EN 370 Commodity Fictions WorldLiterature and WorldEcology Bruce
EN 370 Commodity Fictions: World-Literature and World-Ecology
Bruce Robbins: “How do you tell the history of the world? Not long ago this question would have seemed naive”. Now, however, in the context of “the decline of American power and the rise of China”, as well as “global warming and other looming resource-related catastrophes”, “urgent reasons have made themselves felt [. . . ] for trying to make sense of history on a planetary scale” (n+1 magazine, 2013).
Jason W. Moore: “By the dawn of the 21 st century, it had become increasingly difficult to address core issues in social theory and social change without some reference to environmental change. [. . . ] The environment is now firmly established as a legitimate and relevant object of analysis” (‘From Object to Oikeios: Environment-Making in the Capitalist World-Ecology, ’ 2013: 1).
The rise of ecocriticism Emerges as a distinct field of academic specialization in the 1970 s; institutionally consolidated by the 1990 s In part, a response to shift in environmental consciousness signalled by, eg. : Earth Day, 1970; Stockholm, 1972; Club of Rome report, 1972; oil shocks of 1973 and 1979
The rise of ecocriticism Arnae Ness – “deep ecology” (1973) ‘Blue Marble’ earth shot, 1972; The Good Life, 1975/ Survivors, 1975
Postcolonial Studies Like ecocriticism, emerges as a distinct field of academic specialization in the 1970 s; institutionally consolidated by the 1990 s Postcolonial studies as a response to end of post-war boom, long downturn, and new imperialist offensives in the 1970 s Key canonical texts in the field: Edward Said, Orientalism (1978), Gayatri Spivak , “Can the Subaltern Speak”(1988), Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1991)
Postcolonial studies and ecocriticism as offering correctives to one another’s blindspots For postcolonial studies it was necessary to more clearly foreground the ecological devastation entailed by colonialism and imperialism, For ecocriticism, postcolonial perspectives offered a necessary corrective to the field’s tendency towards First Worldism and its privileging of North American wilderness narratives and British Romanticism. Works interrogating intersection of two fields: Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005); Ursula Heise, Sense of Place, Sense of Planet: Environmental Imagination of the Global (2008); Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffen, Postcolonial Ecocriticism (2009); Pablo Mukherjee, Postcolonial Environments (2010); Elizabeth De. Loughrey and George B. Handley’s Postcolonial Ecologies (2011); and Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011).
The (re)emergence of world literature Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature” (2000): “I will borrow this initial hypothesis from the world-system school of economic history, for which international capitalism is a system that is simultaneously one, and unequal: with a core, and a periphery (and a semiperiphery) that are bound together in a relationship of growing inequality. One, and unequal: one literature (Weltliteratur, singular, as in Goethe and Marx), or perhaps, better, one world literary system (of inter-related literatures); but a system which is different from what Goethe and Marx had hoped for, because it’s profoundly unequal. ” David Damrosch, What is World Literature (2003); Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline (2003); Haun Saussy, Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (2006); Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007); Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees (2007); Emily Apter’s Against World Literature (2013); WRe. C, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (2015)
efforts by materialist critics to reconstruct the concept of world literature in terms of its relationship to global capitalism world literature to be understood, in the broadest terms, as the literature of the capitalist world-system – as the literature that registers and encodes the social logic of capitalist modernity
World-systems analysis emerges in the 1970 s with the work of Immanuel Wallerstein (e. g. , The Modern World-System (1974) Other world-systems theorists, . e. g. , Giovanni Arrighi, Christopher Chase-Dunn, Wilma Dunaway a form of historical sociology (world history and social change) makes a particular argument for the unit of analysis we need to consider when examining the history of social change
World-systems analysis divides historical systems into three categories: minisystems, world-economies, and world-empires The latter two are both types of world-system The hyphen indicates that these are not systems, economies, or empires of the (whole) world, but rather “systems, economies, empires that are a world (but quite possibly, and indeed usually, not encompassing the entire globe). ” Thus, “in ‘world-systems’ we are dealing with a spatial / temporal zone which cuts across many political and cultural units, one that represents an integrated zone of activity and institutions which obey certain systemic rules” (Wallerstein, Introduction to World-Systems Analysis , 16 -17).
In a world-economy, the linkages between the units that constitute this integrated zone are dominated by market exchanges. Uniquely, capitalism is the first world-system to become a world – i. e. a global – system. For Wallerstein, the emergence of capitalism over the course of the ‘long’ sixteenth century (1450 -1640) is the emergence of a capitalist world-economy, one divided between core, peripheral, and semiperipheral regions that are locked together in a relationship of inequality.
a “world-system is a multicultural territorial division of labor in which the production and exchange of basic goods and raw materials is necessary for the everyday life of its inhabitants. It is thus by definition composed of culturally different societies that are vitally linked together through the exchange of food and raw materials. ” Christopher Chase-Dunn and Peter Grimes, “World-Systems Analysis” (p. 389)
Rise of the capitalist world-economy / worldecology World-economy and world-ecology represent ‘distinct angles of vision onto a singular world-historical process’ “With the rise of capitalism, local societies were not integrated only into a world capitalist system; more to the point, varied and heretofore largely isolated local and regional socio-ecological relations were incorporated into – and at the same moment became constituting agents of – a capitalist world-ecology. Local socio-ecologies were at once transformed by human labour power (itself a force of nature) and brought into sustained dialogue with each other. [. . . ] Hence, the hyphen becomes appropriate: We are talking not necessarily about the ecology of the world (although this is in fact the case today) but rather a world-ecology. ” (Moore, “Capitalism as World-Ecology”, 2003: 447)
The world-ecology perspective: history as always co-produced by humans alongside the rest of nature historical systems as bundles of human and extra-human activities and relations woven together into definite historical configurations the capitalist world-system is a world-ecology
World-Literature and World-Ecology the ‘world’ in world literature is the modern world-ecology world literature has this world-ecology as its ultimate interpretative horizon world-historical transformations in human and biophysical natures will necessarily be discernible, at some level, in any modern literary work
commodity frontiers: spaces of extraction or production (such as mines or cash-crop plantations) which reorganize land labour, pumping vast reservoirs of food, energy, or raw materials into the global economy In so doing, they rapidly exhaust human and extra-human natures, compelling the movement of the frontier in search of fresh streams of nature’s bounty What if we took the forms of environment-making through which commodity frontiers develop as the basis for literary comparativism?
“Coal dust and the mud of the mines saturated the whole place. The coal pit was the only thing in each village that mattered, the only part of life on which capital and care and brains were expended. ” (Ellen Wilkinson, Clash, p. 146) “And they all of them had that cacao slime clinging to their souls, inside them, deep in their hearts. For cacao was money, cacao was power, cacao was the whole of life; it was not merely something planted in the black and sap-giving earth: it was inside themselves. Growing within them, it cast over every heart a malignant shade, slaying all good impulses. ” (Jorge Amado, The Violent Land, p. 272)
There are, for me, just three important events in British Caribbean history […]. The first event is the discovery. [. . . ] The next event is the abolition of slavery and the arrival of the East—India and China—in the Caribbean Sea. [. . . ] The third important event in our history is the discovery of the novel by West Indians as a way of investigating and projecting the inner experiences of the West Indian community. The second event is about a hundred and fifty years behind us. The third is hardly two decades ago. What the West Indian writer has done has nothing to do with that English critic’s assessments. The West Indian writer is the first to add a new dimension to writing about the West Indian community… As it should be, the novelist was the first to relate the West Indian experience from the inside. He was the first to chart the West Indian memory as far back as he could go. It is to the West Indian novelist —who had no existence twenty years ago—that the anthropologist and all other treatises about West Indians have to turn. George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile
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