No Country: Working-Class Writing in the Age of Globalization

2. According to political economists and development sociologists, the rise of the globalization project corresponds with the post-World War II state-restructuring and global crisis-management efforts that led in 1944 to the founding of the Bretton Woods international financial institutions (specifically the World Bank and the IMF). The 1930s and decolonization struggles also constitute an important part of globalization’s history. In the aftermath of the 1930s, the IMF and World Bank—properly speaking, the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development (IBRD)—were instituted to finance the rebuilding of war-torn Europe and to prevent another global depression. In this sense, late colonial proletarian writing (Anand’s included) might be seen as anticipating globalization’s debates and dilemmas. The Bretton Woods institutions were not value-neutral. Promises of aid to newly independent countries were part of an ideological agenda of containing the threat of socialism. In 1955 the Bandung Conference—which brought together heads of state, intellectuals, activists, and cultural workers from across Asia and Africa—initiated the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and created a framework for economic development and social justice that refused the binarism of Cold War logic and sought to navigate an alternative route for the workers of the Third World.

In most literary historiography, however, the meaning of globalization gets unmoored from its historical and economic context. Immanuel Wallerstein’s “world-systems theory” model inspires literary critics who retroactively (since the term’s migration from the social sciences to the humanities) see every period-genre field as, of course, contributing to globalization studies. For those literary critics who bracket its economic provenance, globalization can become synonymous with adjusting the perspective, now reframing how we undertake literary studies, moving away from literary history premised in national literature models toward comparative regionalism and formalism. In this ahistorical, decontextualized way, “globalization” becomes automatically synonymous with “transculturation”: global cultural flows are the result of the breaking down of fragile, national economies. Or to put it another way, globalization becomes defined metaleptically by evidence of a sampling of its dispersed effects.

3. “Empire is materializing before [his] very eyes”: this is, of course, a reference to the memorable opening line of the preface to Empire (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000], xi). See also Sanjay Krishnan, Reading the Global: Troubling Perspectives on Britain’s Empire in Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 1–23. Although questions of reading globalization from below do not take center stage in his argument, Krishnan makes a persuasive case for understanding the global as an “instituted perspective.”

4. In the appendix to her Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Spivak, elaborating upon de Man, explains irony not only as rhetorical figure but also as the basis for a cultural politics; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 430. Also see Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 300–301.

5. Anand’s description of “Jimmie Thomas, sometime mechanic in a Lancashire mill, now for fifteen years head foreman in one of the biggest cotton mills in India” disintegrates into caricature: “Occasionally, he kicked a Coolie. But that was when he had read in the morning paper the news of a nationalist demonstration, a terrorist outrage or an attempt at seditious communist propaganda which he, as a member of the British race of India, considered to be more of a personal affront than the pursuit of an ideal of freedom on the part of the exploited. He had long since forgotten the days during which he himself had eked out a miserable existence in Lancashire” (Coolie, 172–173; 217).

6. Anand’s nonindividuated, anonymous “Coolie” of the title must be understood as a part-subject of labor power in a very specific way. Consider, for example, that the English word derives from the Tamil word Kuli—the word simply for “payment” or “wage.” This is a part-subject whose very name signifies the value of labor power and the capital-labor exchange relation.

7. See the epigraph to this chapter. Bessie Head, A Question of Power (Oxford: Heinemann, 1974). See also Bruce Robbins, Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

8. It is not the objective of this book to minutely catalogue these dominant literary histories. In surveying the problem of how to introduce working-class literature as a canonical category, however, we see that there have been various attempts to define working-class literature as well as attempts to read the category of the working class in relation to other established literary traditions. In fact we might say that working-class fiction as a genre has been identified with at least three different critical traditions in the American academy: (1) the “proletarian” moment in American arts and letters, corresponding to the 1930s and its immediate aftermath, the decade of literary radicalism (representative works include Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio; Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited; John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy; Richard Wright’s Native Son; Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth; and Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money); (2) the “industrial novel” of mid-nineteenth century Britain (illustrative examples would be Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton and North and South; Charles Dickens’s Hard Times; Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil; Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke; and George Eliot’s Felix Holt); (3) working-class literature understood as a constitutive element of the realism-modernism debates (examples would be the arguments and counterarguments of Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukacs, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno—key debates in German Marxism gathered under the heading of “aesthetics and politics”).

During the debates of the 1930s in particular, there was a decisive push by theoreticians of the U.S. left to limit the category of proletarian literature to material produced by writers of working-class origin, in contrast to “proletarian” literature, defined as that produced by class-conscious members of the working class with a particular political agenda. Ultimately, however—even according to CPUSA-affiliated critics—proletarian literature ultimately has come to be defined broadly as literature overtly by, for, or about workers.

9. See Peter Hitchcock, Working-Class Fiction in Theory and Practice: A Reading of Alan Sillitoe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1989), 2–3.

10. “When considering the historical development of class-specific fiction,” qualifies Hitchcock, we should not overlook that writing by sympathetic bourgeois and committed socialist authors might reveal “‘class effects’ (pro-class cultural activity that may be the work of producers outside the class they support)” (Hitchcock, Working-Class Fiction, 20). To be clear, Hitchcock’s work cannot be simply subsumed under the category of that of critics who insist that realism and testimonial are the best representative forms for working-class writing, although the legitimacy of working-class origins is here, at least (in his monograph on Sillitoe), affirmed as the defining case for working-class writing.

11. Taking “literary” and “nonliterary” countries as her units of measurement, Casanova assesses the relationship of aesthetics to politics in these terms: “The political dependence of emerging literary spaces is signaled by the recourse to a functionalist aesthetic and, taking the criteria of literary modernity as a standard of measurement, the most conservative narrative, novelistic, and poetical forms. Conversely, as I have tried to show, the autonomy enjoyed by the most literary countries is marked chiefly by the depoliticization of literature: the almost complete disappearance of popular or national themes, the appearance of ‘pure’ writing—texts that, freed from the obligation to help to develop a particular national identity, have no social or political ‘function’—and, as an aspect of this, the emergence of formal experimentation, which is to say of forms detached from political purpose and unencumbered by nonliterary conceptions of literature” (Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004], 197).

12. The object of my critique here is the oftentimes absorptive taxonomy of transnational modernism. In their inventory of “New Modernist studies,” Mao and Walkowitz pose: “Were one seeking a single word to sum up transformations in modernist literary scholarship over the past decade or two, one could do worse than light on expansion” (Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,” PMLA 123.3 [2008]: 737). But arguably, “absorption” and “recognition through assimilation” are a few words and phrases that might also have been used. The literature of labor is nowhere to be found in their overview of “New Modernist studies.” Influential works in subaltern studies are completely bypassed. But furthermore, in their inventory, a classic work of internationalist anticolonial critique, such as Brent Edwards’s The Practice of Diaspora, can be cited out of context to legitimize a project that it reframes and interrupts in crucial ways. More than an inventory, this is a sleight of hand: it becomes a magic trick with the ability to make criticism disappear—to neutralize nonconformist critical trends through selective citation. Against the neutralizing, absorptive impulses of this particular trajectory of transnational modernism, we might counterpose other works from within the canon of critical modernist studies: Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002); Nicholas Browne, Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth-Century Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Among other more recent works that explicitly address the critical interrelationship between colonial discourse, modernization, and modernism, we might consider Krishnan, Reading the Global; Benjamin Conisbee Baer, “Shit Writing: Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, the Image of Gandhi, and the Progressive Writers’ Association,” Modernism/Modernity 16.3 (2009): 575–595; Kristin Bluemel, Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009); and Michael Rubenstein, Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).

13. Emphasis Eagleton’s; Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 216. In some ways this argument can be taken, in part, as a reprise of Terry Eagleton’s—although neither the critique of the provincialism of world literature models nor a consideration of the international division of labor are his specific objects.

14. Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Surveys from Exile (London: Penguin, 1992), 150.

15. In a chapter devoted to the work of literary historiographic reconstruction, and titled “The Novelists International,” Michael Denning also attempts to connect proletarian writing to currents and currencies of world literature—especially to conventions and notations of magical realism. His focus here is the novel form. However, for him, arguably, the question of American exceptionalism ultimately takes center stage. I return to this point below. See Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (London: Verso, 2004), 51–72.

16. Questions of historicism and agency are, of course, at the heart of E. P. Thompson’s argument with Althusser. See Perry Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism (London: Verso, 1980), 16–58.

17. Althusser’s critical reading of Gramsci generates “Marxism is not a historicism” in Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital (New York: Verso, 1997), 119145. I return to this formulation below.

18. On this score, I also take my bearings from Ellen Rooney’s ideas on the politics and ethics of reading. As she puts it, “the heady pursuit of a ‘correct’ theory of ideology permits a disavowal of the elusiveness of this ‘correct’ political position, simultaneously affirming and denying political engagement and enabling an evasion of the absolutely unavoidable risk entailed in ‘reading,’ where reading is recognized as a relation among readers, a productive relation, but one that allows for no theoretical guarantee” (184). See her insightful recasting of Althusser as a theorist of reading, rather than ideology. Ellen Rooney, “Better Read Than Dead: Althusser and the Fetish of Ideology,” Yale French Studies 88 (1995): 183–200.

19. Perry Anderson confronts the problem in these terms: “It was in the UK and USA, after all—the oldest and most powerful of capitalist states, respectively—that the most testing problems for socialist theory had always been posed, and left perforce unanswered” (Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism [London: Verso, 1983], 19).

20. William Empson, Some Versions of the Pastoral (Norfolk: New Directions, 1950), 3.

21. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “From Haverstock Hill Flat to US Classroom, What’s Left of Theory?,” in What’s Left of Theory?, ed. Judith Butler, John Guillory, and Kendall Thomas (New York: Routledge, 2000), 7. Here Spivak is invoking (and reframing) Foucault’s formulations on “the care of the self.”

22. Perry Anderson, “Internationalism: A Breviary,” New Left Review 14 (March/ April 2002): 20.

23. David Harvey, for example, warns against the ways in which this rhetorical salvo might be taken up in the service of a rootless internationalism now dubbed cosmopolitanism. He revisits the line (in the Manifesto) in his compelling call to study the interrelation between geographical knowledges and the so-called cosmopolitanism revivalism: “The workers of the world (whom Marx and Engels erroneously thought of as ideal cosmopolitan subjects because they ‘had no country’) can still seek to unite and overthrow global bourgeois power, with its distinctive form of cosmopolitanism, though this time they too must be far more mindful of uneven geographical developments (the dialectic between socialist internationalism and geography has never functioned freely, if it has functioned at all)” (Harvey, “Cosmopolitanism and Geographical Evils,” Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism, ed. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001], 304).

24. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Verso, 1998), 58.

25. See for example David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (Jan./Feb. 2000): 54–68; Nicholas Browne, Utopian Generations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Natalie Melas assesses the relationship between these theorists’ visions of world literature and her own genealogy for comparative literature. Melas’s specific intervention—postcolonial critique, via Said—is a nuanced defense of theories and methods that none of us can dispense with; see Natalie Melas, All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).

26. Here a distinction might be drawn between David Damrosch’s approach (to world literature) and that of Pascale Casanova. Casanova’s main intervention calls our attention to the fact that the political economy of world literature does not correspond to mapping of power hierarchies of global politics (i.e., let’s notice that the United States is not, despite its position, the leader in the “world republic of letters”). Still, as we see, her theoretical frame devolves into a selective history of Paris as the center of the global publishing industry. There is more variability in the canon of world literature proposed by David Damrosch, who turns to Goethe and his world historical moment as a frame of reference, rather than a touchstone for validating a specific European model. He would define world literature, first and foremost, as “a mode of circulation and of reading” (5). My own approach, foregrounding working-class literature as world literature, is different from this one in that it follows in the tracks of the discursive reach of world literature opened up by Marx in his later texts on class.

27. Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program,” The First International and After, ed. David Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1992), 347.

28. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1981), 1025.

29. See Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 117–120.

30. Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1983), 81–82.

31. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), 2.

32. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Translator’s Preface,” Imaginary Maps, xxv.

33. The phrasing is from John Hutnyk, who writes on Sivanadan in “The Dialectic of Here and There: Anthropology ‘at Home’ and British Asian Communism,” Social Identities 11.4 (2005): 345–361.

1. Rudyard Kipling, Kim (London: Penguin, 1987).

2. Mulk Raj Anand, Conversations in Bloomsbury (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981).

3. Mulk Raj Anand, Coolie (New Delhi: Penguin, 1993 [1936]). Outside the scope of this intention, made public in Conversations in Bloomsbury, in an unpublished manuscript named “Musings on Munoo,” Anand discusses conceiving the idea for Coolie as a reaction to the praise lavished on Kim by Bonamy Dobree, T.S. Eliot, and K. de B. Codrington. See Saros Cowasjee, Coolie: An Assessment.

4. Foreword, D. Chaman Lall, Coolie: The Story of Labour and Capital in India (Lahore: Oriental Publishing House, 1932). See Shaileshwar Sati Prasad’s study of Anand, The Insulted and the Injured (Patna: Janaki Prakashan, 1997).

5. See, for example, Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Ashis Nandy, Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983); and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Resident Alien,” Relocating Postcolonialism, ed. David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).

6. The Small Hands of Slavery: Bonded Child Labor in India (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1996).

7. Mulk Raj Anand, Author to Critic: The Letters of Mulk Raj Anand, ed. Saros Cowasjee (Calcutta: Writers’ Workshop, 1973), 1. I return to this point later in this chapter.

8. This maneuver happens in complicated ways: See, for example, Jessica Berman, “Comparative Colonialisms: Joyce, Anand, and the Question of Engagement,” Modernism/Modernity 13.3 (2006): 465–485. In her reading of Coolie, Berman writes of the “intertextual web” that connects James Joyce and Anand. But she stages the context for her argument in terms of Anand modeling himself after Joyce. Ultimately, her article becomes focused on Joyce, with an inventory of Anand’s debts to modernism and the bildungsroman form tacked on. “To put it bluntly, part of what Anand is finding in Joyce, and not in Iqbal (despite the fact that Iqbal was to become [a] crucial political figure during the struggle for independence), is engagement with the self within the context of a colonial reality rather than the metaphysical world” (468). By contrast, Benjamin Conisbee Baer’s recent work on colonialism and modernism restores Anand to the historical and theoretical debates of the 1930s. Baer’s work shares a focus with my own. By way of historicizing Anand’s connections with the Indian Progressive Writers’ Associations, he reads Anand’s Untouchable as a representation of the subaltern. See Benjamin Conisbee Baer, “Shit Writing: Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, the Image of Gandhi, and the Progressive Writers’ Association,” Modernism/Modernity 16.3 (2009): 575–595. Kristin Blumel also has suggested an alternative to the ideological blind spots of transnational modernism—“intermodernism.” Anand figures in this discourse; see Kristin Blumen, Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009).

9. Nelson, Repression and Recovery, 3.

10. Dietmar Rothermund, The Global Impact of the Great Depression, 1929–1939 (New York: Routledge, 1996).

11. See also Rothermund’s India in the Great Depression, 1929–1939 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1992), which might be supplemented by a close reading of Marx on “counteracting factors” in volume 3 of Capital, as well as select texts on value.

12. While I admire the meticulous scholarship and instructive theorizing of Saskia Sassen, I have often wondered at this insistent focus on the global city as the most “strategic site” in the global economy. I do not agree with the logic of “Much has been published about export processing zones, and they entail types of activity less likely to be located in cities than finance and services; hence we will not examine them in detail” (Saskia Sassen, Cities in a World Economy [Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press, 1994], 9). Of course there is a difference between 1930s global history and the history of economic globalization (the term “globalization” properly belongs to the post-1930s era of GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade). Yet I maintain that a work such as Rothermund’s The Global Impact of the Great Depression may contribute to an understanding of the blind spots in narratives of economic globalization. Other efforts in the same direction include Sassen’s own “Toward a Feminist Analytics of the Global Economy” (first published in the Indiana Journal of Legal Studies 4 [1996]). See also Arturo Escobar’s “Power and Visibility: Tales of Peasants, Women, and the Environment,” in his Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 154–211.

13. According to Saros Cowasjee, “Anand was at this time (1938) a member of the Indian Congress Party and, later, for a while, of the British Labour Party.” Over the course of the decade Anand worked for the Kisan Sabha (Farmers Union) in India and also played an active part in organizing the Second All-India Progressive Writers’ Conference in Calcutta. See Saros Cowasjee, So Many Freedoms (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1977), 21, 25.

14. On the “art and science of mensuration” see the education of Kim: “A boy who had passed his examination in these branches—for which, by the way there were no cram books—could, by merely marching over a country with a compass and a level and a straight eye, carry away a picture of that country which might be sold for large sums in coined silver…. Here was a new craft that a man could tuck away in this head and by the look of the large wide world unfolding itself before him, it seemed that the more a man knew the better for him” (Kim 211).

15. The first chapter in So Many Freedoms deals with the problem briefly; Cowasjee draws up a list of famous names (Anand’s circle of friends from the Pink Decade). But he seems to rush over the reasons Anand has been overlooked within literary historiographies of the 1930s. He does not elaborate on the consequences of Anand’s staunch commitment to the Communist Party and “revolutionary defeatism” in the face of criticism from friends in the British Left.

16. Once again, Kristin Blumel’s work Intermodernism is a notable exception.

17. Which he cofounded with Sajjad Zaheer.

18. Mulk Raj Anand, Apology for Heroism: A Brief Autobiography of Ideas (New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1975).

19. The July 1944 conference of forty-four financial ministers at Bretton Woods, NH, provided the opportunity to create an international banking system. It also chartered the foundation of “twin sisters,” the IMF and IBRD. Some would consider this conference to mark the birth pangs of the development project. See Philip McMichael, Democracy and Social Change (Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press, 1996).

20. On the limitations of posing magical realism as the defining instance of Third World fiction see “Marginality in the Teaching Machine,” in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), 57–59.

21. This is Frantz Fanon’s word from Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 54.

22. Cowasjee (in a rather loose “paraphrasing” of an unpublished article by Anand), So Many Freedoms, 60.

23. The last two comments are made by Gustav Klaus in an otherwise attentive reading of Anand’s book in his survey titled The Literature of Labour (New York: St. Martin’s, 1985), 115, 124. See also D. Riemenschnieder’s criticism that by 1938 “the all too low status of his former heroes was indeed a (technical) handicap,” quoted in Margaret Berry’s study Mulk Raj Anand: The Man and the Novelist (Amsterdam: Oriental Press, 1971), 83. Writing of Anand’s Untouchable, Josna Rege reads the protagonist’s inability to act as a by-product of the irresolution of nationalist discourse: “Like many Indian novels of its time, Untouchable is driven by a desire to identify with the poor of India, to rouse them to action, and to effect a social transformation in the process. Yet the nationalist discourse itself seems to dictate a strangely indirect, incomplete, circular ambit, in which action is desired and undertaken, but eventually obstructed, renounced, or deferred” (Rege, Colonial Karma [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004], 66). I would only qualify that such a nationalist framing overlooks the conditions and constraints of class politics.

24. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, 255.

25. In an instructive chapter in Outside the Fold, Gauri Viswanathan has called to our attention that in Untouchable, Anand conveniently leaves out any discussion of Ambedkar’s contributions to Dalit politics. She makes the case that “the privileging of Gandhi as an emblem of nonpartisan feeling has, as its inverse, the demonization of Ambedkar as a purveyor of sectarian politics.” In her reading of Untouchable, she notes that Anand makes no mention of Ambedkar at all: “Instead, the novel celebrates Gandhi as the savior of the untouchables” (220). In response to this critique of Anand I can only say that (1) I would read the episode of Gandhi as God via Marx’s discussion of Bonaparte in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (in his Surveys from Exile: Political Writings, vol. 2 [New York: Penguin, 1992]); and (2) Coolie is a categorically different and deliberate intervention into the politics of “class—not caste.” But finally I would have to concede that this project—mine: that of a metropolitan feminist—cannot be adequately responsible to the “Dalit movement” (at this point). See Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

26. See FOIL, “Those That Be in Bondage: Child Labor and IMF Strategy in India.” As an example of an intervention into the question of child labor that is both outside and inside the teaching machine, see Spivak’s risky concluding chapter to her A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 312–421.

27. Ellen Rooney, “Form and Contentment,” Modern Language Quarterly 61.1 (2000): 17–40.

28. I am referring, of course, to the fact that Marx’s writings on class remain unfinished.

29. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 16.

30. Why doesn’t Anand choose to “document” these successes? Uncomplicated questions such as these are of course not useful with regard to a literary text, but I will refer here to Dilip Simeon’s argument in The Politics of Labour Under Late Colonialism (New Delhi: Manohar, 1995), 341. Regarding “privileged participants in the drama of class struggle,” he brings up the point that for certain nationalist literati, TISCO indexed a “Parsi industry.”

31. We might say that inasmuch as this “picaresque” novel, composed to the broken rhythms of erratic coolie work, is about anything, it foregrounds the story of how some stories do not get written.

32. See Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” 239. See also n. 42 below re the term “coolie.”

33. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 141.

34. Vinay Bahl, The Making of the Indian Working Class: A Case of the Tata Iron and Steel Company, 1880–1946 (New Delhi: Sage, 1995). Her introduction is a serious, impassioned—but in places flawed—critique of Chakrabarty’s argument. See for instance comments such as these: “Chakrabarty is sacrificing the politics of liberation by denying the existence of capitalism’s systematic coercion. This denial also logically removes the possibility of raising any kind of resistance to capitalism” and “[by] basing his approach on cultural particularism, Chakrabarty takes away the hope of emancipation from the working class struggle.” See also her point that “these theories [newly emerging critiques of Eurocentrism in Marxism], which belong to Postmodernists and Subalternists, have no political or theoretical consequences to the existing system. However, they were able to retain the image of being a critique of the West” (21).

35. Katherine Mayo is the American writer who, in collusion with the British propaganda machine, chronicled the horrors of socially sanctioned “child abuse” and casteism in her sensationalist 1927 tract titled Mother India. The “proper” subject of Mayo’s book is, of course, the violated girl child/child wife. Her chapter titled “Psychological Glimpses Through the Economic Lens” makes for extremely interesting reading. See Katherine Mayo, Mother India (London: Jonathan Cape, 1930). Also, here I employ “irony” in the sense of its minimal dictionary definition: “an ill-timed or perverse arrival of an event or circumstance that is in itself desirable.”

36. See E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1927). He also proposes that the approximate center often “lies in a discussion about the art of the novel.” I might add to this, drawing upon Mieke Bal’s Narratology, that the center here is where the “embedded story” contains a suggestion as to how the text should be read. See Mieke Bal, Narratology (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1985), 147.

38. From the unpublished article, “Musings on Munoo.” This article reveals that Anand’s novel is the bio-graph of the friend in question, who worked in a pickle factory (as does Munoo, at one point). See also n. 3. above.

39. In an account of a conversation between Gandhi and himself, Anand recalls being asked, “Why write a novel? Why not a tract on untouchability … the straight book is truthful and you can reform people by saying things frankly.” To which Anand replied, “Though I do want to help people, I believe in posing the question rather than answering it” (quoted in Cowasjee, So Many Freedoms, 42). We cannot read this statement as an easy dismissal of social responsibility when we consider Anand’s continuing work as an activist and cultural worker in post-Independence India. Rather, what strikes me here is Anand’s figuration of the novel form as a rhetorical question.

40. Mieke Bal’s point about “focalization” is helpful to keep in mind: as she puts it, most theories of narration “do not make an explicit distinction between, on the one hand, the vision through which the elements are presented and, on the other, the identity of the voice that is verbalizing that vision. To put it more simply, they do not make a distinction between those who see and those who speak” (Narratology, 100–101).

41. The quotation continues: “[and] not [simply] when we have, on the one hand, a literal meaning and on the other hand, a figural meaning, but when it is impossible to decide which of the two meanings (that can be entirely incompatible) prevails” (Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979], 9–10).

42. With regard to the concept of “coolie” as the part-subject of labor, consider the etymology of the Tamil word Kuli—the word simply for “payment” or “wage.” See E. Valentine Daniel, “Conclusion: The Making of a Coolie,” Journal of Peasant Studies 19.3–4 (April/July 1992). Significantly, we must also note that there is some dispute about whether the term originated as the name of an aboriginal tribe of Gujerat.

43. Ellen Rooney, “Form and Contentment” (212).

44. In terms of the layout of the letter form, it is striking that the writer includes these overstated descriptions of “Mr. Little” in alignment with the set margins.

45. I use “supplement” to mean both “to supply a gap” and “to add an excess.” Here and in the following section the reference is to “The Exorbitant. Question of Method,” in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 157–164.

46. Shaileshwar Sati Prasad proposes that Anand draws upon Lall for his book Two Leaves and a Bud as well as for Coolie; see The Insulted and the Injured.

47. Bal, Narratology, 71.

48. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in his Image/Music/Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 148.

1. On the one hand, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri declare proletarian internationalism in its “paradoxical and powerful” incarnation to be dead; see Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 49–52. On the other hand, how to think the postcolonial/immigrant subject is foreclosed within a certain ideological cathexis of a certain school of postcolonial critique—although admittedly this bracketing off is performed in the scrupulously visible political interest of cautioning some who self-interestedly confuse elite and nonelite patterns of migration under the monolithizing, catchall rubric of “diaspora studies.” See for example Spivak’s warning: “Increasingly and metaleptically, transnationality is becoming the name of the increased migrancy of labor. To substitute this name for the change from multinational capital in the economic restructuring of the (developed/developing) globe—to re-code a change in the determination of capital as a cultural change—is a scary symptom of Cultural Studies, especially Feminist Cultural Studies” (“Diasporas Old and New: Women in the Transnational World,” Textual Practice 10.2 [1996]: 245).

2. Ambalavaner Sivanandan, Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism (London: Verso, 1990), 199–250.

3. Stuart Hall, “When Was ‘The Post-colonial’? Thinking at the Limit,” in The Post-Colonial Question, ed. Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (London: Routledge, 1996), 242.

4. Of course, here, I am thinking of Robert Young’s Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).

5. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

6. My subheading is a pointed reordering of the key terms comprising the title of one of the hallmark anthologies on the narrative logic of race as a social formation—“Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr.

7. In his recent book Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, David Scott makes a case for the study of the literary genre of tragedy (versus romance) as a mode of historical emplotment for thinking anticolonial discourse in particular.

8. See the epigraph to this chapter.

9. JVP (Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna) or People’s Liberation Front (in English). While at a certain juncture in Sri Lankan history the JVP might have been appropriately described as a Marxist party (in fact, this still remains the designation that it appropriates unto itself), it is now more accurately described as “nationalist socialist,” if not Sinhala nationalist. Also see n. 25 in chapter 3.

10. This short story appears in Where the Dance Is (London: Arcadia Books, 2000), 42–64.

11. See for example this passage from Adorno’s Minima Moralia: “Dialectical thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means. But since it must use these means, it is at every moment in danger of itself acquiring a coercive character: the ruse of reason would like to hold sway over the dialectic too.” [He goes on, in this same passage, to arrive at a theory of the remainder, invoking the work of Walter Benjamin]: “Stringency and totality, the bourgeois intellectual ideals of necessity and generality, do indeed circumscribe the formula of history, but for just this reason the constitution of society finds its precipitate in those great, immovable, lordly concepts against which dialectical criticism and practice are directed. If Benjamin said that history had hitherto been written from the standpoint of the victor, and needed to be written from that of the vanquished, we might add that knowledge must indeed present the fatally rectilinear succession of victory and defeat, but should also address itself to those things which were not embraced by this dynamic, which fell by the wayside—what might be called the waste products and blind spots that have escaped the dialectic” (151).

In regard to a particular conceptualization of “rewriting as dialectical thought,” I also acknowledge a debt to a formulation of Brent Hayes Edwards. In a lecture delivered in commemoration of the centennial of the publication of W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Edwards elaborates an interesting reading of the cultural politics of Du Bois’s postscripts and “afterthoughts” (Brent Edwards, “Late Romance,” John Hope Franklin Center, Duke University, Durham, NC, 12 November 2003). In general, the comparisons and contrasts between Sivanandan’s and Du Bois’s cultural politics and literary internationalism bear much further scrutiny.

12. Again we notice here that Sivanandan’s invocation of “double consciousness” is not in keeping with Du Bois’s sense of the term—the burden (and gift) of being able to see oneself through the eyes of others. In chapter 4 (on the Botswanan/South African refugee writer Bessie Head) I return to debates surrounding the interpretation of Du Bois’s crucial concept.

13. Suvendrini Perera touches upon this point implicitly in the frame to her reflections on Sivanandan’s novel. See “Unmaking the Present, Remaking Memory: Sri Lankan Stories and a Politics of Coexistence,” A World to Win: Essays in Honor of A. Sivanandan, Race and Class 41.1/2 (July-Dec. 1999): 189–197.

14. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Diasporas Old and New: Women in the Transnational World,” Textual Practice 10.2 (1996): 245–269.

15. Sithaperam Nadesan, A History of the Up-Country Tamil People (Hatton: Nandalala, 1993), 12–13.

16. In his essay titled “Beyond Human Rights,” Agamben seems to suggest that we refigure the cultural politics of human rights from the standpoint of the refugee—the paradigmatic figure of our times, as nation-states start to dissolve. As he puts it, “The refugee should be considered for what it is, namely, nothing less than a limit-concept that at once brings a radical crisis to the principles of the nation-state and clears the way for a renewal of categories that can no longer be delayed” (Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000], 22–23).

17. See David Scott’s “Dehistoricizing History” in Unmaking the Nation, ed. Pradeep Jeganathan and Qadri Ismail. This chapter on debates in Sri Lankan historiography is reprinted in his Refashioning Futures: Criticism After Postcoloniality.

18. The immigrant Tamils also aroused the anxiety of the national socialist JVP. During the 1970s, they proposed the “fifth column” thesis as the party line—a conspiracy theory that maintains that India was an imperial power and that “estate Tamils” (and all Tamils, for that matter) constituted a “fifth column in the service of Indian expansionism.”

19. In 1834, following slave revolts in the West Indies, Britain proclaimed the abolition of slavery in its territories but continued to mine India for cheap labor. And thus imperial capitalists turned to South India to supply “the lack” of available labor in colonial Ceylon among other colonies.

20. See Ismail, Abiding by Sri Lanka: On Peace, Place, and Postcoloniality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 186.

21. Those familiar with Sinhala nationalist mythology will immediately register a rethinking of the Vijaya myth.

22. Memory plays tricks on the narrator when it comes to the remembered object of life in Jaffna. Counter to the characteristic narrative logic of the novel—quite early on we are alerted to its broken rhythm—and to verifiable historical facts, he remembers Jaffna in all its specificity as if he had “lived there all [his] life.” Rajan observes, “Other memories of my school days seem so distinct, clear, separate: there are spaces between them which I cannot quite fill. But my memories of Sandilipay run on to each other, unreckoning of the time that separated my visits there, as though they had been edited for continuity. And it is not as if I had lived there all my life” (143). The narrator’s timeless Jaffna is marshaled as a countermemory against competing versions of militant nationalisms and territorial claims. En route to Jaffna on the train, the narrator recalls his father’s gift for making a cramped space seem bigger. In this vision of the tangled beauty of confinement, Sivanandan gives us one of the most powerful, ethical meditations of the novel: “Everything he did in that small rectangle of a compartment was so assured, deft and certain. He moved in the confines of that cubicle as though it were a house: he gave it space and breadth and dimension. It would not have surprised me one bit if a tree had sprung in our midst, or a stream or mountain, so much space there was. Perhaps space was a relationship: we had so much room because we had room for each other, and a way of belonging, perhaps to ourselves and to others” (138). The loss of Jaffna or some romantic, revisionist nostalgia for prewar rural village life and simpler, gentler times is not the defining loss of the narrative. Rather, the loss that is mourned over and over again is the death of socialist ideals, and an intangible code of ethics, and the erasure of working-class biography.

23. The reference is, of course, to Marx’s “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” See Surveys from Exile, 2:147.

24. I am grateful to Ahilan Kadirgamar for vetting and verifying Sivanandan’s English translation of this verse.

25. See Sonali Perera, “(Where) Language Acts in When Memory Dies,” Nethra 4.3/4 (April-Sept. 2000): 101–107.

26. See Qadri Ismail, “Damn Good Story,” Himal 12.8 (Aug. 1999): 22.

27. “The logic of the saga-form dictates the unsatisfying, and uncharacteristic, conclusion that our lives typically end in a tragedy that must be content with knowing tragedy’s perennial nature,” observes Timothy Brennan in his appraisal of When Memory Dies; Brennan, “Poetry and Polemic,” Race and Class 41.1/2 (July-Dec. 1999): 23–34.

28. Vasuki Nesiah, “Monumental History and the Politics of Memory: Public Space and the Jaffna Public Library,” Lines Magazine. http://www.lines-magazine.org/Art_Feb03/editorial_vasuki.htm (accessed Sept. 1, 2003).

1. I am referring here to Spivak’s concept of “ethical singularity.” Beyond codings of crisis and periods of short-term agitation, women’s and feminist texts sometimes give us alternative models for thinking working-class literature and socialist ethics. They attend to what Spivak has termed the “secret encounter” in the hidden interstices of history-making events; she defines this encounter as something that can take place only in the everyday, in the effortful striving between equals—not historian and subaltern—who are nevertheless aware that always, even within this attempt at ethical responding, some part of the message wished to be communicated is lost. She writes of “the slow effort of ethical responding” that is defined by other time frames than the history of revolutions. See “Translator’s Preface,” Mahasweta Devi, Imaginary Maps, trans. Spivak (New York: Routledge, 1995), xxv.

2. We might also consider the “Postface to the Second Edition of Capital,” where Marx theorizes “all that is present and moving,” as he rethinks the Hegelian dialectic.

3. Upon this score also see Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) and Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso, 1979).

4. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front (New York: Verso), 202. For the concept of formations versus institutions see Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford, 1977), 115–120.

5. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1963), 77–101.

6. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

7. This is Swasti Mitter’s term. See the preface and chapter 1 of Swasti Mitter, Common Fate, Common Bond: Women in the Global Economy (London: Pluto, 1986), 1–24.

8. See Samir Amin, Unequal Development (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), 203–214 on the origins of extraversion. Some might say that globalization has made Amin and Mitter merely historical. On the contrary, the structures of the international division of labor that they describe persist today, even in the interstices of global finance capital.

9. We see that here the lines are opposed. There is no easy way of crossing this aporia, but difficult as it is, this structural opposition must be acknowledged.

10. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 75.

11. While there are moments in her reading that suggest productive contradictions, Barbara Foley still classifies Yonnondio under the heading of a “proletarian bildungsroman,” bypassing the fact that it is actually not quite a book—that the author publishes it as an uncompleted girl-child’s coming of age story. I agree with Constance Coiner, on the other hand, who observes that “Yonnondio’s heteroglossia and the novel’s four narrators represent an attempt to move beyond an individual point of view toward more collective forms” (181). To her, Yonnondio prefigures a postindividualistic form for novelistic discourse. See Barbara Foley, Radical Representations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 321–361. It should be noted that she quotes Coiner as a counterexample to her own reading. See also Constance Coiner, Better Red (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

12. In “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Culture Studies,” Spivak wonders, “Yet is there something particularly disqualifying about ‘working-class’ becoming a canonical descriptive rather than an oppositional transformative? [She observes that] certainly the basic argument of Jonathan Rée’s Proletarian Philosophers would seem to suggest so” (Outside in the Teaching Machine 273).

13. Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio: From the Thirties (New York: Delta, 1974). A brief summary follows. Yonnondio tracks the various dislocations of the working-class Holbrook family as they move from region to region in search of work. They start out in a small mining town in Wyoming, move to a farm in South Dakota, and then finally end up living and working among the packing houses of an (unnamed) city. The narrative, we notice, shifts in focalization from the girl-child/subject of the story, Mazie, to the mother, Anna, to—on occasion—the father, Jim. A crucial subplot of the story involves the breakdown and recovery of the working-class mother. The staging of her “recovery” complicates the text in productive ways.

14. See Raymond Williams’s chapter on “Structures of Feeling” in Marxism, 128.

15. V. N. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 140.

16. Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle (New York: Delta, 1956), 1–12, 63–116.

17. In August 2001 a militant nationalist organization naming itself the Sinhala Commission recommended to the ruling government that as a means of righting British colonial wrongs, it take measures to retroactively deny citizenship to the descendents of Indian-origin Tamil workers, imported as indentured labor to serve on the coffee and tea plantations of the colonial period—a scandalous use of the epistemology of postcolonialism in the service of Sinhala nationalism.

18. Certainly the framing of such questions of subjectivity and representation is not without complications. Perhaps it also remains to be asked whose “interest” staking a claim for such a subject—one that figures “unity-in-dispersal”—serves? If Spivak’s admonition addressed to French poststructuralist thinkers in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” was not to monolithize the working class, even in the avowed interest of theorizing a coalitional politics, it is a caution that must be heeded by Marxist-feminist literary critics even as they reach to articulate the terms of a feminist class politics across the new international division of labor, in the shadow of economisms like comparative advantage—or what has been called the NGOization of feminism.

19. Eagleton describes a concept of (British) working-class writing that portends the interrogation of “ruling definitions of literature” in the concluding section of Literary Theory: “The fourth and final area is that of the strongly emergent movement of working-class writing. Silenced for generations, taught to regard literature as a coterie activity beyond their grasp, working people over the past decade in Britain have been actively organizing to find their own literary styles and voices. The worker-writers’ movement is almost unknown to academia, and has not been exactly encouraged by the cultural organs of the state; but is one sign of a significant break from the dominant relations of literary production. Community and cooperative publishing enterprises are associated projects, concerned not simply with a literature wedded to alternative social values, but with one which challenges and changes the existing social relations between writers, publishers, readers, and other literary workers. It is because such ventures interrogate the ruling definitions of literature that they cannot so easily be incorporated by a literary institution quite happy to welcome Sons and Lovers, and even, from time to time, Robert Tressel” (216). I am grateful to Peter Hitchcock for calling this passage to my attention.

20. This again underscores the fact that Dabindu represents a heterogeneous, dynamic collectivity, rather than a synchronous collective class subject. I am indebted to Kumudini Samuel for drawing my attention to the point that the changing volunteer editors of the periodical (who are not identified or credited within the later editions) are affiliated with a range of different feminist and human rights groups in Sri Lanka. I am also grateful to her for her insights into the unwritten history of ideological battles and left-party politics (such as those of the RMP/Revolutionary Marxist Party) associated with the convening of the initial organizational group. I am also indebted to Kumari Jayawardena, Fara Haniffa, Sepali Kottegoda, and Ranjith Perera for energizing conversations—especially for their responses to a version of this paper discussed at the Social Scientists’ Association, Colombo, Sri Lanka, on 16 June 2005.

21. See also Rosa’s “Strategies of Organisation and Resistance: Women Workers in Sri Lankan Free Trade Zones” in “Capital & Class,” 27–35.

22. It is a matter of record that some of Dabindu s worker education projects were funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) during the 19982000 period. However, I find it particularly interesting to note that commemorative histories and “self-representations” of Dabindu tend to omit the specific details of the group’s transformation into an NGO; consider, for example, H. I. Samanmalie’s “The Birth of Dabindu” (more on this presently). For now I wonder if we can read this omission symptomatically. Many theorists of globalization have commented on the structural limitations of the “NGOization of feminism.” Others have celebrated global NGO culture as the rise of international civil society. However, bracketing the polarizing debates for a moment, we do well to bear in mind the complex prehistories of different NGOs such as Dabindu. We might question, for example, what brought these groups together before they became NGOs. What existing structures are NGOs built upon? For more commentary on NGOs and left politics see Deborah Mindry’s “Nongovernmental Organizations, ‘Grassroots,’ and the Politics of Virtue.” Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri share a slightly different critical viewpoint, even as they characterize NGOs as Empire’s “instruments of moral intervention” (35–38). By contrast, for an illuminating reading of the categorical demonizing of NGOs—especially as this stance relates to the contemporary political scene in Sri Lanka—see Kumari Jayawardena’s “The NGO Bogey” published in Pravada (n.d.).

23. “Motherland is in the tiger’s mouth. Wake up, all ye Sinhalese!”

24. The direct translation would be “(drops of) sweat.” For a brief history of the founding of Dabindu refer to the sixteenth commemorative issue of the paper. H. I Samanmalie, “The Birth of Dabindu,” Dabindu 16.1 (Sept. 2000): 2–3. All translations from the Sinhala are my own, but I am extremely grateful to Professor Victor Hapuarachchi, formerly of Colombo and Kelaniya universities, for taking the time to review my work.

25. The JVP (Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna; in English, “People’s Liberation Front”) needs to be distinguished from the Trotskyite old left parties in Sri Lanka. The JVP, it has been argued, once was the voice of the Sinhala-educated unemployed. It is now, since the 1970s insurgency, perhaps better defined as a pseudo-Marxist party in the service of Sinhala nationalism. It continues to be routinely and incorrectly described as “Marxist” in newspapers. For a more nuanced reading of this complex phenomenon (which cannot possibly be contained within a footnote), see the chapter on “The JVP and the Ethnic Question” in Kumari Jayawardena’s Ethnic and Class Conflict in Sri Lanka. For a general historical overview of Sri Lankan Marxist parties, see also Robert Kearney’s “The Marxist Parties of Ceylon,” in Radical Politics in South Asia, ed. Paul R. Brass and Marcus F. Franda (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973), 401–439.

26. Actually, the direct translation of this title would be “Women’s Creative Production/Making.” It is worthwhile pointing this out, taking into consideration also the general project of feminism within which these worker-activists were engaged. For the native speaker, it is impossible also, not to hear the phrasing “building of women” in “stri nirmana.” I am grateful to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak for always listening with “a translator’s ear for difference.” It should also be noted here that the Stri nirmana booklet is the collaborative effort of certain Dabindu writers and feminist activists of the Women’s Education and Research Center in Kandana.

27. Organizing Committee, “Preface,” Stri nirmana (Ja Ela: Dabindu Collective, 1988).

28. Anonymous, “Apatada nidahasak natha,” Dabindu 13.6 (Feb. 1998): 1.

29. See “Mulu bara janathava matha” (The entire weight lies upon the people), Dabindu 13.3 (Nov. 1997): 1. A pinstripe-suited, seven-headed G7 monster rides upon the shoulders of the World Bank—personified as riding the “common man”—while sticking a sharp stick (labeled in English “condition-alities”) into his rear end. The man is shown sweating in his attempt to grab the money bag (labeled $) that the WB dangles just out of his reach. (It seems particularly interesting that here Dabindu represents “The People” in neocolonialism in terms of a sarong-clad man. See also Anonymous, “The Question of Child-Workers in Bangladesh,” Dabindu 13.3 (Nov. 1997): 2, and 8; and Anonymous, “Bangladeshi Women’s Rights,” Dabindu 12.10 (July 1997): 2.

30. Sandya Hewamanne and James Brow, “If They Allow Us We Will Fight,” Pravada 6.11 (2001): 22.

31. See, for instance, Deepika Thrima Vitana, “Chintanaya nidahas nam” (Thinking freedom), Dabindu (June 1994): 4; Charuni Gamage, “Nonimi ginna” (The unstoppable fire), Dabindu 10.12 (March 1994): 6; Deniyaye Arosha, “Mavu kusin nova mihi kusin SiriLaka upan viru daruvane …” (O heroic children born not of mother’s womb, but of the earth of Mother Lanka …), Dabindu (April/May 1998): 6; D. W. Vijayalatha, “Vathu kamkaru striya” (The tea plantation worker-woman), Swarna P. Galappaththi, “Vathu kamkaru striya” (The tea plantation worker-woman), Stri nirmana (Ja Ela: Dabindu Collective, 1988), 27, 37; A. C. Perera, “Padada pathum” (Vagabond wishes), Dabindu (June 1994): 5; S. Udayalata Menike, “Mai Dinaya” (May Day), Dabindu (April 2000): 6.

32. The word “garment” here is shorthand for “garment industry.” It would properly be aghalum karmanthaya, but here the colloquial term is rendered from English into phonetic Sinhala. It is important to consider the “universality” of this lexicalization across South and Southeast Asia, where “garment” always “means” garment industry or garment factory, lexicalized into the mother tongue.

33. These ellipses occur in the poem.

34. See the proposal advocating decentralization and devolution. Sri Lankan Branch, Committee for Democracy and Justice in Sri Lanka, “Let’s Defeat the Call for War and Push for a Parliamentary Solution,” Dabindu (Sept./Oct. 1995): 3.

35. Deepika Thrima Vitana, “Chintanaya nidahas nam” (Unthinking freedom), Dabindu (June 1994): 4.

36. The direct translation would actually involve a subjunctive mood construction: “if … were”: “If there were freedom of the act-of-thinking.”

37. Although in Olsen’s case the narrative also contains a critique of the ameliorative structures of civil society. Consider for example the episode in which Emily is sent to the convalescent home.

38. K. G. Jayasundera Manike’s “Jivithaya” (Life) is also quoted in its entirety in Rosa’s “The Conditions and Organisational Activities of Women in Free Trade Zones: Malaysia, Phillippines, and Sri Lanka, 1970–1990,” as well as in A Review of Free Trade Zones in Sri Lanka, ed. Sunila Abeyesekera, trans. Punyani Gunaratne (Ja Ela: Dabindu Collective, 1997).

39. Davies, Tony. “Unfinished Business: Realism and Working-Class Writing,” in The British Working-Class Novel in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jeremy Hawthorne (London: Edward Arnold, 1984), 125.

40. I am thinking here of a piece of cultural anthropology where the author, through a painstaking analysis of the language of presidential speeches, reports, and interviews with factory bosses, finds the free-trade-zone women workers to be unwittingly complicit with a nationalist development agenda. It is over and against the ideological construction of “woman” in these official texts of historiography that I attempt to read the literature of these factory workers in an attempt to approach how woman as subject for history is imagined. See Caitrin Lynch’s “The ‘Good Girls’ of Sri Lankan Modernity: Moral Orders of Nationalism and Capitalism,” Identities 6.1 (1999): 55–89.

41. Somalatha, “Kalapayen vathukarayata” (From zone to plantation), Dabindu 13.1 (Sept. 1997): 8–9.

42. This phrasing, of course, calls to mind Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. I would argue that such a systematization (of “dominant” cultural logic) is only possible by bracketing other residual aesthetic practices and ideologies of form such as those discussed here. Throughout it has been my objective to show that the calculus changes if we consider heterogeneous examples of working-class literature from across the gendered international division of labor. Also see Spivak’s crucial last chapter on “Culture” in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (312–421).

43. It is true that Hardt and Negri do not use the term “proletarian” as a contemporary descriptor of working-class relations in the new international division of labor. As they put it, “the proletariat is not what it used to be, but that does not mean it has vanished. It means, rather, that we are faced once again with the analytical task of understanding the new composition of the proletariat as a class” (Empire, 52). And yet, they don’t consider the feminization of labor or the history of social movements of the global South as having an impact on their analysis and our collective endeavor in any pressing way. Elsewhere in Empire they maintain that ethico-political agency has shifted from the proletarian collective subject to “the poor.” See for instance the lyrical passage that postulates that “once again in postmodernity emerges in the blinding light of clear day the multitude, the common name of the poor. It comes out fully in the open because in postmodernity the subjugated has absorbed the exploited. In other words, the poor, every poor person, the multitude of poor people, have eaten up and digested the multitude of proletarians. By that fact itself the poor have become productive” (158). Furthermore, according to Hardt and Negri, the signs of life that register proletarian solidarity are those that are intelligible as world historical “events”: “The fact that the cycle as the specific form of the assemblage of struggles has vanished, however, does not simply open up to an abyss. On the contrary, we can recognize powerful events on the world scene that reveal the trace of the multitude’s refusal of explanation and that signal a new kind of proletarian solidarity and militancy” (54).

44. Consider, for example, Annanya Bhattacharjee, Ashim Roy, V. Chandra et al., “A New Path for Indian Labor? International Solidarity in the Age of Outsourcing?” The Cornell Global Labor institute convened this forum on Nov. 30, 2004, bringing union members of the New Trade Union Initiative in India together with a coalition of U.S. unionized workers (affiliated with Jobs with Justice) to discuss prospects for dialogue, solidarity, and effective compromises on a global scale.

45. Some readers might point to the fact that these names are rather decidedly ethnically marked. My point is that Olsen does not feel the need (as Ibarro does in her plea) to qualify that these workers are “American-born” and therefore entitled to consideration.

46. I am thinking here, for example, of Gloria Anzaldúa’s amazing poem “Cihuatlyotl, Woman Alone” as one of the many works that negotiate the complex figuration of an individual/collective Chicana subject in different ways.

47. Mahasweta Devi, Dust on the Road: The Activist Writings of Mahasweta Devi, ed. Maitreya Ghatak (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2000), 211.

48. Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 82–83.

49. E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory (London: Merlin, 1978), 235.

50. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “From Haverstock Hill Flat to US Classroom, What’s Left of Theory?”

51. See Spivak’s foreword to Other Asias (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 2.

52. Devi, Dust on the Road, 89.

53. See, for example, the appendix to Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (423431), where she relates the concepts of allegory, irony, and parabasis to ethical practice as well as to the political interpretation of narrative.

54. Partha Chatterjee, The Present History of West Bengal (New Delhi: Oxford, 1997), 94.

55. The specific critic is not named by Spivak, who brings up this criticism in her “Translator’s Preface,” Imaginary Maps, xxvi.

56. The reference is to Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 127.

57. See Spivak’s translation: “and her face, in sleep within the depths of this fairy tale ravine, looks most fulfilled” (Devi, Fairytale, 104; emphasis mine).

58. Cynthia Enloe, “Women Textile Workers in the Militarization of Southeast Asia,” in Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 409.

59. An internationalism that also struggles to remain alive in grassroots organizations such as the Sinhala-Tamil rural women’s front, and in fora like Rural Women (Gami Kantha), a newspaper dedicated to foreign domestic workers.

60. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 959. Emphasis mine.

1. Bessie Head, A Woman Alone, ed. Craig Mackenzie (Oxford: Heinemann, 1990).

2. My understanding of the “practice of diaspora” owes much to Brent Hayes Edwards’s study The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, which illuminates with exacting precision the historical agency of literature as creative practice even as it expands the provenance of the Harlem Renaissance beyond Anglophone texts and authors. Edwards’s exemplary case is black periodical cultures and the dialogism inherent in traditions of black internationalism.

3. Rob Nixon calls attention to how the designation “colored” emerges through the layered negations of state speech: “The population Registration Act of 1950, for example, defined a ‘colored’ as someone ‘who in appearance is obviously not White or Indian and who is not a member of an aboriginal race or African tribe’” (Nixon, Homelands, Harlem, and Hollywood [New York: Routledge, 1994], 104).

4. Most biographies begin with the dramatic disclosure of Head’s place of birth—Fort Napier Mental Hospital, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Her mother, Bessie Amelia Emery, struggled with mental illness for the greater part of her adult life and had been institutionalized by her family before. And yet, too often, key facts of the story are omitted or reordered to produce the most sensationalist (colonial and or anticolonial) retelling of the origins story. Certain versions conjure Bessie Amelia Emery as a defiant transgressor of the Immorality Act. Some have her incarcerated in an asylum as a result of her actions. Head’s father drops out of calculus entirely.

5. He goes so far as to suggest that Head in effect exploits a privileged subject position: “Ironically enough, this feeling [of exclusion] is less pronounced in South Africa, where the colored writer enjoys the psychological support of what has become a large national minority” (Lewis Nkosi, Tasks and Masks [Essex: Longman, 1981], 101).

6. Ernest Allen Jr. gives us an itinerary of the many creative mistranslations that W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of “double consciousness” undergoes. His section devoted to sociologists’ pathologizing readings of the “dualism of the soul” and “schizoid twoness” of the mulatto is subtitled “a mini-history of a misconception.” See Ernest Allen Jr., “Du Boisian Double Consciousness: The Unsustainable Argument,” Massachusetts Review 43.2 (2002): 217–253. His overall argument elaborates a shift in meaning in Du Bois’s own lexicon between the publication dates of “Strivings of the Negro People” and “Conservation of the Races.” I am grateful to Donna Murch for calling this article to my attention. As a side note—certainly an “exorbitant supplement”—perhaps, panning outward to the political and rhetorical ploys of the 2008 U.S. presidential election, we might consider representations (including self-representations) of Barack Obama’s “conciliatory politics” via reductivist readings of his “biracialism.”

7. Nixon, Homelands, Harlem, and Hollywood, 112.

8. Anthony O’Brien, Against Normalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 235–236.

9. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Diasporas Old and New: Women in the Transnational World,” Textual Practice 10.2 (1996): 257–258.

10. “History is a process without a subject,” Althusser tells us, and leaves it at that. Bessie Head’s work interrogates identity (and the individual subject) in the interest of making way for the historical agency of other collectivities.

12. I am thinking here of Freud’s essay on “The Uncanny,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1961-), 17:217–252.

13. See Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 122.

14. My chapter 3 contains an elaboration of the ethico-political figure of speech interferences via the reading of Olsen’s Yonnondio.

15. “The analysis that I am undertaking is psychological. In spite of this it is apparent to me that the effective disalienation of the black man entails an immediate recognition of social and economic realities. If there is an inferiority complex, it is the outcome of a double process:—primarily, economic;—subsequently, the internalization—or, better, the epidermalization—of this inferiority” (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 11).

16. Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

17. While there are some poststructuralist readings of Marx that at least approach the question of Marx’s counterintuitive “humanism” via the question of abstract labor, most Marxist scholars of critical race theory as well as subaltern studies construe the concept of abstract labor as a problematic stumbling block rather than a productive contradiction. Upon this score, see, for example, Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, 154–173, especially 170. Dipesh Chakrabarty approaches the question slightly differently. He begins with the following premise: “Abstract labor may thus be read as an account of how the logic of capital sublates into itself the differences of history” (655). But questioning his own line of thinking, he then goes on to show how Marx’s own thoughts may be made to resist an idea central to Marx’s critique of capital—that “the logic of capital sublates differences into itself.” See Chakrabarty, “Universalism and Belonging in the Logic of Capital” in Public Culture. The difference between Chakrabarty and Spivak is that Spivak would make a case for the potential for an enabling, or just, use of abstraction in Marx: “His analysis must use the same method that makes the object of his analysis an evil: abstracting out individual heterogeneity into a quantitative measure of homogeneous labour so that calculation may be possible” (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Speculations on Reading Marx After Reading Derrida,” in Post-structuralism and the Question of History, ed. Derek Attridge et al. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987], 30–62). Also see Keenan, “The Point Is to (Ex)change It: Reading ‘Capital,’ Rhetorically,” in Fables of Responsibility.

18. Some find abstract labor’s quintessential expression/realization in “computational thinking”—the hallmark of the information age. See, for example, Hardt and Negri’s readings of labor power and abstract labor. Theirs is a revisionary project that admittedly set out to question “old notion(s) … common to classical and Marxian political economics.” However, I would distinguish Bessie Head’s stagings of labor power and her own processes of “defetishizing the concrete” (illustrated as they are in working-class narratives of food production and agriculture) from Hardt and Negri’s axioms. Their revisions pose abstract labor as a phase leading up to the contemporary period of immaterial labor: “In previous periods, however, the tools [for abstraction] generally were related in a relatively inflexible way to certain groups of tasks; different tools corresponded to different activities…. The computer proposes itself, in contrast, as the universal tool, or rather as the central tool, through which all activities might pass. Through the computerization of production, then, labor tends toward the position of abstract labor” (Empire, 292). In Hardt and Negri’s lexicon it is immaterial labor—abstract labor gets subsumed under this general rubric—that “seems to provide a potential for a kind of spontaneous and elementary communism” (294). For a diametrically opposed reading of the structural and structuring power relations of computational thinking see David Golumbia, The Cultural Logic of Computation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

19. “Hauntopology” builds on Derrida’s concept of “ontopology”: “(By ontopology we mean an axiomatics linking indissociably the ontological value of present-being [on] to its situation, to the stable and presentable determination of a locality, the topos of territory, native soil, city, body in general)” (Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International [New York: Routledge, 1994], 82).

20. “This militancy makes resistance into counterpower and makes rebellion into love” (Empire, 413). The turn to love in Head’s A Question of Power recalls but also perhaps revises Hardt and Negri’s concluding theme. At the close of Empire, they propose that the future of a radically resignified communist militancy might find an emblematic figure in Saint Francis of Assisi. On the other hand, John McClure’s insightful reading of this moment poses a challenge to secular thinkers like Hardt and Negri. He calls our attention to what is overlooked in certain grounding ethical assumptions of postsocialist alternatives. See Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 23. McClure lists A Question of Power as a postcolonial example of “postsecular fiction.” Figures representing a vague, untethered, ahistorical, “partial” Buddhism (along with bits and pieces of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Greek mythology) recur in A Question of Power—even as they are ultimately dispelled and displaced by the credo of literary internationalism. I return to this point in the coda to this chapter.

21. Jacqueline Rose, “On the ‘Universality’ of Madness: Bessie Head’s A Question of Power,” Critical Inquiry 20 (1994): 415.

22. See Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1978), and Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 19.

23. The subheading is also a play on “capitalism and schizophrenia”; see Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).

24. See for example, Njabulo Ndebele, Rediscovery of the Ordinary (Johannesburg: COSAW, 1991), 37–57, and Kelwyn Sole, “‘The Deep Thoughts the One in Need Falls Into’: Quotidian Experience and the Perspectives of Poetry in Postliberation South Africa” in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 182–205.

25. Sanders reads Keenan’s Fables of Responsibility against and through the politics of South African history in “Reading Lessons,” Diacritics 29.3 (1999): 3–20.

26. Nixon, Homelands, Harlem, and Hollywood, 112–117.

27. Translation modified. “The universality of man manifests itself in practice in that universality which makes the whole of nature his inorganic [unorganisch] body” (Karl Marx, Early Writings [London: Penguin, 1974], 328). See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 76, n. 101: “Since Nature is exactly not ‘inorganic,’ there can be no doubt that unorganisch means ‘without organs.’”

28. Admittedly, Head has a complicated relationship with organized feminism.

29. See for example Arturo Escobar, who historicizes the concept of “development” from the 1950s to the 1970s but also asks us to consider it as discourse: “Even those who opposed the prevailing capitalist strategies were obliged to couch their critique in terms of the need for development, through concepts such as ‘another development,’ ‘participatory development,’ ‘socialist development’ and the like” (Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995], 5).

30. In “Notes from a Quiet Backwater II” Head qualifies the scope of her “earlier work,” including her three novels. “Having defined the personal, my work became more social and outward-looking” (Bessie Head, A Woman Alone, 78).

31. Quoted in Gillian Eilersen, Thunder Behind Her Ears (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995), 268.

32. “I decided to record the irrelevant” (Bessie Head, Serowe, Village of the Rain Wind [London: Heinemann, 1981], 67).

33. Bessie Head, Tales of Tenderness and Power (Johannesburg: Donker, 1989).

34. My thinking here is indebted to Julie Livingston. See her brilliant study of an ethics of care charted against and through concepts of Tswana physiology and personhood: Julie Livingston, Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).

35. Bessie Head, A Gesture of Belonging: Letters from Bessie Head, 1965–1979, ed. Randolph Vigne (London: Heinemann, 1991), 27.

36. Bessie Head, When Rain Clouds Gather (Oxford: Heinemann, 1969).

37. See Bessie Head, A Woman Alone, 72–73.

38. Ketu H. Katrak, “From Pauline to Dikeledi: The Philosophical and Political Vision of Bessie Head’s Protagonists,” Ba Shiru 12.2 (1985): 26–35; Annie Gagiano, Achebe, Head, Marechera: On Power and Change in Africa (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000).

39. See Gagiano, Achebe, 136.

40. Katrak, “From Pauline to Dikeledi.”

41. I hope to continue with this work in an extended study based on this chapter. For now I have had to bracket this comparative reading. See also O’Brien, Against Normalization, 176–214. I am grateful to Rob Nixon for suggesting Anthony O’Brien’s work to me.

42. He is of course, speaking of wealth flowing from primary producers to industrialized countries. See Chakravarthi Raghavan, Recolonization (London: Zed Books, 1990), 21. See also Deborah Mindry, “Nongovernmental Organizations, ‘Grassroots,’ and the Politics of Virtue,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 26.4 (2001): 1188–1211.

43. Eilersen, Thunder Behind Her Ears, 96.

44. See the section titled “Rural/Indigenous” in Spivak, “From Haverstock Hill Flat to US Classroom.”

45. “‘What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing—with a rather shaky hand—a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write’” (Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language [New York: Pantheon Books, 1972], 17).

46. Emphasis mine. Livingston proposes that “the notion of building is an important concept in Tswana personhood” (15). Head’s concepts of building/erasing as well as the part-objects of women’s cooperative voluntary labor might also be read against and through the critical ethnographer/historian’s commentary: “[building or self-making, she observes,] is the primary means through which the promise of liberal individualism (manifest in education, entrepreneurship, wage work) can be harnessed to the making of social selves.”

47. “[S]ome people become attached to leaflets and prospectuses, others to handwriting facsimiles or typewritten copies of unobtainable books; and certainly periodicals can form the prismatic fringes of a library,” considers Benjamin. And yet the subjectivity of the collector seems to overwrite the subjectivity of the collection in Benjamin’s case. Whereas in Head’s, the subjectivity of the collective/collection takes precedence. Bessie Head would have had a lot to say Walter Benjamin. She, like him, was an ephemerist. A sustained consideration of this comparison might lead us to think about two very different ideological underpinnings of post-Marxist scholarship—demarcated as “postcolonial” versus Frankfurt School. See Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Shocken Books), 66.

48. Quoted in Carlo Coppola, ed., Marxist Influences and South Asian Literature (Delhi: Chanakya, 1988), 11. Here I am indebted to Coppola’s translation of the Hans version.

49. See, for example, this instructive moment in the text where the character Camilla comments patronizingly to Elizabeth: “In our country culture has become so complex, this complexity is reflected in our literature. It takes a certain level of education to understand our novelists. The ordinary man cannot understand them…. And she reeled off a list of authors, smiling smugly. It never occurred to her that those authors had ceased to be of any value whatsoever to their society—or was it really true that an extreme height of culture and the incomprehensible went hand in hand?” (79).

50. The reference is to Bruce Robbins, Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

1. David Lodge, Nice Work (London: Secker and Warburg, 1988).

2. See Bruce Robbins’s insightful reading of this moment in Lodge’s novel in which he calls our attention to how the discursive construction of an “international popular” generally falls short of international solidarity or action. Bruce Robbins, “The Sweatshop Sublime,” PMLA 117.1 (2002): 84–97.

3. Joel Johnson, “1 Million Workers. 90 Million iPhones. 17 Suicides. Who’s to Blame?” Wired 28 (Feb. 2011); Web version 15 March 2011.

4. As Hardt and Negri put it, “in other words, (potential) revolutionaries in other parts of the world did not hear of the events in Beijing, Nablus, Los Angeles, Chiapas, Paris, or Seoul and immediately recognize them as their own struggles. Furthermore, these struggles not only fail to communicate to other contexts but also lack even a local communication, and thus often have a very brief duration where they are born, burning out in a flash. This is certainly one of the central and most urgent political paradoxes of our time: in our much celebrated age of communication, struggles have become all but incommunicable” (Empire, 54). Writing in 2000, their call was to understand the global implications of local strikes and uprisings whose specific meanings could not be translated into different contexts.

5. “Fatal Fire in Bangladesh Highlights the Dangers Facing Garment Workers,” New York Times, 26 Nov. 2012: A4.

6. “There is an interesting paradox in the name assembly movement. No doubt we are speaking of a movement that spans a great geopolitical range, even if this expanse is discontinuous. A product less of contagion than of resonance, the occupation of public spaces by protesters signifies a broader phenomenon that has global dimensions in the assembly of its differential particularities. Movement thus refers to this process of resonance, the way that distinct events merging from their social-historical ground come to recognize themselves in one another without evading their particularity” (Stathis Gourgouris, “Assembly Movements and the Deregulation of the Political,” PMLA 127.4 [2012]: 1004).

7. The reference is to a classic title in working-class studies: Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

8. Étienne Balibar’s recent work on the “disjunctive synthesis” of the social in Marx is a painstaking elaboration of the problems and possibilities. I am grateful to him for finding some time to answer my questions following his address, “Marx’s Two Discoveries: A Disjunctive Synthesis and Its Current Relevance” (keynote speech, “World of Capital: Conditions, Meanings, Situations” conference, Columbia University, New York, 29 April 2011).

9. But not all countries and cities are valued equally for projects of historical recovery or as case studies for epistemology. Similar philosophical worldviews, when arising from different spaces in the international division of labor, pose a problem for debates in Western Marxism. That is to say, the semantics of the social as rooted in the illiberal bases of shared responsibility and duty are more often than not dismissed as backward, feudal, or precapitalist. Chakrabarty’s Rethinking Working-Class History, however, ultimately asks us to consider an ethics of responsibility, rather than equal rights, constitutionalism, and historical precedent as a foundation for socialist class politics. Both Hoggart’s and Chakrabarty’s are risky investments in culture. But reading them together allows us to pose a question: What does it mean to speak of (a) working-class culture in a global and unequal world without resorting to narrative hierarchies of cultural relativism and historical difference?

10. See for instance, Shehzad Nadeem, Dead Ringers: How Outsourcing Is Changing the Way Indians Understand Themselves (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

11. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012).

12. This is an argument for the ethical recuperation of world literature. The phrase in quotation marks is from David Damrosch. But the call for “distant reading” comes from Franco Morretti. To gain a comprehensive understanding of the world we are told we must dispense with our penchant for close reading. Systemic thinking of the sort proposed by Moretti, then, calls for a species of “distant reading … where distance is a condition of knowledge.” Distance, here, translates into a worldview that is a priori against the optics of national historiography. As a process and method, distant reading privileges the vantage point of social history over literary close reading. But “distance,” in Moretti’s vision, is also counterposed as the antonym to a discursive assemblage of loosely related opposed meanings—among them, “local,” “rooted,” “personal.” Lodge’s feminist critic, perhaps, models this distant reader of the world-as-a-global system—“one and unequal,” but a system nonetheless.

13. As should be clear by now, my understanding of the uses of the literary is deeply indebted to the thinking of Raymond Williams. The beautiful turn of phrase that lends itself to my theme is his way of describing the ephemerality of history and “the social” as receding presence, sometimes glimpsed at in literature through figures at the edge of semantic availability. See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, 128.

14. Terese Agnew, “Portrait of a Textile Worker: Art Quilt Project by Terese Agnew,” accessed at http://www.tardart.com/html/ptw.php on 2 Feb. 2010. This representation of the iconic South Asian figure is based on a snapshot of a Bangladeshi garment factory worker. Agnew’s mixed-media portrait is based on a 2002 photograph taken by Charles Kernaghan, the director of the National Labor Committee, on an undercover visit to a factory in Bangladesh. I am grateful to Richard Miller for calling my attention to this artist’s work and for gifting me the poster version.

15. Ethel Brooks’s analysis of the symbolic economy of transnational protest recalls us to the limitations of boycott politics: “Everyday forms of violence in garment producing sites and communities along with everyday battles to organize women working in garment factories throughout the world, are marginalized when they cannot be represented or sold to a consuming Northern audience” (Brooks, “Ideal Sweatshop? Gender and Transnational Protest,” in Sweatshop USA, ed. Daniel Bender and Richard Greenwald [New York: Routledge, 2003], 283).