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Where in the World Is World Literature?

EVEN AS “WORLD LITERATURE” becomes part of the intellectual vocabulary of a wider public sphere beyond academic humanities circles, at least in the Anglophone North Atlantic, it is sometimes difficult to see it as much more than an arcane preoccupation of students of literature, of little interest even to scholars in the other humanistic disciplines, from art history to anthropology. This is at least in part due to developments in the literary field itself, which has seen a resurgence of specialization and seems less and less to engage questions and ways of thinking that have bridged disciplinary boundaries in recent years. More concretely, in the current revival of the concept of world literature, something of considerable importance appears to be largely missing: namely, the question of Orientalism. While the authority of Edward Said’s Orientalism has become more or less incontrovertible for broad sectors of the critical humanities, the book also seems to be treated as a work firmly situated in the past, whose historical achievement may be appreciated but whose methods, archives, and larger stakes have been largely superseded by the emergent realities of our world. I do not think that it would be an exaggeration to say that the present interest in literary relations as a planet-wide reality bypasses the question of Orientalism’s “worldly” efficacy almost entirely. It may actually be the case that, despite the massive pedagogical consequences of Said’s book over the past few decades, people trained as critics and scholars of literature are nevertheless still not comfortable in engaging with the Orientalist and area studies archives. The modern discourse of world literature thus pays scant attention to the very historical process that is its condition of possibility, namely, the assimilation of vastly dispersed and heterogeneous writing practices and traditions into the space of “literature.” This process of assimilation is an ongoing one, repeated constantly in the very forms of circulation that constitute world literature. It is the origins and historical unfolding of this process that I shall explore in this chapter and Chapter 2.

Historicism and Orientalism: Reading the World

We might begin to address this problem with a discussion of Pascale Casanova’s widely cited World Republic of Letters, a work that has generated a broad discussion since its translation into English, which presents an argument about the emergence of international literary space in Europe in the early modern era and its expansion across the continent and beyond over the past four centuries. The overall armature of the book rests on the identification of three key moments in the development of this international literary space and seems to follow fairly closely the chronology established by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities.¹ The first, its moment of origin so to speak, is the extended and uneven process of vernacularization in the emerging European states from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. The next turning point and period of massive expansion comes, Casanova argues, again following Anderson’s periodization, in the “philological-lexigraphic revolution” starting in the late eighteenth century and the widely dispersed invention of national cultures—languages, literatures, varieties of völkisch traditions—that ensued. Casanova argues that the new practice of literature to emerge in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, linked to a new conception of language and its relationship to its community of speakers, is an element within, and a modality of, “the first enlargement of literary space to include the continent of Europe as a whole.” The third and, for Casanova, ongoing period in the expansion of this world literary space is linked to the historical “event” of decolonization in the post–World War II era, “marking the entry into international competition of contestants who until then had been prevented from taking part.”²

My point of entry into this formulation is what I take to be its most consequential misconception: for Casanova, non-Western literary cultures make their first effective appearance in world literary space in the era of decolonization in the middle of the twentieth century. Casanova thus fails to comprehend the real nature of the expansion and rearrangement of this until then largely European space in the course of the philological revolution. It is through the philological knowledge revolution—the “discovery” of the classical languages of the East, the invention of the linguistic family tree whose basic form is still with us today, the translation and absorption into the Western languages of more and more works from Persian, Arabic, and the Indian languages, among many others—that non-Western textual traditions made their first wholescale entry as literature, sacred and secular, into the international literary space that had emerged in early modern times in Europe as a structure of rivalries between the emerging vernacular traditions, transforming the scope and structure of that space forever. This moment, which Casanova reads almost entirely through Johann Gottfried Herder, is mistaken by her for a redrawing of the internal cultural map of Europe, rather than a reorganization that is planetary in scope, in the sense that this emerging constellation of philological knowledge, perhaps best known to us now from Said’s reading of it in Orientalism, posits nothing less than the textual cultures and languages of the entire world as its object in the final instance. Moreover, this assimilation of “Oriental” writing practices proceeded by classicizing works from antiquity, that is, by arranging and establishing them as the core canon and original tradition of a civilization, well before turning to contemporary writers and forms of writing. The modalities of the former process of classicization established the rules and regulations for the later assimilation of contemporary writing. We should note, however, that the world as an assemblage of cultural units or entities was, more accurately speaking, divided in metropolitan knowledge practices in the imperial era between “primitive” societies and ancient “civilizations.” As Suzanne Marchand, for instance, has shown in her important critical history of Oriental studies in Germany, the emergent disciplines in the humanities in Germany in the nineteenth century were divided between those concerned with so-called Naturvölker and Kulturvölker, respectively.³ (And many societies once regarded in the imperial world system as the former now of course produce major literatures of the sort once attributed exclusively to the latter.) This disciplinary division of labor between anthropology and Orientalism, however, each with its canonical concepts and methods for the study of its own segment of “the rest” of humanity, did not preclude frequent overlap and cooperation between them. In a broader sense, therefore, we might say that metropolitan aesthetic discourses about the world’s colonial peripheries retain an element of the anthropological, always in a mutually determining tension with the concept of the expressive traditions and practices of European civilization.

Casanova’s is a misreading of the scope even of Herder’s work, for his various attempts to generate ways of thinking about the “education of mankind,” even while voicing skepticism about the proliferation of this frame of thought among his European contemporaries, must themselves be viewed as part of the larger German and European Orientalist enterprise. Herder not only relied on the work of professional Orientalist scholars and travelers for his historical syntheses but ought himself to be considered as such, not simply because, as Marchand has argued, of his significant writing on what he called Hebrew poetry (and since “the Orient” in German culture was largely biblical-Hebraic well into the 1770s) but also because of his pioneering importance in igniting the German interest in ancient India, on which he wrote extensively from the 1880s on.⁴ More broadly speaking, philosophical historicism of the sort associated with Herder cannot be understood without examining its relation to the properly Orientalist ideas of cultural difference, such as those elaborated by William Jones in both the “Islamicate” and “Indic” phases of his work, to which I turn shortly, and the reverse is also the case: the Orientalist enterprise, too often examined as a free-standing discourse and set of practices, needs to be reexamined as part of larger cultural and intellectual configurations at the threshold of the modern West. Orientalism was not merely the conduit for bringing non-Western cultural exempla to a European reading public (already) trained in historicism—though it was also that. More importantly, it was in fact the ground on which such ideas could be elaborated, tested, and contested.

As is well known, Herder began in his writings of the 1770s, including the Treatise on the Origin of Language (written during December 1770, published in 1772), to mark a break with conceptions of the origin of language that had been dominant in the eighteenth century and that viewed the origin and development of language as such as part of the history of humanity—we need only think here of the well-known works of such eighteenth-century predecessors of Herder’s as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, both cited in Herder’s work. The Treatise is composed explicitly as a refutation of the theory of the origin of language evinced in Rousseau’s own Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754). Herder refuted, on the one hand, the widely held contemporary ideas about the necessarily divine nature of the creation of human speech but also, on the other, Rousseau’s postulation of a state of nature in which “man” had no need of speech. With reference to the latter, Herder spoke contemptuously of “that phantom of his, natural man” and argued that the capacity for reflection and reasoning, the quality that distinguishes man from the animals, was not dissociable from language and that if “reason was not possible to man without language, … then the invention of the latter is to man as natural, as old, as original, as characteristic as the use of the former.”⁵ Herder thus sought to remove the question of the nature of human language and the possibilities of knowledge from the rhetorical structure of speculative-historical narratives of the “education of mankind” and made it available to the possibility of historical investigation. Already in section 2 of the Treatise, Herder speaks of the separate evolution of distinct languages, some, like Hebrew, giving us clues about the “original” forms of human speech. But in a series of subsequent writings—such as Yet Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Mankind (Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, 1774) and the widely encompassing Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 1784–1791)—he argued more systematically that human intelligence always took historical form and could only be exercised in language, in particular languages at particular times and, to a great extent, in particular places. Herder rejected the modes of contemporary thinking associated with the sweeping developmentalist schema that placed enlightened modernity at the pinnacle of mankind’s civilizational evolution, arguing instead that no system of beliefs and values could be the basis for making judgments about another. Each human collective was to be seen as an organic whole, embodying its own unique “genius” and spirit—its Volksgeist—that could only be understood and judged on its own terms, by entering into the viewpoint of its native members.

The consequences over the next century, even merely in Euro-American culture, of the rise and acceptance of these ideas about the boundedness of thought in language are legion and too well known to require rehearsing here in detail. They range from the emergence of secular methodologies of interpretation of the scriptures to romantic notions about the imagination and history and even the forms of cultural relativism that are foundational to both British and American anthropology in the early twentieth century—Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas, the modern codifiers of these respective traditions, had each received the heritage of Herderian historicism as part of their intellectual formation in Germany.⁶ But Herder, unlike his teacher Johann Georg Hamann—the other leading figure of (and predecessor in) what, in a number of works, Isaiah Berlin has identified as the “counter-Enlightenment”—insisted at the same time on being able to speak of Humanität in general, to be encountered in the diversity rather than similarity of human forms, a potential and ideal rather than something “ready made.”⁷ Herder’s reputation as progenitor of German nationalism and the even more damning judgment of his being the source and inspiration for Nazi raciology are questions of some complexity. It would be wrong to see in Herder a fully formed and radical German nationalism, as later critics have sometimes done, to say nothing of those in the national-socialist era who considered themselves his acolytes.⁸ His strong historicism implies that no one people or way of life can claim superiority over any other, let alone use it for its own ends, and his concept of Humanität is precisely that of an irreducible concert of peoples. On the other hand, as Sarah Lawall has noted, “Herder’s stress on empathy (Einfühlung) and experience, his insistence on the discreteness and plurality of national and ethnic characters, and his belief in the metaphorical quality or intentionality of perceptions, keep his world history from being the mere workings of a perfectly balanced neoclassical machine.”⁹ It is instructive in this regard that when German idealism took its most precipitous plunge into nationalism three decades later (and half a decade after Herder’s death) in French-occupied Berlin, in the form of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation, in which the German appears as the “original man,” the term Humanität itself was rejected as dead and incomprehensible to native speakers of German and alien to their collective wisdom, to be replaced with the supposedly authentic Germanic compound Menschenfreundlichkeit. (Being a loan-translation, however, this term can no more pass the test of indigenousness than could the word it was meant to replace.)¹⁰ But it is also the case that Herder provides the most detailed and early elaboration of what I call nation-thinking, those emergent discursive strategies and modes of writing that made it possible for the first time to conceive of human societies in more or less secular national-cultural terms.¹¹ It is therefore not incorrect to view Herder as a progenitor of the romantic and organic national concept as such, whose notion of language and culture is so deterministic as to spill over into the territory theorized decades later in Germany, France, and elsewhere in Europe as biological race.

Yet Another Philosophy is a broadside against the dominant tendencies of the modern age, often adopting an ironic, mocking, and even sarcastic tone about what Herder considers the artificiality and pretentiousness of the philosophes’ insistent appeal to universal reason. This “enlightened” propagation of a relentless pursuit of abstract reason—and Herder’s most frequently appearing antagonist is Voltaire—makes of human life a hollow shell, ignoring the realm of “feeling” that is at the heart of the social bond between human beings at all levels of society, from the family to the nation: “The eternal foundation for the education of mankind in all ages: wisdom instead of science, piety instead of wisdom, the love of parents, spouses, children instead of pleasantries and debauchery. Life well-ordered, the rule of divine right by a dynasty—the model for all civil order and its institutions—in all this mankind takes the simplest but also the most profound delight.” This original core of feeling and attachment, moreover, “has no equal at all in our philosophical, cold, European world.”¹² Furthermore, Herder criticizes the philosophes as historians for judging past eras of history—that is, other societies—on the basis of the values and supposed accomplishments of their own, which means that they fail to grasp the core, the specific preoccupations and accomplishments, and the unique sources of felicity and communal well-being of the peoples under consideration:

Even the image of happiness changes with every condition and location (for what is it ever but the sum of “the satisfaction of desire, the fulfillment of purpose, and the gentle overcoming of needs,” all of which are shaped by land, time, and place?). Basically, then, all comparison becomes futile. As soon as the inner meaning of happiness, the inclination has changed; as soon as external opportunities and needs develop and solidify the other meaning—who could compare the different satisfaction of different meanings in different worlds? … Every nation has its center of happiness within itself, as every ball has its center of gravity.¹³

Any generation or era in history can moreover only build on what it has received from earlier ones. But the philosophers’ self-orientation leads them to a blindness to the myriad particulars that make up the life of a people and produces a relentless universalism that can only ever find others lacking the attributes of enlightened culture and society. As a corollary of this screed against the Enlightenment forms of universalism and cosmopolitanism, which can only produce a “mechanical” view of life, Herder launches a defense of particular, local, historically established, and communal ways of life, such as in the ancient Germanic world—organic “communities of brothers living beside one another.” Ancient and time-tested means of inculcating virtue—all the myriad forms of education that human societies have developed over the ages in accordance with their values and “center of gravity”—are being abandoned for a universal and superficial “refinement to mannered pleasantries.” Whereas once “wisdom was always narrowly national and therefore reached deeper and attracted more strongly, … how widely it casts its rays now! Where is what Voltaire writes not read? The whole world is well-nigh glowing with Voltaire’s lucidity!”¹⁴ But there is a fundamental tension in Herder’s work, these radically particularist ideas about language, religion, literature, mythology, and ritual coexisting uneasily with the “education of mankind” narrative frame common to Enlightenment thinkers. The story of mankind’s education or formation begins in the “Oriental world” (that is, the world of the Old Testament) and proceeds through Egypt, Greece, Rome, early Christianity, and the Middle Ages, culminating in the Renaissance. The tension is revealed in the note of irony present in the title itself: yet another philosophy of history for the education of mankind.

The French are of course at the core of Herder’s critique, for the culture of the French Enlightenment is for him inherently a colonizing one: within Europe, there has come to be a universal fashion for French culture and ways of thinking: “the rulers of Europe are speaking French already, and soon we will all be doing so.” Given the abstract, mechanical, rootless, and hence superficial nature of their culture and thinking, the French are mere “apes of humanity, of genius, of good humor, of virtue—and precisely because they are nothing more, and are themselves aped so easily, they are such for all of Europe.” But the destructiveness is being visited on a world scale, and all the European powers—England, France, Holland, Spain, and the Catholic Church (“the Jesuits”)—caught up in the fever for civilizing the “savages,” are playing their part: “Where are there no European colonies, and where will there not be any? The fonder savages grow everywhere of our liquor and luxury, the more ready they also become for our conversion! Everywhere they are brought closer to our culture, by liquor and luxury especially, and before long—God willing!—all human beings will be as we are: good, strong, happy men!”¹⁵ Herder thus expresses here that strain of conservative eighteenth-century thought, which includes Edmund Burke, that viewed the world-scale violence of empire building as a logical extension and practical application of liberal-Enlightenment ways of thinking.¹⁶ But here we may also glimpse the fundamental paradox of counter-Enlightenment critique, that while trumpeting its particularism it stages its riposte to the universalism of Enlightenment thought and defense of particular life-ways as a universal critique of Enlightenment and on the basis of the universal public that it takes to be the latter’s distinct (and questionable) achievement.

For Herder, the purest, highest, and most spontaneous expression of the spirit (or Volksgeist) of an organic community is its poetic tradition. And needless to say, this is a “bardic” conception of poetry—to borrow a term from Katie Trumpener—in rejection of the dominant neoclassicism of the time and its promotion by learned societies, academies of letters, and the like, to say nothing of “enlightened” absolutist rulers like Prussia’s Frederick the Great, Voltaire’s intellectual and literary protégé but also worldly patron and friend.¹⁷ “Poetry,” Herder writes, “is a Proteus among peoples; it changes its form in accordance with a people’s language, morals, habits, temperament, climate, and even their accent.” Furthermore, the creative vitality of a people can only be given adequate form in its own language: “We cannot blame a nation for loving its poets above all others and not wanting to abandon them for foreign ones. The poets of a nation are, after all, its poets. They have thought in its language; they have used their imaginations within its context; they have felt the needs of the nation within which they were raised, and to those needs they have addressed themselves. Why should not a nation, therefore, empathize with its own poets, for a nation and its poets are tightly interconnected by a bond of language, thoughts, needs, and feelings.”¹⁸ These original, primitive, and natural forms of poetic expression are the shared heritage of humanity in which the core of human existence comes through—hence Herder’s (proto-romantic) “affection for autonomous, unself-conscious, natural poetry,” as Marchand has noted, and hence his emphasis on the earliest and supposedly unadulterated cultural forms of every ancient civilization.¹⁹ This is the case, for instance, with his monumental work on the “spirit of Hebrew poetry,” written in the form of a dialogue, which is an attempt to reconcile the Christian notion of the “truth” and originality of the scriptures with the new philological and secular conception of poetry, departing from the work of the Anglican Bishop Lowth, whose lectures on the subject published in 1753 had long become the canonical approach to the poetry of the Hebrew Bible.²⁰ For Herder, the Old Testament is to be understood as “true” not in a literal sense but because it expresses the collective spirit and wisdom of the ancient Israelites, God’s chosen people in their own time—thus making possible a secular reading of it for its “mythical” contents. And in his extensive writings on ancient India especially in the last decade or so of his life, Herder put in jeopardy even the belief in the universality of the Judeo-Christian revelations, refusing to judge Indian religiosity on the latter’s terms.²¹

Such a concept of cultural and historical difference, therefore, could hardly have been concerned primarily with the uniqueness of the traditions of the French and the Germans, as Casanova has suggested. It concerns the question of human diversity on a world scale. It is certainly the case that “competition” with the French intelligentsia and its symbolic capital in the European republic of letters is the context proper to understanding the emergence of Herderian historicism. Herder and his fellow travelers of Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) in the 1770s, including the young Goethe, elaborated an idea of the unique creative genius of peoples precisely as members of an emergent German intelligentsia chafing against the “universal” symbolic force of French letters. It revealed the ideological impulse of a weak emergent bourgeoisie, without a unitary state, let alone an empire, condemned to watching the Industrial Revolution from afar. And we could also say that Goethe’s late-in-life dissemination of the idea of Weltliteratur was motivated at one level by the sense that German literature was at an inherent disadvantage with respect to the English or the French in not being backed by a powerful state and its institutions. But this does not preclude, at another level of intercultural relations, a shared interest (with the French or British) in the absorption and systematization of the writing practices and traditions of Europe’s various others—Orientalism, in short. Modern Orientalism emerged from the very beginning as a continent-wide network and system of relays. And colonial raison d’état, narrowly conceived, of individual imperial states did play an important role from one context to another, but not as the overarching principle of its intellectual and “scientific” development. To view the history of Orientalism in Germany as fundamentally different from that in France or Britain because of the absence or at best lateness of imperial experience in the German case, as Marchand has done, is to have misunderstood this multiple, but simultaneously singular and pan-European, nature of Orientalisms in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In Chapter 2, I shall turn to William Jones’s “discovery” of Sanskrit after arriving in India in 1783 as a judge of the Supreme Court at Calcutta—a cultural “event” with far-reaching consequences for the intellectual developments that are of concern in this book and that was in fact received and consumed as an event throughout the European literary sphere into the mid-nineteenth century. But it is important here to examine closely some of Jones’s earlier work, in particular the two essays—“On the Poetry of the Eastern Nations” and “On the Arts, Commonly Called Imitative”—appended to his first collection of verse, Poems, Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages (1772).²² M. H. Abrams, in his classic study of the emergence of Romantic poetics and criticism, singles out Jones as one of the very rare writers among his contemporaries who “deliberately set out to revise the bases of the neo-classic theory of poetry” and points to the second of these essays as the first statement of the emergent “expressive” theory of poetic composition that was to find its fruition in the work of the English and German Romantics. Jones was “the first writer in England,” Abrams notes, to fuse various dispersed contemporary lines of thinking concerning poetic language—“the ideas drawn from Longinus, the old doctrine of poetic inspiration, recent theories of the emotional and imaginative origin of poetry, and a major emphasis on the lyric form and on the supposedly primitive and spontaneous poetry of the Oriental nations”—into an explicit and systematic account of the “original” nature of poetry.²³ Abrams overstates the case for Jones’s break with “neo-classic” norms, however, as part of Jones’s concern in the book as a whole appears to be to introduce his readers to the possibility that Oriental verse could live up to the ancients’ “standard of true taste,” and he is anxious to insist that “It must not be supposed, from my zeal for the literature of Asia, that I mean to place it in competition with the beautiful productions of the Greeks and Romans.”²⁴ On the other hand, despite Abrams’s reference to Jones’s interest in “Oriental” traditions of verse, Abrams mentions only the second of Jones’s two essays in speaking of his role in the emergence of the new poetics and thus underplays the impact of the Oriental poetic traditions in Jones’s revisionist project: “In 1772 he published a volume of translations and ‘imitations’ of Arabic, Indian, and Persian poems to which he added an important ‘Essay on the Arts called Imitative.’ ”²⁵ (Abrams is also forgetting the place of Turkish in Jones’s schema.) When the two essays are read together, as they are clearly meant to be, they reveal a more complex picture of the cultural transactions that constitute the moment and become available to us for a more expansive understanding of the range of historicist ideas and of the diffusion of “lyric” sensibilities, practices, and theories across the world over the following century.

The second, more general essay (on “imitation” in poetry) begins by identifying a profound and widespread error in aesthetic thinking in the eighteenth century that for Jones has classical roots:

It is the fate of those maxims, which have been thrown out by very eminent writers, to be received implicitly by most of their followers, and to be repeated a thousand times, for no other reason, than because they once dropped from the pen of superior genius: one of these is the assertion of Aristotle, that all poetry consists in imitation, which has been so frequently echoed from author to author, that it would seem a kind of arrogance to controvert it; for almost all the philosophers and criticks, who have written upon the subject of poetry, music, and painting, how little soever they may agree in some points, seem of one mind in considering them as arts merely imitative.

Noting that “in some Mahometan nations” this is patently not the case and “no kind of imitation seems to be much admired,” Jones goes on to argue for the origins of poetry in “strong, and animated expression of human passions, of joy and grief, love and hate, admiration and anger.” “Genuine” poetry is thus no more than “some vehement passion” expressed “in just cadence, and with proper accents” and “pure and original musick,” simply that same poetic composition “expressed in a musical voice, (that is, in sounds accompanied with their Harmonicks)” and “sung in due time and measure.” True poetry (and also true music and painting) produce in the reader (or listener or beholder) “a kind of rapturous delight … not by imitating the works of nature, but by assuming her power, and causing the same effect upon the imagination, which her charms produce to the senses.” The nature of poetry is thus to give expression to genuine feeling, since “the passions, which were given by nature, never spoke in an unnatural form” and a “man, who is really joyful or afflicted, cannot be said to imitate joy or affliction.” Though his overall purpose is to define “what poetry ought to be,” Jones writes, he has had to begin “by describing what it really was among the Hebrews, the Greeks and Romans, the Arabs and Persians.”²⁶ The essay on the poetic practices of the “Eastern nations” thus provides the ground for the elaboration of the broader ideas about poetry and expressiveness, with a view to their lessons for poetry and poetics in the European languages.

Jones begins this essay, the first of the two, with a description of the physical geography of “Arabia [or] that part of it, which we call the Happy, and which the Asiaticks know by the name of Yemen,” and of its influence on the “manners” of its inhabitants, since “the genius of every nation is not a little affected by their climate.” It is a utopian account, in the well-known and recognizable European traditions of the valorization of the primitive: “no nation at this day can vie with the Arabians in the delightfulness of their climate, and the simplicity of their manners.” And since “whatever is delightful to the senses produces the Beautiful when it is described, where can we find so much beauty as in the Eastern poems, which turn chiefly upon the loveliest objects in nature?” Furthermore, “we must not believe that the Arabian poetry can please only by its descriptions of beauty; since the gloomy and terrible objects, which produce the sublime, when they are aptly described, are no where more common than in the Desert and Stony Arabia’s [sic].” Given the importance of the oasis and the verdant valley in Arabian life, therefore, “it is a maxim among them that the three most charming objects in nature are, a green meadow, a clear rivulet, and a beautiful woman.” And as the Arabians are “such admirers of beauty, and as they enjoy such ease and leisure,” it is not surprising to see them “naturally be susceptible of that passion, which is the true spring and force of agreeable poetry; and we find, indeed, that love has a greater share in their poems than any other passion.” The prophet Muhammad—referred to in this same passage as “the impostor”—being “well acquainted with [this] maxim of his countrymen,” thus “described the pleasures of heaven to them under the allegory of cool fountains, green bowers, and black-eyed girls, as the word Houri literally signifies in Arabick; and in the chapter of the Morning, towards the end of his Alcoran, he mentions a garden, called Irem, which is no less celebrated by the Asiatick poets than that of the Hesperides by the Greeks.” Moreover, the natives of Arabia enjoy the singular advantage over the inhabitants of most other countries that “they preserve to this day the manners and customs of their ancestors, who, by their own account, were settled in the province of Yemen above three thousand years ago.”²⁷

A similar correspondence between geographical environment and poetic imagery may be seen, Jones asserts, in the case of the Persians, who adopted the conventions of Arabic poetry with the arrival among them of the religion of Muhammad. But they adapted it to their own more settled and urban social environment, the desert and tribal imagery of Arabic poetry thus undergoing an inflection appropriate to this milieu: “The remarkable calmness of the summer nights, and the wonderful splendour of the moon and stars in that country, often tempt the Persians to sleep on the tops of their houses, which are generally flat, where they cannot but observe the figures of the constellations, and the various appearances of the heavens; and this may in some measure account for the perpetual allusions of their poets, and rhetoricians, to the beauty of the heavenly bodies.” This softening of the physical conditions of life (compared to the Arabs) thus also means “that softness, and love of pleasure, that indolence, and effeminacy, which have made them an easy prey to all the Western and northern swarms, that have from time to time invaded them,” but “this delicacy of their lives and sentiments has insensibly affected their language, and rendered it the softest, as it is one of the richest, in the world.” Western readers of their poetry will fail to appreciate its beauty and richness if they do not attend to its historical and geographical particularity: “We are apt to censure the oriental style for being so full of metaphors taken from the sun and moon; this is ascribed by some to the bad taste of the Asiaticks; the works of the Persians, says M. De Voltaire, are like the titles of their kings, in which the sun and moon are often introduced: but they do not reflect that every nation has a set of images, and expressions, peculiar to itself, which arise from the difference of its climate, manners, and history.”²⁸ And finally, from Persia the poetic culture traveled, again on the back, as it were, of Islam, first to the Turkic-speaking peoples of Central Asia and then to India, to be refashioned yet again according to the conditions and needs of these places and peoples. Needless to say, then, the India in this essay, briefly touched on near the end, is largely Indo-Persian and Indo-Muslim—an association that changed dramatically after Jones’s arrival in Calcutta, when, as Maryam Khan has shown, the Muslim in India began to appear more clearly in his writing as a mobile and detachable—that is, nonindigenous—element.²⁹

Thus, Jones’s text is a key and early moment in what, in a series of works, Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins have called the “history of lyric reading,” the gradual expansion of the reach of “lyric” norms of expression—often contradictory and unsusceptible to definition—to encompass our sense of the poetic as such.³⁰ This gradual transformation is one of the more marked literary developments of the modern era in the Western tradition. But this change in habits of reading and writing is in fact an intercultural and worldwide process, though it is important to stress that these transformations have been far from either linear or symmetrical in their unfolding. Certainly, the lyricization of poetry in the West has had effects in other parts of the world, producing all kinds of new tensions and reconstellations in poetic reading and writing practices in many different traditions, especially in the so-called peripheries of the modern world literary system. But in fact the historical trajectory is a more complex one, for the prehistory of “lyric reading” in the West leads back to the constellation I have been discussing in this chapter—the Orientalist “discovery” of the “ancient” poetic traditions of the “Eastern nations.” Jones’s book of 1772 (the poems as well as the essays), like Herder’s study of the poetic style of the ancient Hebrews (1782), is thus an exemplary text of the pre-Romantic conjuncture, in which entire bodies of “Oriental” verse begin to be conceived of, on the one hand, as the unique and spontaneous expression of the spirit, mind, or psyche of a distinct people and, on the other, as marked by a spontaneity and authenticity of “expression.” The question of the Oriental or Asiatic lyric is thus an unavoidable one for a consideration of the early practices and concepts of world literature.

At the center of Jones’s rethinking of poetics at the threshold of the modern era is the genre of the ghazal. When he speaks of Asiatic poetic forms, especially from the Persians onward in his scheme of historical transmission, he is essentially speaking of this one poetic genre in particular. Although he does not name the genre in the essays I have discussed here, almost every one of his poetic examples from Arabic, Persian, and Turkish lies within the space signified by it. At the center of the ghazal, thematically speaking, is the problematic of love or, perhaps more accurately, of desire and devotion, which gets within the form a somewhat conventionalized but at the same time highly complex treatment. It is marked by a personal and intimate mode of address, highlighting such affective states and sensibilities as intensified desire for union with the beloved, the rigors and disciplines of love, and indefinitely delayed union. Etymologically, the word is derived from the Arabic verbal root gha-za-la, which means to spin (something) and, by metaphorical extension, to court or woo, to speak words of love (to a woman), to flirt. (Ghazal shares this root with the English gazelle, a link and a resonance to which I return in Chapter 3.) The conventional historical account traces the origins of the form to the Arabic qaṣīda in the sixth to seventh centuries and more specifically its opening section, the naṣīb, which is typically addressed to a beloved. It is in Persian in Abbasid times that it first becomes the free-standing form with the meter and rhyme schemes that we recognize today as such and through Persian is introduced into more or less every literary language of the wider Islamicate world. The ghazal has historically been practiced from Spain to Bengal, at the very least, making it one of the most widely practiced poetic forms of the Old World. And from Goethe and Federico García Lorca to J. S. Merwyn and Adrienne Rich, poets in the modern West over the past two centuries have engaged in writing practices that they themselves have conceived of as the composition of ghazals.

The ghazal has thus proven to be a remarkably resilient transnational and translingual form. As the editors of a recent critical anthology on the genre have suggested, this extraordinary dissemination, adaptation, and translation over the centuries mark the ghazal as one of the most widely practiced and disseminated forms in world literature.³¹ In light of my larger argument here, however, this proposition needs to be reformulated in the form of a question: how may we rethink “world literature” itself to make it responsive to this form’s complex history? In South Asia, the ghazal has historically been at the epicenter of the crisis of modernity—I return to this question in some detail in Chapter 2—that is, it has been an exemplary site for the elaboration of the contradictions of the nationalization of language and literature and the insertion of this nationalized literary space into world literature, the process that I am calling the institution of Indian literature. The genre had entered the Indian languages at a relatively late stage, continuing to be associated with composition in Persian, producing a distinct and recognizable “Indian style” (sabk-e hindī) in late medieval and early modern Persian literature.³² In the vernacular of North India, that is, Hindi-Urdu, the ghazal contains within itself an entire social universe in a mediated and stylized form, populated by such stock figures as the disconsolate lover/speaker, the distant beloved, the rival for the beloved’s attention and affections, and the moral scold, the figure of social and religious orthodoxy. In a series of social, formal, and linguistic realignments in the early eighteenth century, the ghazal in the vernacular became linked to the Persianate “feudal” elites of the declining Mughal Empire. Any attempt to write a literary history of the form thus needs to confront the question of how, with such social origins, it could have been gradually transformed into one of the most disseminated poetic forms in modern times in any version of the language of North India. But it is to say the least ironic that when a critical practice emerged in Urdu under the impact of colonial rule in the late nineteenth century—the colonial-reformist poetics of the so-called na’ī rauśnī (the new light) movement associated with Aligarh University, figures like Muhammad Husain Azad, to whom I return in Chapter 2—it produced a utilitarian critique of the lyric traditions of Urdu and Persianate culture more broadly, the very “Oriental” corpus of the lyric that, a century earlier, Orientalists like Jones and his avid Romantic readers had utilized in their attempt to “revive” poetry in the modern West. To be more precise, this critique consisted of both romantic and utilitarian elements, articulating ideas about authenticity of expression with those concerning social usefulness.

Writing of the lyric as a distinctly modern form, Theodor Adorno wrote, famously, that “the Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic lyric” and “manifestations in earlier periods [presumably in Europe] of the specifically lyric spirit familiar to us are only isolated flashes.… They do not establish a form.”³³ He seems not only ignorant of the poetic cultures of Asia and the Near East that he is referencing here, which is to be expected, but also unaware of the complex history of the very categories he is deploying: he merely expresses, rather than exploring critically, the fundamental ambiguity of the modern experience of lyric. For “lyric” sensibility emerged in Europe at the threshold of modernity in the encounter with “Oriental” verse and, having taken over the universe of poetic expression in the West, became a benchmark and a test for “Oriental” writing traditions themselves, erasing in the process all memory of its intercultural origins. These transactions are surely part of any genealogy of the lyric, that is, any critical-historical account of how “lyric” has come to be conceived of as such in modern literature.

Although in a general sense it would be correct to regard many aspects of Jones’s work as allied with the “neoclassical” side in the eighteenth-century intellectual landscape, what emerges in these two essays of Jones’s published in 1772 is thus a theory of “national” poetic genius and its relation to the “climate, manners, and history” of a people that overlaps in significant ways with such a pre-Romantic work of Herder’s Yet Another Philosophy of 1774. What Herder and Jones offer in these works are early versions of the chronotope of the indigenous—that is, spatiotemporal figures of habitation (in a place) in deep time—that became canonical for humanistic knowledge in the nineteenth century and whose effects in one colonized society I explore more fully in Chapter 2. To put it more broadly but also more succinctly, then, the emergence of philosophical historicism cannot be separated out from the entire Orientalist enterprise as it underwent a massive transformation and expansion in the 1770s and 1780s, making available the hitherto unknown literary exempla of far-flung and ancient bodies of writing, codified as the unique traditions of distinct civilizations, interpreted through emergent ideas about historical and cultural particularity. More precisely, this early codification of Orientalist knowledge, to which, as we have seen, Herder himself made a significant contribution, is the very ground on which the new ideas of cultural difference came to be elaborated, tested, contested, and defended. In Herder’s late works themselves, which bring him closer to the Romantics, properly speaking, these two strands of contemporary European thought—Orientalism and philosophical historicism—are finally fused together, no longer visible as distinct elements, and this fusion becomes the ground of Romantic thought and its contributions to the so-called Oriental Renaissance, such as, for instance, in Friedrich von Schlegel’s On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians (Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, 1808). Said’s entire effort in Orientalism was (at one level) to argue for the centrality of Orientalism, as cultural logic and enterprise, to the emergence of modern European culture, to Europe’s self-making, and against those dominant conventions of intellectual and literary history that treat the entire colonial process as extraneous or at best marginal to the main lines of modern European development. But Said himself unwittingly (and mistakenly) reverts to this convention when he treats the emergence of “historicism” as distinct from and logically and causally prior to modern Orientalism as one of the four historical “elements” that made the latter possible.³⁴

Returning once again to the use Casanova makes of Herder to mark the second stage of her developmental schema, we may now note that her nearly exclusive focus on Herder’s writings of the early 1770s, which predate the infusion into the European intellectual-literary sphere of the properly Orientalist ideas of linguistic and cultural diversity, allows her to formulate the argument about the transformation of (European) world literary space without reference to the gestalt shift in knowledge and culture made possible by the assimilation of the Oriental exempla that became increasingly available to European reading publics in large numbers for the first time gradually from that very decade onward. She views even Goethe’s use of the term in the late 1820s, as I have already noted, entirely in terms of the entry of German literature into the European republic of letters and consequent competition with the more established French literary culture, entirely without reference to Goethe’s long history of involvement with Oriental literary matters.³⁵ Casanova follows a common historiographic convention when she speaks (correctly) of a “Herder effect” in the then more “peripheral” parts of Europe, from Poland and Hungary to the Balkans, providing a charter for intelligentsias and elites in smaller and variously dominated societies to proclaim their cultural independence by the elaboration of a native national literature in their own language.³⁶ But in fact this “effect” of historicist-Orientalist thinking is visible in the formation of the system of nation-states on a world scale in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More broadly, then, Casanova fails to recognize the fundamental difference and disjuncture between the modalities of the first and second stages of her historical schema—intra-European “competitive” vernacularization, in the first instance, and a colonial absorption and transformation, in the second—and inserts them instead within a narrative of continuous expansion of world literary space. As I shall show in Chapter 4, Casanova essentially makes the same mistake as Erich Auerbach in singling out and foregrounding philosophical historicism in this manner while making Orientalism disappear from view altogether.

And with respect to the after-lives of historical-particularist positions associated with figures like Herder, we might go even further and say that wherever and whenever in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Enlightenment is challenged with counter-Enlightenment, universalism with particularism, cosmopolitanism with nativism, and positivism with vitalism—and, more broadly, whenever a “nation” is understood in the first instance as an organic unity of the people quite independently of the presence or absence of a unified state—the heritage of these intellectual and cultural orientations is in some fashion in play. Historicist ideas thus hover over the nineteenth century not only in Europe (and, by extension, America) but in every society inducted by force in one fashion or another into the intra-European imperial system. Even in places such as India, in which English-language and/or Western-style vernacular education began to be introduced very fitfully in the first half of the nineteenth century, these ideas linking peoplehood to place, language, and literature were introduced to native students through the writings not only of the Indologists, properly speaking, but also such British Germanophiles as Thomas Carlyle, whose early essay “The State of German Literature,” which launched his career as a writer, not only excoriated the provincialism of the British charge of “enthusiasm” against German culture but made explicit the imperative for all peoples to produce a “national” literature that could represent their way of life and mentality to the larger world: “A country which has no national literature, or a literature too insignificant to force its way abroad, must always be, to its neighbours, at least in every important spiritual respect, an unknown and misestimated country.”³⁷ To “force its way abroad”—that is, to enter the space of world literature—is thus an inherent feature of every properly national literature. “World” and “nation” are in a determinate relationship of mutual reinforcement here, rather than simply one of contradiction or negation.

To put it somewhat differently but also more precisely, while the historicist-Orientalist ways of thinking canonized an emphasis on the variety of ways of being human, they did so in order to establish the same manner of being different: the ultima ratio of the Herder effect, already to be glimpsed from time to time in Herder’s own writings, is a “spiritual” map of the world consisting of individual and distinct (“national”) peoples, each similarly different from all the others, even if not always equally different. (I shall return to this question in more detail in Chapter 4 with reference to Auerbach’s work.) What is perhaps more important to the purpose at hand, however, is that the counterpoint to the forms of Enlightenment universalism (“the Herder effect”) can only be understood as an inescapable element of the dialectic of Enlightenment itself—hence the illusory element in any strong claim to authenticity on the part of nativist cultural projects in the colonial and postcolonial world.

The concept of Weltliteratur that emerged in Goethe’s writings in the late 1820s was largely Herderian in orientation—if we understand by “Herderian” the nexus of philosophical historicism and Orientalism that I have been charting here. Although Goethe clearly meant by Weltliteratur an organized exchange of a higher “spiritual” nature between writers, artists and intellectuals committed to universal Humanität, the concept as it emerged in his writings and developed over the course of the nineteenth century was nevertheless tied to philological practices that depend on a notion of an organic link between a people and its language and place, its literature understood as the natural and unmediated expression of its unique character and genius. In other words, Goethe’s concept leaned against the vast Romantic-völkisch cultural edifice in the early nineteenth century—the collections of folk-songs and folk-stories, dictionaries and grammars, philological treatises, Orientalist translations, and literary histories of national cultures that proliferated in the period and defined its cultural ambience—that had itself been built on the foundations that Herder had laid and which in turn it had helped to shore up. Authentic national literatures rose out of those primitive Volk cultures, and world literature was a space and a mode of intercultural communication among especially the literati of different nations whose goal was the translating and transmitting of these national creative products into a more universal sphere of cultural exchange. Goethe of course conceived of Weltliteratur in relation to more material forms of exchange, a cultural space that would mirror (and would hasten) the coming closer of the world’s disparate places as a result of both commercial and military developments and inventions. As Fritz Strich noted in his famous study, Goethe and World Literature, Goethe hoped that “world literature would make an active contribution to expanding trade and commerce, and that on the other hand the ever-increasing speed and ease of intercourse would facilitate the formation of a world literature.”³⁸ But the very concept of such communication assumes the particularity and discrete nature of the entities that are to be put into intercourse, namely, national-ethnic or civilizational intelligentsias and sociocultural formations. This is the genealogical origin of the principles of organization of world literary space, which enforce the same manner of being distinct or different. In Chapter 4, I turn to Auerbach’s rethinking of Weltliteratur in the aftermath of the Second World War, which may be understood, as Paul Bové has shown, as a reorientation of the concept from a distinctly Herderian to a Vichian historicism, abandoning the organic conception of language and society associated with the former that had remained dominant in nineteenth-century philology.³⁹ I shall argue further that this turn from one version of eighteenth-century historicism to the other marks the distinctly exilic nature of Auerbach’s project, famously announced in the call, adopted from the medieval Franco-German mystic Hugh of St. Victor and repeatedly cited by Said, to treat “the entire world as a foreign land.” Mimesis itself is in fact at one level a repudiation of Herderian Volksgeist as analytical method not only in its explicitly pan-European cosmopolitanism but also in the differentiation of European civilization itself at its very origin into distinct (and, to an extent, antagonistic) Hebraic and Hellenic elements.

As I have argued at some length, it is a rather obvious and (it seems to me) incontrovertible historical fact that the deep encounter between English and the main Western languages and the languages of the global periphery as media of literary expression did not take place for the first time in the postcolonial era, let alone in the supposedly transnational transactions of the period of high globalization, but at the dawn of the modern era itself; and this encounter fundamentally transformed both cultural formations involved in it but especially the latter. But this fact either has not been rigorously treated in the contemporary critical discussion about transnational literary relations or, more commonly, has been missing entirely. And this empirical failing has conceptual consequences, for instance, in Casanova’s work: because this initial charting of non-Western traditions of writing on the emerging map of the literary world in the Orientalist conjuncture is suppressed or cannot be perceived, such figures as Kateb Yacine, V. S. Naipaul, and Salman Rushdie come to provide the exemplary types of non-Western writer (as they all do for Casanova); the psychology of assimilation into metropolitan languages and cultures and such models of cultural change as creolization and métissage consequently become the privileged mode of understanding literary practices linked to life-worlds outside the metropolis; and the far more complex and elusive tensions and contradictions involved in the emergence of the modern non-Western literatures disappear from view altogether. In fact, as we have seen, this process of assimilation took place on the ground of antiquity and the positing of a lost Golden Age against which all indigenous forms of the modern would by definition be found wanting.

The effects of the reorganization of culture and knowledge in the course of the philological revolution were far reaching, not just for the European intelligentsia but for those very colonized and semicolonized societies, and more specifically the textual traditions, that were now brought under the purview of these new knowledge practices. In order to comprehend the structure of literary relations that is now a planet-wide reality, we need to grasp the role that philological Orientalism played in producing and establishing a method and a system for classifying and evaluating diverse forms of textuality, now all processed and codified uniformly as literature. As Vinay Dharwadker has argued in a pioneering essay, the forms taken by “British and European representations of literary India … lie not so much in the ‘nature’ of the Indian materials as in the intellectual contexts of European literary thought.”⁴⁰ The (now universal) category of literature itself, with its particular Latinate etymology and genealogy, marks this process of assimilation of diverse cultures of writing, a process only partially concealed by the use of such vernacular terms as adab (in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and Turkish, among others) and sāhitya (in Hindi and a number of the Indian vernaculars) to signify the new literariness.

This, I want to suggest, is the suppressed element in the concept of world literature from its inception, namely, the far-reaching refashioning of a range of societies around the world in the new phase of colonial expansion that accompanied and followed from the Industrial Revolution. By the time Goethe reignited and disseminated the term in the last years of his life—his first reported use of it on January 31, 1827, is in the context of his having recently read a “Chinese novel”—it represents a retrospective look, with the global shifts in the structures of “literary” knowledge it is intended to reference having already been a long-established reality, including of course in the life of the poet himself, whose writing practice, as is well known, was deeply affected by his reading of a German translation of Jones’s Śākuntala in 1791—well before his better-known encounter with the verse of Hafez in the second decade of the next century. Philosophical historicism and Orientalism are the double intellectual legacy that both make this new concept possible and to which it points in turn. And by the time the term is resurrected by Marx and Engels more than a decade after the publication of the Conversations with Eckermann, which had reported its earliest use by Goethe, it is relatively speaking an old story indeed, appearing within a historical account of the rise and growth of the bourgeoisie as a global social force.⁴¹

A Heap of Ruins: Colonialism, Capitalism, World Literature

Marx and Engels’s famous remark about world literature, much invoked in contemporary discussion but not often closely examined, comes in the long first section of the Communist Manifesto, “Bourgeois and Proletarians.” The relevant passage is as follows: “In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.” These remarks are made as part of the well-known discussion of the creation of the “world-market” by the bourgeoisie and the consequent “cosmopolitan character” it has given to “production and consumption in every country.” This need for a “constantly expanding market for its products” is not an accidental one but rather dictated by the very nature of production in bourgeois society, which “cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.” This compulsion inherent to its mode of production “chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” The varied processes of colonial expansion—military conquest, forms of tributary rule, seizing of agricultural revenues, destruction of native industries, bureaucratic governance, racial apartheid, brutal exploitation, notions and practices of the civilizing mission—are thus inherent to the logic of capital itself:

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce so-called civilization [sogennante Civilisation] into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.… Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants [Bauernvölker] on nations of bourgeois [Bourgeoisvölkern], the East on the West.⁴²

The ease with which such categories of a colonialist nature as barbarian and semibarbarian circulate in this passage might make readers wary of its authors’ conception of the relationship between capitalism and colonialism. But the overall effect of the passage is of course to the contrary, namely, a dismantling of the colonial categories of barbarism and civilization, the latter exposed for what it truly is: “so-called civilization,” no more and no less than the bourgeois mode of production, that is, an emergent and expansionist system for the extraction of surplus value on a world scale. And Marx and Engels are clear that colonization represents an application on a worldwide scale of structures that had initially been established within domestic national spaces by making the country “dependent” on the city, that is, by transforming the relationship of city and country to that of center and periphery. The colonial periphery is thus in a way the global countryside of the imperial metropolitan countries.

One implication of the line of argument in this passage is that the concept of colonialism appears as internal to the concept of capital as such. This is not an appropriate occasion for a comprehensive survey of Marx’s views concerning European colonialism and its relationship to the historical rise of the bourgeois mode of production, but we might at least recall that, writing in the fourth notebook of the Grundrisse a decade later, Marx notes unambiguously that the “tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself. Every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome.”⁴³ But what kind of concept is it exactly, and what is its significance for our discussion here? As Ranajit Guha has shown in his remarkable book Dominance without Hegemony, there are in fact two versions of an argument about colonialism and capital in Marx’s writings—“weak” and “strong” ones, we might say—the former, in postulating the “universalizing tendency of capital,” views it as an irresistibly absorptive force “tearing down all the barriers which hem in the development of the forces of production, the expansion of needs, the all-sided development of production, and the exploitation and exchange of natural and mental forces.”⁴⁴ If read in isolation, Guha notes, this observation “would make [Marx] indistinguishable from any of the myriad nineteenth-century liberals who saw nothing but the positive side of capital in an age when it was growing from strength to strength and there seemed to be no limit to its expansion and capacity to transform nature and society.”⁴⁵ But Marx goes further, Guha observes, to distinguish between the overcoming of “barriers” ideally from their overcoming in reality: “Since every such barrier contradicts its [i.e., capital’s] character, its production moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited. Furthermore. [sic] The universality towards which it irresistibly strives encounters barriers in its own nature, which will, at a certain stage of its development, allow it to be recognized as being itself the greatest barrier to this tendency, and hence will drive towards its own suspension.”⁴⁶ The language of Guha’s reading of this passage in Marx is a little less than unequivocal on this point, but “ideal” and “reality” in Marx’s passage do not correspond, respectively, with a concept (of capital), on the one hand, and, on the other, empirical or “merely given” social reality; rather, both the “ideal” and the “reality” referenced here are internal to the concept of capital itself that Marx is elaborating. The forms of historical difference that mark the colony as a site of bourgeois modernity thus represent for Guha (and, in his view, for Marx) an internal limit of capital, not an external barrier to be overcome (or not) in practice. Following this line of thought a bit further, we might say that Guha’s concept of the division of colonial space into “elite” and “subaltern” domains—a form of social inequality that is qualitatively different from the class structure of capital in the advanced metropolitan zones—is an attempt to formally express this relation between capital and colonialism, between the sociology of capital in the metropolis and that in the colony.

Thus, Frantz Fanon’s famous statement that “Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched [légèrement distendu] every time we have to do with the colonial problem” is not the sort of departure from Marx that it is sometimes taken to be but rather a making explicit and effective of certain possibilities in Marx’s own writings. Fanon’s argument that the “originality of the colonial context is that economic reality, inequality, and the immense difference of ways of life never come to mask the human realities”—or, to put it more precisely, that under colonial conditions the commodity form cannot quite accomplish a fetishization of capitalist social relations of exploitation and expropriation into a relation of free exchange—is perhaps not much more than an attempt to take seriously statements such as this one in the final chapter of the first volume of Capital: “The same interest which, in the mother country, compels the sycophant of capital, the political economist, to declare that the capitalist mode of production is theoretically its own opposite, this same interest, in the colonies, drives him ‘to make a clean breast of it,’ and to proclaim aloud the antagonism between the two modes of production.” Political economy, Marx further argues in the same passage—he has in mind E. G. Wakefield, author of colonization schemes in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada and a historian and theorist of colonial settlement—has thus discovered not “something new about the colonies, but in the colonies, the truth about capitalist relations in the mother country.”⁴⁷ In “The Future Results of the British Rule in India” (1853), one of the series of journalistic dispatches about Indian debates and conditions and Britain’s imperial adventures more broadly that Marx wrote for the New York Daily Tribune in 1853 and then again in 1857–1858, he reiterates this insight: “The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its homes, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked.”⁴⁸

Marx’s writings on colonialism have been subject to wide discussion in recent years, and a fuller survey of this secondary literature is clearly beyond the scope of this book. They have also, in my view, been often misrepresented or misunderstood, both by those, including Said, who have too easily dismissed their relevance for contemporary discussion due to their alleged proximity to colonial ways of thinking (Said’s “Orientalism”) and by those, like Aijaz Ahmed or Gilbert Achcar, whose basic instinct seems to be to defend them against “postcolonial” heterodoxy.⁴⁹ Bryan Turner’s study of Marxism and Orientalism, which appeared the same year as Said’s book, is a much less sentimental and more objective analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of various strands of Marxist thinking in this regard.⁵⁰ But it is quite clear to me at this point that Said’s treatment of Marx as simply and fully another “Orientalist,” on the somewhat flimsy basis of Marx’s quoting of Goethe’s Westöstlicher Diwan (West-Easterly Divan, 1819) in one instance and on his view of British colonialism as the “unconscious tool of history” in bringing about historical progress in Asia, is not only erroneous but unfortunate as well, since it leads to the charge, clearly incorrect in my view, that Said is an “essentialist” himself with a monolithic view of the West and gives succor to those in Arab society, namely, the “ultra-nationalists or the religious fundamentalists,” as Achcar has recently argued, who discredit the role of Marxism in the struggle against imperialism, denigrating it as an import from the West. This uncharacteristically ham-handed reading on Said’s part may indeed have been due to a lack of in-depth familiarity with a range of Marx’s major works, as Achcar suggests, but to attribute to him an “essentialism” of Orient and Occident, as Achcar and others have done, betrays a lack of understanding of his broader corpus in turn, for at the core of his project is a thoroughgoing anti-identitarianism, as I have argued earlier.⁵¹ In the afterword to a later edition of Orientalism, Said repudiated such descriptions of his work and argued, “Orientalism can only be read as a defense of Islam by suppressing half of my argument,” at whose core was the view that the “construction of identity is bound up with the disposition of power and powerlessness in each society.” Furthermore, “what appears in the West to be the emergence, return to, or resurgence of Islam is in fact a struggle in Islamic societies over the definition of Islam. No one person, authority, or institution has total control over that definition; hence, of course, the contest.”⁵² But Said’s critics’ view of Marx (on colonialism) as well is often strangely one-sided and schematic. For Achcar, since Marx had, as is well known, already broken free of philosophical idealism, albeit in stages (as explained by Louis Althusser), he has escaped once and for all from essentialism, which is a fundamentally idealist tendency. As such, Marx therefore has nothing whatsoever to do with “Orientalism.” But the very terms of this debate—whether Marx is for or against British colonialism in Asia and whether he is able to sustain a stance of humanitarian “sympathy” toward the suffering of Britain’s Asiatic subjects at the destruction of their ancient and hereditary means of subsistence and ways of life—obscures what else is of value in these writings. In fact, they have much of contemporary interest for those who, in the real tradition of anti-imperial radicalisms in the twentieth century, have sought to develop experimental ways of thinking about the structures of dominance, persistent inequities, and possibilities for freedom on a world scale.

Marx seems to be engaged throughout his India writings in an attempt (and struggle) to develop a new historiographical language that is neither triumphalist about the so-called accomplishments of British capitalism in primitive and barbarous Asia nor reliant on the clichés of “those who believe in a golden age of Hindustan,” as he puts it contemptuously in “The British Rule in India” (1853).⁵³ We might call the first of these tendencies “Anglicist” and the second “Orientalist,” in the nineteenth-century British-imperial sense of these terms. But this struggle in Marx’s India dispatches to get beyond the colonial debate does not always end in success. Some versions of the argument about Asiatic or Oriental “despotism” in fact represent an amalgam of Anglicist and Orientalist ideas in placing society in precolonial Asia outside the possibility of historical transformation: “English interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindu spinner and weaver, dissolved these small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities, by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, and, to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.” But Marx also views the threatened “village system” of India as a moral economy and seems aware that while (in his view) “England had broken down the entire framework of Indian society,” no “symptoms of reconstitution” had yet appeared. Furthermore, in a turn that ought to be decisive for our understanding of the complexity of his position, Marx suggests a way of thinking about the subjective and psychic content of colonial experience: “This loss of his old world, with no gain of a new one, imparts a particular kind of melancholy to the present misery of the Hindu, and separates Hindustan, ruled by Britain, from all its ancient traditions, and from the whole of its past history.”⁵⁴ This brief statement is remarkable for what can only be called its anticipation of a range of crucial and inescapable motifs and issues in colonial and postcolonial societies that have been the site of fierce contention into our own times—crisis of tradition, alienation from historically received forms, an exilic relation to that which nevertheless appears to be one’s own, the inability to mourn properly that which is both present and gone. An adequate and progressive response to these historical circumstances, the passage seems to imply, does not require ignoring their reality, as some (and only some) forms of Marxist thinking in recent decades have sometimes implied. For all the recurring lapses into Anglicist or Orientalist (or both) ways of thinking about India’s present and past in these writings by Marx, they are notable for the ways in which they resonate with the renewal of anti-imperial thinking in our own times.

How exactly may we then read the brief reference to world literature in the Manifesto in light of this understanding of Marx’s conception of the colonial itself as epistemological structure and structure of feeling as well as an economic or politico-military one? It is clear that for Marx and Engels world literature is a practice (and concept) of bourgeois society, impossible to imagine as anything but a product of the Western European bourgeoisie’s drive to create a world market. As such, it is inseparable from the work of destruction that has left native societies, as Marx noted five years later, in a “heap of ruins.”⁵⁵ For Marx and Engels, world literature is thus the site of a contradiction and a struggle, both complicit in the emergence of a world market and pointing toward a distinctly human emancipation, the possibility of the overcoming of “national one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness” and the inauguration of human “communication” on a world scale. So, as with most practices and institutions of bourgeois society, here too Marx’s method calls for a dialectical orientation toward the simultaneously creative and destructive nature of the bourgeoisie as a world historical force.

In “The Future Results of the British Rule in India,” Marx notes the creation of a new social class in India, an unintended result of British policies, like the introduction of the railways and other modern means of communication and transportation. This too is a line of argument with profound contemporary significance. I shall quote the passage in full:

From the Indian natives, reluctantly and sparingly educated at Calcutta, under English superintendence, a fresh class is springing up, endowed with requirements for government and imbued with European science.… I know that the English millocracy intend to endow India with railways with the exclusive view of extracting at diminished expenses the cotton and other raw materials for their manufactures. But when you have once introduced machinery into the locomotion of a country, which possesses iron and coals, you are unable to withhold it from its fabrication. You cannot maintain a net of railways over an immense country without introducing all those industrial processes necessary to meet the immediate and current wants of railway locomotion, and out of which there must grow the application of machinery to those branches of industry not immediately connected with railways. The railway system will therefore become, in India, truly the forerunner of modern industry. This is the more certain as the Hindus are allowed by the British authorities themselves to possess particular aptitude for accommodating themselves to entirely new labour, and acquiring the requisite knowledge of industry.… The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the now ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindus themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether.… [Their] country has been the source of our languages, our religions, and [they] represent the type of the ancient German in the Jat and the type of the ancient Greek in the Brahmin.⁵⁶

We should note first of all that the seemingly transparent use of “Hindus” in this passage (and elsewhere in the India writings) to designate the entire population of the subcontinent is precisely speaking an Orientalist convention, unimaginable without the entire work of the indigenization and Sanskritization of language and culture undertaken by European scholars, colonial officials, writers, and teachers over the previous six or seven decades. Second (and more importantly), the role of unintended agent of the overthrow of the bourgeoisie in the metropolis that was assigned in the Manifesto to the working class, in the colonies is envisioned for the new middle class to emerge under the conditions of colonial rule. The tension between “native” and “proletarian” as concepts of social analysis that is sometimes viewed as an unfortunate feature of postcolonial thinking in our times is thus present in Marx’s own colonial writings. And the derivative problem, whether anticolonial nationalist elites were a progressive force deserving of the support of communists worldwide, was to follow Marxist theory well into the twentieth century. It is to be seen, for instance, in the famous debate on the so-called national and colonial question in 1920 at the Second World Congress of the Communist International between Vladimir Lenin and M. N. Roy, the Indian communist in Mexican exile. The debate turned on the question of whether communists should ally themselves with “bourgeois democratic” parties and movements in anticolonial situations, a question that Roy, in a critique of Lenin’s “draft theses,” answered in the negative.⁵⁷

Furthermore, Marx provides here in broad historical overview a technologically determinist account of colonial governance and its questioning by a new native elite—many decades before the rise of any such movement in India, we might add—that became canonical for subsequent Marxist and more broadly socialist accounts of colonial history. It was sometimes taken to absurd extremes in nationalist culture itself, such as the hopeful intimation toward the end of Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935), arguably the first major Anglophone novel written by an Indian, to which I shall return in Chapter 3, that the coming of flush-toilet technology would put an end to the degrading and oppressive caste practice of untouchability. Although Marx is concerned here largely with the newly introduced forms of technology and their requisite forms of skills and social relations more broadly, his invocation of education—the natives “reluctantly and sparingly educated at Calcutta, under English superintendence” understood as the potential historical agents of a revolution in social relations—might open up a supplementary line of argument, more attentive to the forms of historical consciousness unique to this “fresh class” (Marx’s phrase) and necessary for its reproduction.

I shall return to this matter at more length in Chapter 2, but suffice it here to say that the Anglicist project of the “Western” education of native elites was at the same time the means of transmission to them of Orientalist knowledge, fully formed procedures for the conceiving of certain forms of Sanskrit textuality as the basis for the Indic civilization of the subcontinent. Far from being mutually exclusive ideological formations, Anglicist and Orientalist ideas and practices coexisted productively in the cultural and educational institutions inaugurated by colonial power. With a view to a larger historical and geographical canvas, then, we might say that Orientalism in Said’s idiosyncratic sense of the word—and, in terms of our reading of the Indian governance debate, Orientalism-Anglicism—is the cultural logic of bourgeois society in its outward, expansionist orientation; it is the cultural logic of the bourgeois transformation of societies on a world scale. (Said, in his single-minded attempt to rescue the notion of empire from “vulgar” economism, stops short of fully drawing out this conception.) The Orientalists’ conventional notion of the “Golden Age” is thus the canonical concept of nationalism as well. And world literature, that is, the (bourgeois) understanding and experience of the world as an assemblage of “literary” or expressive traditions, whose very ground of possibility was the Orientalist knowledge revolution, thus functioned as the means for the insertion of the new “national” class of natives into the bourgeois world system. We may therefore indeed speak of world literature as a “cosmopolitan” concept, as Marx and Engels do, but this cannot be allowed to occlude the fact that it is also a particularistic or historicist one.

It is the effects of these shifts in knowledge and culture on the colonized societies, then, which constitute the objects, properly speaking, of the Orientalists’ endeavors, that I am concerned with recovering here. None of the currently influential accounts of world literature, even those that draw on historical-materialist or generally sociological ways of thinking, seem concerned with such a historical reconstruction, a critical-historical understanding of the social life of world literature and the meanings and energies it carries over into the present from the past. The resurgence of world literature in our times—in academic discourse, in the practices of literary publishing, and in reading habits in the Global North and elite sectors of society worldwide—is in a strong sense a post-1989 development, which has appeared against the background of the larger neoliberal attempt to monopolize all possibilities of the international into the global life of capital. This mode of appearance of the literatures of the Global South in the literary sphere of the North is thus linked to the disappearance of those varieties of internationalism that had sought in various ways to bypass the circuits of interaction, transmission, and exchange of the emergent global bourgeois order in the postwar and early postcolonial decades in the interest of the decolonizing societies of the South. The most common general name for this alternative is Bandung, diffuse and dispersed, but also interconnected, attempts worldwide to reimagine the life of humanity from the perspective of peoples just emerging from the racialized denigration of colonial subjugation, which produced remarkable intellectual and artistic collaborations and conversations across the world, institutionalized in international conferences, exhibitions, publishing ventures, periodicals such as Lotus, Marg, and Moyen Orient, and numerous other forms.⁵⁸ And behind Bandung, both chronologically and in terms of antisystemic affinities, is that other history of imagining and practicing a literary international that emerged in the Soviet Union specifically as an alternative to the global reach of Euro-American modernism, given first programmatic elaboration by Andrei Zdhanov, Karl Radek, and others at the first Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934.⁵⁹

A fuller engagement with the social and cultural imaginary of Bandung internationalism must await another occasion, but its historic disappearance in the post–Cold War era is very much an element in the triumphalist “We are the world” tone so clearly discernible in the self-staging of world literature in our times.⁶⁰ In many ways, the rubric “postcolonial literature” as used in the Global North now serves as a means of domesticating those radical energies—and not just linguistic or cultural differences—into the space of (bourgeois) world literature as varieties of local practice—as Indian, African, or Middle Eastern literary practices, for instance. And English as global literary vernacular facilitates and intensifies this disappearance of those alternative practices of the international that were conducted and institutionalized in the shade of Bandung just a few decades ago. The modes of circulation of Anglophone world literature today, including as (supposedly “neutral”) medium of translation, thus serve to naturalize this specific version of the international or global, which is predicated on, and helps to reproduce, reading publics oblivious to the possibility of historical alternatives in the past or the present, even and especially in the Global South. My argument here rests on a view of English as a language of translation that does not fully correspond to either side of the quarrel between protagonists of the efficacy of translation and those who emphasize the stubbornly ineffable and untranslatable in language.

Emily Apter’s Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability has perhaps already become the standard representative of the latter position, while on the other side could be ranged any number of scholars in translation studies, above all Lawrence Venuti.⁶¹ It will I hope already be clear that I share Apter’s “reservations about tendencies in World Literature toward reflexive endorsement of cultural equivalence and substitutability, or toward the celebration of nationally and ethnically branded ‘differences’ that have been niche-marketed as commercialized ‘identities.’ ” Against these tendencies, Apter has proposed what she calls “a counter-move, [invoking] untranslatability as a deflationary gesture toward the expansionism and gargantuan scale of world-literary endeavors.” The Untranslatable, furthermore, is to be understood as in Barbara Cassin’s Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, “not as pure difference … but as a linguistic form of creative failure with homeopathic uses.”⁶² One such homeopathic remedy on offer—that is to say, one such cure achieved by exacerbating the malady—is the purging of the language (of philosophy or literature) of its ethnonational claims and determinations. It is hard to imagine a principled opposition to this goal, one that seems to be shared across the intellectual and political spectrum today, all the way from Derrida’s conception of (linguistic) origin as “prosthesis” to varieties of Marxist internationalism, by way of more or less Arendtian understandings of the nation-state’s capacities for producing forms of statelessness and uprooting.⁶³ The question for us concerns how that purging might be achieved and what exactly the history of the ailment is or its etiology. Homeopathy is in some ways an apt metaphor for this process but my conception of it is more fully dialectical in nature, each element of the contradiction becoming the site of a (partial and located) critique of the other. And I view translation itself as a social process that cannot be fully comprehended exclusively as a problem in rhetoric or semiotics and am most interested, as I have already noted with reference to Jones and his generation, in its historical particularities as an Orientalist practice.

As for the relationship between the rise of English in particular contexts and its consequences for possibilities of world imagination, a case study of sorts is provided by contemporary Pakistan, where a middle-class Anglophone reading public has taken shape very rapidly in recent years alongside the development of local Anglophone fiction, the latter being an unprecedented development in Pakistani literary history. However, while this public has no trouble whatsoever seeing these writers along a Karachi–London or Karachi–New York literary axis, as writers with access to such outlets as Granta and the Guardian, it has in effect no knowledge whatsoever of Lotus, the literary journal of the Afro-Asian Writers Association that was edited from Cairo and then Beirut in the 1960s to 1980s and, near the end of his life, by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the supposed “national” poet of Pakistan, who wrote mostly in Urdu. The Lenin Peace Prize, also utterly forgotten today in countries where it was once considered a notable and prestigious recognition, always included international writers among its multiple awardees each year and was conceived explicitly as an alternative to (and amalgam of) the Nobel Prizes for peace and for literature. (Over the decades, these included such figures as Bertolt Brecht, Louis Aragon, Anna Seghers, Mahmoud Darwish, and Faiz Ahmed Faiz.) As for all the major theories of world literature current today in the core societies of the world system, which are therefore also gaining prestige in many sectors of the global periphery, it is symptomatic that in essence they give an account of world literature as a concept, practice, or structure of the (Euro-American) bourgeois world, without any reference to these concrete historical alternatives and contestations throughout much of the twentieth century. And the critique of neoliberal ideology and practice more broadly in these times must fail in its self-assigned task if it simply relies on these neoliberal structures—such as the forms of domination of English as supposedly neutral medium—and does not confront them with a critical-historical understanding of their emergence under colonial conditions and their reproduction and transformations in postcolonial times.

Whether we view world literature as a conceptual organization or problem for research, as Franco Moretti has suggested, or, as David Damrosch has argued, as a body of literary works, namely, those that circulate “beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language,” we cannot ignore the global relations of force that historically the concept has put in play and simultaneously hidden from view.⁶⁴ And this tension—way of thinking or reading versus form(s) of writing—is in fact internal to and as old as the concept itself. So a critical study of world literature must take us to this other terrain, the scene of its most efficacious results in the colonial and now postcolonial worlds. Moretti works with the premise that “the literature around us is now unmistakably a planetary system,” consisting “of hundreds of languages and literatures.” This figure of multiplication and excess is a recurring one in the discourse around world literature, for instance, in Auerbach’s influential essay “Philologie der Weltliteratur” (1952). Moretti responds to this excess by absolving the reader from “just reading more texts” and argues that “world literature is not an object, it’s a problem, and a problem that asks for a new critical method.”⁶⁵ Moretti has been criticized—rightly, it seems to me—for recommending what he calls distant reading, a sort of global collaboration in which the theorist—located where, exactly, and writing in which language?—synthesizes the raw materials provided to him or her by a variety of “local” experts of the various vernacular literary traditions into an account of, for instance, the dissemination of the novel as a global form. In an amusing turn of phrase, Mariano Siskind has accurately placed the latter, the empirical fieldworkers in the peripheries, on “the ground floor” of world literature and the “über-comparatists” and synthesizers of the empirical material on an “upper level.”⁶⁶ (In response to widespread critique of this notion of distant reading, Moretti seems to have doubled down recently, republishing several of the relevant essays in a volume with this title, Distant Reading.) In addition to leveling out the particularities of language and work, this conception seems to assume that “local” literary-historical accounts can be taken to be authentic elaborations of national or regional literary cultures, as opposed to, say, contested and contentious ones that are implicated not only in social relations and conflicts, broadly speaking, but in the very practices of world literature in specific ways. Furthermore, it seems vulnerable to the charge that it leaves intact the Western literary cultures in their normative structural role, the latter providing the forms of development against which all literary languages have to measure themselves.

But this last criticism perhaps goes too far, although Moretti himself may have contributed to this characterization of his work. The critics are responding to what we might call the weak version of Moretti’s argument in the essay, the mechanistic account of diffusionist versus organicist modes of cultural transformation and insistence on systematicity and iron necessity—all the loose talk of a “law of literary evolution.” Alongside this is another strand, however, that cannot quite be accommodated with the first one, a stronger version of the argument that seems alert to the historical and contingent nature of such historical developments as the emergence of “the Indian novel” and the literary-institutional as well as textual-formal “cracks” (Moretti is quoting Jale Parla here) that such historical encounters produce. Repeatedly in “Conjectures on World Literature,” Moretti steps back from his own tendency of equating novelistic “form” with the metropolis and contents or “materials” with the peripheries. Instead, he proposes a tripartite division in the dissemination of the novel: foreign form–local materials–local form. The “Anglo-French core,” Moretti further writes, may have “tried to make [the world literary system] uniform, but it could never fully erase the reality of difference.” In fact, “those independent paths that are usually taken to be the rule of the rise of the novel (the Spanish, the French, and especially the British case)—well, they’re not the rule at all, they’re the exception.”⁶⁷

In other words, it seems to me that, despite appearances and Moretti’s own seemingly strenuous efforts to the contrary, the terms of his argument should not be seen as an unequivocal reversion to a positivistic conception of world literature and are useful for those who wish to produce an account of the structural inequalities in world literary space while at the same time investing in a counterimagination of literary relations without recourse to a permanent and overdetermining center. In fact, the argument I have been elaborating here concerning the modes of ascription of “peripheral” status to bodies of writing in their very insertion into world literary relations ascribes greater powers to the center than is the case in Moretti’s account, since in my view the very modes of conceiving of vernacularity and indigeneity are products of the colonial process. But I view these powers themselves as historical processes, that is, as subject to change and contestation, inscribed and reinscribed in institutions and writing practices of various sorts, rather than as the modalities of the “law of literary evolution.” These powers of domination produce system-effects and are experienced as pressures at a range of locations across the social, cultural, literary, and linguistic fields. Both these analytical orientations—attentiveness to the systemic aspects of “cultural” inequality as well as to its shifting and conjunctural nature—are or ought to be necessary elements of critical practice directed at “world literature.”

And finally, taking seriously these scenarios of domination that emerged in the era of the birth of modern Orientalism will require some fairly dramatic revisioning of the model of national competition proposed by Casanova for what she calls the world republic of letters. The metaphor of the literary marketplace is in fact endemic to attempts to conceive of literature in international terms and seems to appear whenever a tradition of writing comes into articulation with bourgeois world literary space—for instance, in so “peripheral” a text as Muhammad Husain Azad’s Āb-e ḥayāt (The Waters of Life, 1880), which is conventionally referred to as the first literary history of the Urdu poetic tradition written by an Indian and to which I shall return at some length in Chapter 2. Goethe himself used the metaphor of the market, as we have seen, but it comes into its own in Casanova’s book, a metaphor that never quite comes to acquire conceptual force and is in itself no guarantee of a critical understanding of literary relations on a world scale.⁶⁸ In the end, we might note of Casanova not that she is too Paris-centric in her account of the world republic of letters—a common objection directed at her argument—but rather that she betrays an inadequate understanding of “Paris” itself as a world literary center, since it was, already by the 1820s and for much of the nineteenth century, the center of European Orientalism broadly speaking, and Indology in particular, synthesizing the materials continually provided by the British Empire to the European literary sphere.

The ongoing discussion about world literature has thus been both hugely encompassing and strangely timid: it seems unaware of the enormous role played by literature as institution in the emergence of the hierarchies that structure relations between societies in the modern world. The integration of widely dispersed, varied, and heterogeneous sociocultural formations into a global ensemble has taken place, especially at the most decisive periods in this historical process, disproportionately on and through this terrain. The concept and practices of world literature, far from representing the superseding of national forms of identification of language, literature, and culture, emerged for the first time precisely alongside the forms of thinking in the contemporary Western world that I have referred to as nation-thinking—namely, those emergent modes of thinking in the West that are associated with the nationalization of social and cultural life and point toward the nation-state as the institutional horizon of culture and society. For any attempt at a critical understanding of our present moment, the larger task is to comprehend the precise nature of this extended literary-philological moment, in which often-overlapping bodies of writing came to acquire, through a process of historicization, distinct personalities as “literature” along national lines.

The institution of literature, which has not received scholarly attention in colonial studies comparable to such practices of the colonial state as the census and ethnography, has its most decisive historical significance in the role it played in the formation of the new bourgeois, colonial-national intelligentsias who saw their historical task as the vernacularization of language and culture—a conceit of return to the language of “the people” that in fact consisted of unprecedented innovations whose actualization even in elite segments of society required a strenuous pedagogy.⁶⁹ These “national” traditions were formed through the destruction of varied and sometimes ancient cultures of reading, writing, and performing—developments that continue to pose challenges to literary cultures in the Global South into our own times. Shifting the conceptual registers somewhat, we might therefore say more precisely that the emergence and modes of functioning of world literature, as the space of interaction between and articulation of the “national” or regional literatures, are elements in the much-wider historical process of the emergence of the modern, bourgeois state and its dissemination worldwide, under colonial and semicolonial conditions, as the normative state-form of the modern era.