NO MATTER HOW FAR you travel from home today, you can be pretty sure about some of the things to expect if you are told that you will be meeting someone who is a writer of some renown in that country. Any linguistic difficulties of such a meeting might be overcome by recourse to one or the other of the “world” languages of European origin, such as English, above all, but also French or Spanish, either directly or through an intermediary. You would likely meet a person familiar with the worlds of literary magazines and literary publishing, and you both may have read some of the same magazines or reviews or might at least be familiar with some of the same ones. The two of you could most probably exchange views about favorite authors, maybe even discover that you like the same ones, whom each of you may have read in the original or in translation. On the other hand, you may come to form an opinion of the person’s literary tastes as somewhat poor or even shocking. The person may stiffen visibly if you are introduced as a “literary critic”—he or she is a “writer,” after all. You might discuss the recent film adaptation of an important novel you both like. And, thinking back on the encounter, you might even come to believe that you may have recognized in this person one or another of a distinct “type” of literary or writerly personality familiar to you from other places in the world.
A mere hundred years ago—and that is a relatively short interlude in the history of the modern world—your encounter would have been far less predictable, even in a place like India, whose languages and cultures had already undergone dramatic change under the violent impact of foreign rule by the British Empire for well over a century. Another fifty or hundred years earlier, the experience might have proved simply undecipherable. A recent European arrival requesting such an encounter might have discovered, first of all, many distinct cultures of poetic composition even in the same town or city, based in a variety of languages and dialects with no clear connection to ideas about the language of a people, let alone a nation. Some of these bodies of writing may have been alien or opaque and even possibly unknown to each other even in the same locale. In other cases, the same individual may have written in more than one language or dialect according to the very different aesthetic standards that were extant in each of them. Some persons who were introduced to the visiting European as composers of verse might have seemed more like musicians or even mystics or religious functionaries. Others may have been busy writing odes to landlords, petty princes, kings, or even officers of the British colonial administration according to regimented rules for singing the praise of benefactors specific to the language. On the one hand, such scenarios are part of the concern of the intellectual and scholarly activity called world literature; on the other, the social and cultural transformations from the older scenario to the contemporary one can be described as the emergence of world literature, the transformation of literature into a world-encompassing reality. It is with such matters that we shall be concerned in this book.
The idea of world literature seems to exercise a strange gravitational force on all students of literature, even on those whose primary impulse is to avoid or bypass it entirely, forcing on them involuntary and unwanted changes of course and orientation. Its promise of a unified perspective on world culture brooks no possibility of strong repudiation. It hardly seems viable to say in response, “Back to national literatures!” And yet the ongoing institutionalization of world literature in the academic humanities and in publishing cannot quite dispel a lingering sense of unease about its supposed overcoming of antagonisms and a reconciliation and singularity that is too easily achieved. More bluntly put, it is hard not to wonder if all this talk of world literature might not be an intellectual correlate of the happy talk that accompanied globalization over the past couple of decades, until the financial crash and its ongoing global aftermath, which has taken the form of a new Great Depression in some countries, introduced a certain reality check into the public discourse. How do we ensure what we might call the critical intelligence of the concept, which after all has had a presence in the work of so diverse a set of critical thinkers as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Erich Auerbach, and Edward Said but which at the same time seems susceptible to easy commodification in the literary marketplace, broadly conceived?
It will have been noticed that in the opening paragraphs, I more or less implicitly assumed “you” to be Euro-American. Could it be that the latter is always at the “center” of the discourse whenever we talk about world literature? What would a discourse look like in which that was not the case? Could I have written a preface in which the native of an Asian or African society, for instance, was invited to imagine a historical encounter with a European writer as a means of discovering the alienness of European “literature”? The very difficulty of imagining this reverse mode of address is a sign of the success of “world literature.” Concepts and categories of European origin are at the core of literature as a worldwide “space” or reality, including long-established ways of thinking about the alien, the exotic, or the other. And European “world” languages, above all English, seem to be the not-quite-invisible ether that permeates this space. But what is the nature of this space, exactly, and by what means did it get established? How are we to understand its expansion and “success” worldwide? And what is its relationship exactly to modes of writing and expressivity that belong to places that are non-Western, “global southern,” or of the “underdeveloped” world? James Joyce’s great image in Ulysses for the predicament of culture in a colonized society was reflections in the “cracked looking glass of a servant.” The image of the native that the world threw back at her was a broken and disfigured one. How can we characterize the predicament in a postcolonial society? A great deal more is at stake in the question of world literature than some of its leading contemporary elaborators seem to recognize: the origins of bourgeois modernity—that is, the culture of capitalist society—within a history of worldwide imperial violence; the persistence into our times, albeit in altered forms, of the racial and cultural antagonisms of the colonial world; and the ongoing struggle over the right and the ability to define the contours of human experience. The discourse of world literature today often seems to consider itself immune to questions concerning such problems. In this book, I attempt to develop ways of thinking that might hazard answers to at least some of them.