2. Global Literature, Realism, and the World-System in Crisis
• 3. “Worlds in Collision”: Salman Rushdie, Globalisation, and Postcoloniality-in-Crisis
• 4. “Prophet Malthus Surveyed a Dustbowl”: David Mitchell, Neo-Malthusianism, and the World-Ecology in Crisis
• 5. Aesthetic Attitudes to Globalisation: Rana Dasgupta, Capitalism-in-Crisis, and Narrating the World
• 6. “FAC UT ARDEAT”: Rachel Kushner, the World-Historical Novel, and Energetic Materialism
• 7. Conclusion: Towards a Literary Internationale?
• Back Matter