Postcolonialism After World Literature

Relation, Equality, Dissent

Lorna Burns

• Éditeur: Bloomsbury Academic
• Année: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350053045
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Littérature
• Sous-sujet: Critique littéraire pour la littérature comparée

Postcolonial studies took shape in response to the nationalist and decolonization movements of the twentieth century. Today, a resurgent interest in world literature reflects an increased awareness of globalization. These twin projects are torn between a criticism that finds in the text the trace of capitalist modernity and one that accounts for the revolutionary potential of literature to challenge our global present.
Postcolonialism After World Literature exposes what is at stake in this critical choice through a line of philosophical enquiry – Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Rancière – that poses an alternative to the materialist strand of world literary criticism pioneered by Pascale Casanova and Franco Moretti. Engaging with these theorists and others, Lorna Burns contests world-systems theory as the basis for thinking about contemporary postcolonial and world literatures, and proposes a renewed framework that promotes literature's capacity to provoke dissent; to imagine new forms of belonging and relation for both national and world citizens; and to stage the shared equality of all. Moving between theory and the novels of Roberto Bolaño, J. M. Coetzee, Kamel Daoud, Dany Laferrière, Pauline Melville, Arundhati Roy and Kamila Shamsie, Postcolonialism After World Literature presents the case for rethinking world literature in light of the legacies of postcolonialism, and for reshaping postcolonial studies in an era of world literature.
Lorna Burns is Lecturer in Postcolonial Literatures at the University of St Andrews, UK. She is the author of Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze (Bloomsbury, 2012).

1

A World Empire of Letters: Theories of World Literature from Nation to World-System

World literature evokes in its very terminology an opposition, or at least an alternative, to the institutionalized framework of literary studies premised on the national canon: world rather than nation. Of course, writers and readers retain their national affiliations; as David Damrosch argues, ‘even a genuinely global perspective remains a perspective from somewhere’ (2003: 27). In turn, Damrosch theorizes world literature as ‘a mode of circulation and of reading’ (5), and as a term that can be evoked when texts ‘circulate beyond their culture of origin’ (4). Thus, a work of literature can either be attributed to a nation or classed as belonging to the world, depending on the position of the reader, and that ‘reader is likely to impose domestic literary values on the foreign work’ (4). Understood in this way, world literature risks becoming the appeal of the exotic, ‘a temporary frisson, a circumscribed experience of the bizarre’ (Clifford 1981: 542), to evoke James Clifford’s account of nineteenth-century European exoticism. By extension, then, this approach echoes imperialist practices since world literature is, as Damrosch claims, an encounter with ‘a distinctive novelty that is like-but-unlike practice at home’ (2003: 11). By prioritizing the national as the primary identification of the reader and text, world literature emerges as a process of extending outwards to impose national values on works that bear the sign of difference and, at the same time, as resistance to the complete acceptance of the foreign text as recognizable literature. The foreign text will always be ‘like-but-unlike’; ‘almost the same, but not quite’ (Bhabha 1994: 86). Here the language of postcolonial hybridity aligns with Damrosch’s concept of world literature. The world literary text takes on the role of colonial subject: a marker of a difference and an ambivalence that disturbs the secure order of the colonial world view. For Mufti (2010), however, the hybridity of world literature, signalling both difference and the same, risks recalling imperialist orientalism: in its first articulation, world literature was an encounter between the European reader and the orient and, as such, carries with it orientalist connotations by which otherness is both represented and assimilated. This, of course, was always Auerbach’s (1969) fear for the fate of world literature: drawn towards the celebration of diversity but also the homogenization he witnessed in a globalizing modernity. As a result, as Vilashini Cooppan argues, ‘the globalization of literary studies has to mean something more than simply leaving the nation for that other social, political, and imaginative space dubbed by Arjun Appadurai as the “transnation”’ (2004: 20).

Postcolonial scholars may find another reason for resisting the complete shift from nation to world. Speaking to the Second Congress of Black Artists and Writers in Rome, 1959, Frantz Fanon argued that ‘the most urgent thing today for the intellectual is to build up his nation’ (2001: 199). Fanon’s valorization of the work of national culture in the legitimization of the newly decolonized nation inspired theorists to presume the close association of postcolonial and national literatures, even while the field is credited with expanding the canon and incorporating a greater diversity of global voices within the study of European literatures. Pascale Casanova (2004), as we shall see later in this chapter, deems postcolonial writing ‘small’ literature, and relegates it to the peripheries of her world literary republic on the grounds that it remains overdetermined by the politics of the new nation. Fredric Jameson (1986) has also made the correlation: drawing on the language of three-worlds theory, he proclaims that all Third World literature is national allegory. While Jameson ultimately offers a more productive understanding of the role of the nation in the postcolonial imaginary (cf. Burns 2015), the close association of national and postcolonial literatures misunderstands the nuance of postcolonial theorists on this issue. Fanon, for example, maintains the revolutionary capacity of national literature within the context of decolonization in terms of universal values. Colonialism pronounced universalist stereotypes in relation to the colonial other and, therefore, will ‘logically […] lead to the exaltation of cultural manifestations which are not simply national but continental’ (2001: 174), or in some cases global. In other words, writers in support of decolonization must also turn to the universal in their attempt to overcome imperial domination. Furthermore, this inevitable stage in the process of decolonization, the ‘logical’ progress to the point at which the colonized reclaim their culture, or what Fanon calls the ‘fighting phase’ (179), will itself ultimately come to pass, replaced by a universalist vision of a ‘new humanity’: ‘After the conflict there is not only the disappearance of colonialism but also the disappearance of the colonized man’, to be replaced by a ‘new humanity [that] cannot do otherwise than define a new humanism both for itself and for others’ (198). While Christopher Miller (1990) objects to the radical despecificity of this universalist vision, Neil Lazarus contends that far from denying the validity of African cultures, The Wretched of the Earth exposes the African subject as a construct of colonialism. There is, then, no originary national culture to which the colonial subject can return and thus Fanon’s work is the formulation of an ongoing ‘national project [that] also has the capacity to become the vehicle – the means of articulation – of a social(ist) demand which extends beyond decolonization in the merely technical sense, and which calls for a fundamental transformation rather than a mere restructuring of the prevailing social order’ (Lazarus 1999: 79). National literature for Fanon is both part of the construction of a postcolonial nation that is international, globalist and universal in its proclaimed values (cf. Fanon 2001: 199), and the articulation of a future open to the possibility that, whatever the failings of the national middle classes in the aftermath of decolonization, the social order can be transformed. Literature’s particular role in creating the potential for such change is, I argue, the claim of Jameson’s controversial ‘Third World Literature in an Era of Multinational Capital’. Despite the hostile reaction against this essay on the part of postcolonial scholars, such as Aijaz Ahmad (1987), it is this future orientation and potential for change that represents postcolonial writing’s insurgent capacity both within the context of the nation and, as Fanon reminds us with his vision of a new humanity, the world.¹

Damrosch’s claims for a literature that is ‘like-but-unlike practice at home’ (2003: 11) can be reconceptualized through postcolonial theory. As it will be recalled, Bhabha’s precise definition of hybridity is an object that is ‘new, neither the one nor the other’ (1994: 25. Emphasis modified). The newness that, in their different ways, both Fanon and Jameson identify in the future-orientated task of postcolonial nation-building finds its complement in the transnational, global and universalist ground of world literature. The otherness of world literature is not simply an object to be assimilated by the values of the core, and although we cannot, as Djelal Kadir notes, ignore the institutionalization of this field of literary study (2013: 294) and overlook the imbalance of power and hierarchies that privilege specific genres, languages and forms, the difference, untranslatability and novelty of the world literary text persist beyond such imperialist pressures. This chapter focuses on two prominent theorists of world literature, Pascale Casanova and Franco Moretti, in order to expose the ways in which their works foreground these assimilatory and resistant forces as structural principles of a single literary field. However, both, to different degrees, offer weak accounts of the latter, the resistant potential of that which exceeds the logic of representation. Casanova’s literary field, as outlined in The World Republic of Letters, and Moretti’s theory of literary forms traced from Signs Taken for Wonders to his influential ‘Conjectures on World Literature’ and beyond are restricted by a conceptual framework premised on a priori structures which tend towards the assimilation or management of otherness.² As such, Mufti’s accusation that world literature simply extends an orientalist vision of difference in which the foreign is ultimately, always assimilated within the horizon of the same, holds in the case of these touchstones of contemporary world literature theory. This chapter and those that follow seek an alternative path: one driven by critical and philosophical theories of aesthetics that promote literature’s capacity to challenge assimilatory pressures and ‘the prevailing social order’ (Lazarus 1999: 79), and to imagine new forms of national and global belonging in the aftermath empire. Developing these ideas will take us through the philosophies of Bruno Latour, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière, in each case adapting their work to the service of postcolonial critique. But first, in order to put postcolonialism in pursuit of an ascendant (in institutional terms) field of world literature scholarship, this chapter explores the details of Casanova’s and Moretti’s theories. It does so, in the first instance, by taking forward Fanon’s demand for postcolonial intellectuals and writers to address, at once, the worldly and the nationally specific, for it is this very division that challenges the assumptions and fundamental arguments of one of the most prominent theories of contemporary world literatures: Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters.

A world divided: Pascale Casanova’s world empire of letters

Published in 2010, the same year as Moretti’s ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, The World Republic of Letters is underpinned by a conviction that while there may be a single literary space it is one marked by a fundamental inequality that passes unremarked by the presumptuous, arrogant ‘critics in the center’ (Casanova 2004: 355). This wilful ignorance is the target of Casanova’s book, and through an analysis of the creation and perpetuation of this inequality she hopes that it will ‘become a sort of critical weapon in the service of all deprived and dominated writers on the periphery of the literary world’ (2004: 354–5). In these terms it is easy to see Casanova’s appeal for Marxist and postcolonial critics seeking to engage with a renewed interest in world literature. And yet her admirable conviction, I argue, is not supported by a consistent theory of a world literary system unequally divided into core and periphery. In order to understand this conceptual entanglement, Christian Thorne argues, we must ‘realize […] how programmatically Casanova has grafted Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory onto Pierre Bourdieu’s account of distinction or cultural capital’ (2013: 59).³ From Bourdieu, Casanova takes up the notion of a literary field populated by ‘nothing so interesting as a rarefied temperament […] but an entirely mundane, nuts-and-bolts literary infrastructure: a leisured elite, schools willing to teach its patricians the skills of higher literacy, a caste of professional writers, bookstores, libraries, publishing houses, state patronage for the arts, and a functioning feuilleton’ (Thorne 2013: 59). From Wallerstein, she takes the central concept of world-systems theory: a single system of capital that is at once unified and marked by the unevenness of its distribution. Combining the two Casanova conceives of a literary field in which literary capital is unevenly distributed, with concentrations of ‘wealth’ cementing the power of key centres, most notably Paris, and poverty characteristic of the peripheries.⁴ ‘The best thing about her book’, Thorne concludes, ‘is that its title is simply wrong, utterly contravened by her own argument, which describes nothing like a “world republic of letters”, with whatever faded egalitarian associations that term still has, but rather a literary world-system, neocolonial in effect, if rarely in intentions: stratified, full of power imbalances, “a world of rivalry, struggle, and inequality”’: in short, an ‘empire-not-republic of letters’ (Thorne 2013: 60). By this measure of The World Republic it is clear that it falls far short of Casanova’s stated hope that her book will offer ‘a sort of critical weapon in the service of all deprived and dominated writers on the periphery of the literary world’ (2004: 354–5). In the face of an aggressively imperialist empire of letters one might expect such critical tools to take the form of a postcolonial or at least, preserving the binary opposition, counter-colonial stance that will enable those writers of the periphery to challenge their marginalization. However, as Thorne suggests and as I began to sketch out in a previous article (cf. Burns 2015), Casanova’s fidelity to an egalitarian world republic of letters creates a division at the heart of her book, encapsulated by its own two-part structure. It is this fracture that limits the extent to which her theory of world literature can be seen to resist the imperialism of the literary world-system or, indeed, to redress its inequalities.

Part One of The World Republic of Letters establishes the case for a single world literary system, unequal in its distribution of capital. While recognizing that the history of literature begins with the nation, Casanova nonetheless argues for a world literature of translations and global circulations. This signals the common ground she shares with David Damrosch, for whom literature can be said to exist within a framework that is at once national and global. World literature, Damrosch argues, can always be read as national literature depending on the reader’s affiliations, but texts become world literature once they ‘circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language (Virgil was long read in Latin in Europe) […]: work only has an effective life as world literature whenever, and wherever, it is actively present within a literary system beyond that of its original culture’ (Damrosch 2003: 4). Damrosch clearly envisions a longue durée of world literature that far exceeds Casanova’s rather short-range – for Casanova the world republic emerges in the Romantic era alongside the rise of the modern nation-state – and Casanova’s Bourdieuian approach places far more emphasis on the significance of the canon and other forms of literary consecration than Damrosch does, as suggested by his well-known claim that ‘world literature is not an infinite, ungraspable canon of works but rather a mode of circulation and of reading’ (5). Nonetheless, circulation remains a shared characteristic of world literature for both theorists. As Casanova argues in her conclusion to Part One of The World Republic, ‘world literature does indeed exist today, new in its form and its effects, that circulates easily and rapidly through virtually simultaneous translations and whose extraordinary success is due to the fact that its denationalized content can be absorbed without any risk of misunderstanding’ (2004: 172). The work of translation, however, offers a good test of Casanova’s theory since it is at once ‘the foremost example of a particular type of consecration in the literary world’ (133) and a measure of a text’s denationalization. Successful translations are those that ‘can be absorbed without any risk of misunderstanding’; or in other words, which mask the national specificity of their originating contexts so effectively that there is no loss of meaning in the transition from one language into another. Of course, translation has been central to world literature since Goethe’s infamous Conversations with Eckermann: Goethe’s own encounters with translated works of Chinese literature inspired him to a cosmopolitan sense of commonality with and difference from diverse national cultures. His claim that ‘poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere, and at all times, in hundreds and hundreds of men’ (Goethe 1906: 212) is an extension of this sentiment insofar as it is through the translation of languages, myths and stories that the universal emerges. But it does so in endlessly recreative and specific ways, and, thus, what is translated is always ‘something new’ (209). By contrast, Casanova takes forward the universalist aspects evident in Goethe’s comments as a marker of a text’s autonomy, and thus its position within the literary republic. While Goethe’s celebration of Chinese literature depends upon a moment of recognition and the frisson of difference, a form of exoticism, to be sure, but nonetheless an encounter between self and other that preserves both the universal and the specific, Casanova characterizes world literature as an encounter with a text so utterly free and abstracted from its historical, political and national context that the reader perceives no difference whatsoever. For this reason, as Thorne demonstrates through Casanova’s own exemplars (Tolstoy and, above all, Beckett), modernism emerges as the pinnacle of literary autonomy:

Modernism ratifies the condition of literature in translation, neither presuming local knowledge nor offering to produce it. And world literature is the name for a certain tendency toward abstraction within the global literary system, the propensity of works aiming for an international readership to make themselves frictionless. […] Such, in a nutshell, is Casanova’s splendid revision of the concept of Weltliteratur, which here stops functioning as the name for an (especially tedious) canon and instead makes its rightful contribution to a materialist history of letters. (Thorne 2013: 60–1)

World literature, understood in this light, already strikes the postcolonial critic as a suspicious entity, working towards the erasure of difference and alterity in favour of a generalizing abstraction: a point that is sustained as Casanova brings world-systems theory into the equation. Translation, Casanova further clarifies, is at on...