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This chapter attempts to resituate the problem of ‘world literature’, considered as a revived category of theoretical enquiry, by pursuing the literary-cultural implications of the theory of combined and uneven development. Following the lead of Franco Moretti, Fredric Jameson and others, it proposes that world-literature be thought about as the literature of the world-system. The ‘combined unevenness’ that is a formal feature of modern literary production is read as a registration of capitalism on a world scale. A critique is mounted of theories of modern literature (including ‘modernism’) that displace capitalism from centre stage. Particular attention is paid here to the work of Edward W. Said, Emily Apter, Susan Bassnett, Rey Chow, and Wai Chee Dimock.

This theoretical chapter examines the question of what has been called ‘peripheral realism–. Reviewing the texts selected for examination in the book overall – produced at different times and places across the span of the long 20th century – it shows that they share not only common themes, plots and subjects, but also a range of formal features that might be called ‘irrealist’. The argument is that these techniques and devices represent formal registers of (semi-) peripherality in the world-literary system, discernible wherever literary works are composed that mediate the lived experience of capitalism's bewildering creative destruction (or destructive creation). This argument is mounted through particular reference to such authors as Dostoevsky and Machado de Assis and to literary historical development in such regions as Russia and the Caribbean, the United States, Brazil, Mexico (and Latin America more generally).

This chapter juxtaposes World Literatures and World Englishes in order to understand the continued relevance of literary studies to engaging with globalized languages and cultures. This juxtaposition leads to an emphasis on the relative slowness of reading literature in the context of increasingly instantaneous information retrieval and dissemination. The chapter argues that different literatures, including World Englishes literatures, contribute to humanities education through their lack of transparency and the difficulty of framing them in the terms of a globalized communicative ideology. World Englishes, by contrast with Global English, are aspects of this opaqueness, encouraging and requiring a critical engagement vital to the humanities.

Arguing that the war in the east has been overshadowed in public remembrance by literary depictions of the war on the western front, Eva Horn delves into novelistic portrayals of the eastern front. The chapter finds that, in contrast to the traumatic technologized trench warfare of the west, the “wild war” on the eastern front was “not a war of machines but a war of bodies and mentalities, not a war of nations but of ethnicities, not a war of destruction from a distance but a dirty, destructive interaction between enemies.”

The first chapter turns to Tagore, whose auto-translations stand as examples of degraded art both because translations fail to meet the criteria of aesthetic originality and because the critical consensus around Tagore’s English works is that they fail to transmit the beauty and flair of their Bengali originals. Rather than discount Tagore’s translations, I centralize them and examine how he turned unglamorous, second-order acts of literary production, such as compilation, translation, and editing, into modernist strategies for preserving linguistic difference and partial unintelligibility as a style of transnational contact across imperial lines of power. Through my close readings of Nationalism (1916) and The Home and the World (1919), I show how Tagore treated his Bengali originals not as hermetically-sealed, finished works of art, but rather as repositories of material. Their translation and rearrangement into English allowed him to mediate between utopian internationalisms that dreamed of perfect communication between nations and autarkic nationalisms that argued for the cultural self-sufficiency of the nation as a marker of its readiness for sovereignty. Against both these more absolutist positions of globalism and nationalism, Tagore’s auto-translations intervene with a model of national autonomy that precludes cultural organicism and a model of internationalism that makes imperfect communication a feature of globalized collectivity with which to grapple rather than an obstacle to overcome.

This chapter reprints the introduction to The Postcolonial Exotic to set the stage for all of the Bourdieu-inspired approaches to postcolonial studies that will follow. Huggan shows how the oppositional ethos of postcolonial studies runs up against the commodifying apparatus of postcoloniality. The emerging “alterity industry” and its exoticizing processes threaten the potentiality for critique that postcolonial studies seeks to offer. Yet Huggan also steers clear of reductive attacks on postcolonialism as therefore contaminated and complicit; in a context where the global market aspires to commodify all forms of resistance and opposition, there is no uncontaminated stance. Bourdieu offers Huggan conceptual tools to call attention to this tenuous positioning within which postcolonial studies is located in order to explore the possibilities for critique still offered by this contaminated space.

The romantic idea of the writer as an isolated genius has died, but there are few studies documenting the sociology of publishing, particularly the role of “gatekeeping.” How do friends, agents, editors, translators, small publishers, and reviewers—not to mention the changes in technology, copyright, and the industry—shape the literary process? This matrix is further complicated when books cross cultural and language barriers—become part of World Literature. This study builds on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Randall Collins, and David Damrosch, describing the multi-layered gatekeeping process after the 1960s. It focuses on Gabriel García Márquez, Charles Bukowski, Paul Auster, and Haruki Murakami. Tracing their rise, it takes issue with the interpretations of World Literature offered by Pascal Casanova and Franco Moretti. It poses four counter-examples in Rigoberta Menchu, Diane di Prima, Lydia Davis, and Banana Yoshimoto, showing that the genre is neither a “republic” nor a genre.

The introduction to Bourdieu and Postcolonial Studies maps the emergence of Bourdieu-influenced approaches to the field since 2000. Postcolonial studies emerged as an academic discipline in the 1980s as figures like Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha adapted post-structural theory by Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan to examinations of the colonial and formerly colonial world. Since the early 1990s, there has been a move towards more materialist approaches in postcolonial studies, including Marxist critiques of the field as well as increased interest in archival research and book history. In the context of this interest in the material circumstances of literature’s production and circulation, the European theorist who has inspired the most innovative and important work in postcolonial studies in the twenty-first century has been Bourdieu. The introduction investigates the reasons for this turn towards Bourdieu as well as its implications for our understanding both of Bourdieu’s work and of postcolonial studies as a field. The introduction thus offers a sociological approach to the emergence of sociological approaches to postcolonial literature.

The understudied archive of Muslim slave narratives demands a reconfiguration of the early history of New World Black literature, on the one hand asserting Arabic letters and Orientalist mediations as foundational discursive sources while on the other hand directing greater attention to narrative production in West Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Consistently marked in their time and ours by a racist dialectic of amnesia and surprise, these Muslim narrators draw upon devices of the Arab-Islamic tradition even as they anticipate the experiences of administrative detention, of the expired visa, of deportation, and of repatriation. In their enduring oscillation between obscurity and legibility, and in our own efforts to assemble their traces, we must confront and honor these narrators’ eventual retreat from interpellation, a reticence that vexes even as it structures the archive of the Global South Atlantic: resistant, dispersed, decentered, and opaque.

Marlene van Niekerk’s novels Triomf (1994) and Agaat (2004) set new standards for Afrikaans fiction. This chapter canvasses the author’s abiding concerns with the forced adoption of the temporality of another—another political order, another cultural identity—that was at the heart of apartheid ideology, and with the multiple disappointments (missed appointments, frustrated desires) that resulted. Focusing on Agaat, it considers the role of the novel (and of the character Agaat within it) as a prosthesis that makes transmission—and critique—of culture possible. Turning to debates about the shape of World Literature, and the place of South African writing within it, the chapter also asks what the translation of Agaat into English suggests about the fates of writing from a specific national and linguistic context when taken up by a discipline that flattens difference.

Poetic language and literary history mattered to Hannah Arendt in her thinking about community because they told a story about how political worlds, whether bound by nation states or by international laws and treaties, traffic with the worlds we imagine and create. These worlds are not equivalent, but the idea of the world making potential of literature that she inherited from German Romanticism also gave her the means to re-imagine new political terms for humanity at mid-century. What Arendt first described in 1949 as ‘the right to have rights’ had its own poetry. Returning to her work on Rahel Varnhagen, pariah literature, and Bertolt Brecht, this chapter shows how Arendt’s political theory was indebted to her developing understanding of the world-making capacities of poetry and writing in her own period of statelessness.

The chapter considers how, beginning with the Revolution and continuing across the centry, new narrative forms in prose and poetry fashion a discourse of national destiny. As narratives conceptualize historical change and convey the meanings of catastrophe, they develop new plotlines, metaphoric systems and mythological visions. The chapter argues that Russian literature on the Great Terror, collectivization, and Gulag achieves a focus on historical and personal trauma comparable to Holocaust literature. Soviet narratives of World War II also form an important trend from the 1940s through twenty-first century, serving simultaneously as the source of social criticism and the sustained attempt to redefine national identity.

This concluding chapter takes its title from a book of photographs about Australia published in 1931 by E. O. Hoppé. The cover of The Fifth Continent showed the photographer atop a globe looking back at a map of Australia, and it is this attempt to reconstitute the world in relation to alternative spatial perspectives that provided the impetus for Hoppé’s work. Similarly, to read authors such as Slessor or Dark in parallax with canonical types is not only to correlate relatively neglected figures with modernism’s larger orbit, but also to highlight various neglected aspects of more established writers, the complex ways in which their narratives face backwards as well as forwards. The particular force of backgazing within a sphere of modernism thus lies in the way it resists conventional classifications by projecting not an oppositional but a reversible world, one whose boundaries are rendered enigmatic.