Death of a Discipline

The conferees find that our national security, stability and economic vitality depend, in part, on American experts who have sophisticated language skills and cultural knowledge about the various areas of the world. An urgent need exists to enhance the nation’s in-depth knowledge of world areas and transnational issues, and fluency of U.S. citizens in languages relevant to understanding societies where Islamic and/or Muslim culture, politics, religion, and economy are a significant factor.

Therefore, the conferees have included an increase of $20,478,000 for the Title VI/Fulbright-Hays programs to increase the number of international experts (including those entering government service and various professional disciplines) with in-depth expertise and high-level language proficiency in the targeted world areas of Central and South Asia, the Middle East, Russia, and the Independent States of the former Soviet Union. A portion of these funds is intended to enhance the capacity of U.S. higher education institutions to sustain these initiatives over time. The conferees encourage the creation of distance learning initiatives to provide more universal access to language training, summer language institutes abroad, one-on-one language tutoring to accelerate student progress to the highest levels of proficiency, engaging the language resources of local heritage communities where appropriate, and increased collaboration with the Title VI language resource centers, the centers for international business education and research, and the American overseas research centers with a focus on the least commonly taught languages and areas and underrepresented professional disciplines. (communication to Area Studies institutes holding Title VI grants)

At this point, to withdraw in-depth language learning and close reading from Comparative Literature when it moves to the global South is to decide that the only relationship the United States can have with those areas is based on considerations of security, that the critical intimacy of literary learning must remain isolationist in the Euro-U.S.

3. The statistics may have changed slightly in the intervening years, but the general picture remains the same.

4. George E. Rowe, “50th Anniversary of Comparative Literature” and Timothy Bahti, “Impossibility, Free,” Comparative Literature 51 (1) (Winter 99): 1, 62. Bahti is right, Premises is a fine book, and the times are near Fascist, more so than in 1999. The solution is not to go back to an exclusivist Eurocentric comparative literature spawned in the late forties.

5. “Versions of the Margin: J. M. Coetzee’s Foe Reading Defoe’s Crusoe/Roxana,” in Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson, eds., Consequences of Theory: Selected Papers of the English Institute, 1987–88 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 154; the lecture was delivered two years earlier.

6. Charles Wagley, Area Research and Training: A Conference Report on the Study of World Areas (New York: Columbia University, n.d.), 1; emphasis mine.

7. These sentiments are expressed in Margaret Talbot, “The Way We Live Now: 11–18–01; Other Woes” New York Times Magazine, November 18, 2001, 23, in the wake of September 11.

8. The groundbreaking energy of Orientalism by Edward W. Said (New York: Pantheon, 1978) tends to conflate Oriental Studies, Area Studies, and Comparative Literature. Enabled by its initiating impulse, we now make these distinctions.

9. The Birmingham metaphor is taken from the title of a book by one of the most brilliant students at the first Cultural Studies group: Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (New York: Routledge, 1992 [1987]). There are more differences than similarities here. These differences have been charted by Lawrence Grossberg in Dancing in Spite of Myself: Essays on Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 191–218.

10. For “ontopologist,” see Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, tr. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 82. In a back issue of The New Yorker (June 23 & 30, 1997), Salman Rushdie refers to all the literatures of India not in English as “parochial.”

11. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Translation as Culture,” parallax 6 (1) (Jan.-Mar. 2000): 21.

12. When I make this point, I often hear “But everyone can’t learn all the languages!” Just as the old Comparative Literature did not require learning “all the European languages,” so also does this new version of Comparative Literature not ask you to learn all the world’s languages. The only requirement is that, when you work with literatures of the global South, you learn the pertinent languages with the same degree of care. As you go toward the already available resources of Area Studies, learn the language with literary depth rather than only social scientific fluency.

13. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, tr. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 54; the next reference is to 67.

14. “Righting Wrongs.” In Nicholas Owen, ed., Human Rights and Human Wrongs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

15. As usual, Raymond Williams’s system of residual-dominant-emergent-archaic-preemergent gives me the best handle on mapping culture as process (Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977], 121–127). This is why I began with an account of academic memos, a mundane record of the dominant appropriating a social emergent.

16. 1999 Report of the Mayor’s Task Force on CUNY, chaired by Benno C. Schmidt Jr., entitled, “The City University of New York: An Institution Adrift.” The passage quoted is from 13.

17. Mehdi Charef, Le Thé Au Harem d’Archi Ahmed (Paris: Mercure de France, 1983). The phrase is an Arabic transformation of the theorem of Archimedes worked out by a young North African immigrant boy in the low-income housing projects in the outskirts of Paris. This is a typical example of how the underclass imagination swims in the deep waters of metropolitan survival.

18. Derrida, “Force of Law,” in Acts of Religion, tr. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 249: translation modified.

19. What follows is my own interpretative digest of Melanie Klein, Works (New York: Free Press, 1984), vols. 1–4. Giving specific footnotes is therefore impossible. The details may also not resemble orthodox Kleinian psychoanalysis.

20. Spivak, “Translation as Culture,” 13.

21. For the definition of irony I am using here, see Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 301.

22. Jacques Derrida, The Monolingualism of the Other, tr. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 57–58.

23. Maryse Condé, Heremakhonon (Boulder: Three Continents, 1985), 24.

24. Maryse Condé, En attendant le bonheur (Heremakhonon) (Paris: Seghers, 1988), 12.

25. Derrida has an uncharacteristically hardheaded comment about the poor souls who must cross to Europe to seek refuge or escape from poverty: “Today, on this earth of humans, certain people must yield to the homo-hegemony of dominant languages. They must learn the language of the masters, of capital and machines; they must lose their idiom in order to survive or live better” (Derrida, Monolingualism, 30).

26. Michael Gomez, Pragmatism in the Age of Jihad: The Precolonial State of Bundu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 22–23.

27. Saskia Sassen, discussion after Keynote, Conference on Comparative Literature in Transnational Times, Princeton University, March 23–24, 2000.

28. 28. Volkman, Crossing Borders, ix.

29. J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (New York: Penguin, 1982), 51.

30. Mary Louise Pratt, “Comparative Literature and Global Citizenship,” in Bernheimer, ed., Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University. Press, 1995), 58.

31. Coetzee, Waiting, 30; the next quoted passage is from 81.

32. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Psychological Works, tr. Alix Strachey et al. (New York: Norton, 1961–), 17:221, hereafter cited in the text as UC, with page numbers following.

1. A word about Franco Moretti’s brilliant and witty essay about training for new global encyclopedias, although it claims to describe the entire burden of a global comparative literature (Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review n.s. 1 [Jan.–Feb. 2000]: 54–68). Such training relates to both assuming the subjectship of humanism and controlling undecidability. As he admits, it depends on the close reading practiced by national literary scholars on the periphery. Should our only ambition be to create authoritative totalizing patterns depending on untested statements by small groups of people treated as native informants? There is something disingenuous about using Goethe, Marx, and Weber as justification for choosing world systems theory to establish a law of evolution in literature, especially since Marx and Engels were celebrating the in-itself-dubious achievements of the bourgeoisie and the world market. Imperialism is supposed to have brought the novel everywhere. Is the novel form identical with “literature”? I think the real problem with this identification, between writing good reference tools for the novel form on the one hand and for the entire discipline on the other, is a denial of collectivity. The others provide information while we know the whole world. Why should the (novel in the) whole world as our object of investigation be the task of every comparativist, who should give up on language learning? Is it not trivially true that the word “comparative” in “comparative literature” is more a distinguishing mark than a signifier? How can “close reading” be the hallmark of the United States “(in all its incarnations, from the new criticism to deconstruction)” (57), when the new Moretti-style comparativist must rely on close reading from the periphery? Should one point out that now may be the exactly wrong moment to follow the youngish Marx at his most totalizing? Here are Tom Nairn’s words about Marx and “world literature”: “the world market, world industries and world literature predicted with such exultation in The Communist Manifesto all conducted, in fact, to the world of nationalism” (Nairn, The Break-up of Britain [London: Verso, 1981], 341). And indeed, this is nationalism, U.S. nationalism masquerading as globalism. Manifest destiny carried the United States hallmark before close reading did.

The world systems theorists upon whom Moretti relies are now producing sinocentric systems that are equally useless for literary study—that must depend on texture—because they equate economic with cultural systems. In fact, most close reading comparativists do not only read a few texts. They spread out and rely on good reference instruments such as Moretti will provide. They consult secondary texts based on other peoples’ close readings, as Moretti will. Where they can closely read, they see the “criticism” provided by the encyclopedist as necessarily superficial and unsatisfactory. The real problem is the claim to scopic vision: “I will dwell, as on some delicious game, on this method that makes anything appear at will in a particular stretching…. I will go so far as to say that this fascination complements what geometral researches into perspective allow to escape from vision. How is it that nobody has ever thought of connecting this with … the effect of an erection? Imagine a tattoo traced on the sexual organ ad hoc in the state of its repose and assuming its, if I may say so, developed form in another state” (Jacques Lacan, “Of the Gaze as Objet petit a,” in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, tr. Alan Sheridan [London: Hogarth Press, 1977], 87–88). For a more extended consideration of Moretti’s essay, see Jonathan Arac, “Anglo-Globalism?” New Left Review 16 (July/Aug.); 35–45.

2. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, tr. George Collins (New York: Verso, 1997). Hereafter cited in text as PF, with page reference following.

3. Stuart Hall, “The Multicultural Question,” in Barnor Hesse, ed., Un/settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, “Transruptions” (London: Zed Books, 2000), 209–241. On the other side, see Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and Robert D. Kaplan, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (New York: Random House, 2002).

4. This is an important moment in Husserl for Derrida. In Adieu, for example, it is precisely through this that he connects Husserlian phenomenology and Levinasian ethics: “a certain interruption of phenomenology by itself already imposed itself upon Husserl, though he did not, it is true, take note of it as an ethical necessity…. This became necessary in the Cartesian Meditations precisely when it was a question of the other; of an alter ego that never makes itself accessible except by way of an appresentational analogy and so remains radically separated, inaccessible to originary perception…. Levinas himself considers this interruption of self to be a ‘paradox’ … [that] ‘requires a description that can be formed only in ethical language” (Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, tr. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999], 51–53). We are in the arena, therefore, not of the stoppage of politics but of the relationship between ethics and politics that is crucial to Derrida’s work.

5. We are not speaking of “good” politics here, but a politics that wrenches itself away from the certainties of the self. Such projective teleopoiesis requires the inclusion of “evil laughter.” I am not about to literalize this into a predictive future. I would simply like to suggest that this phrase, in which both words are important, may indicate how far we go from our high serious certainties when we undertake the imaginative task of moving out of ourselves.

6. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harper, 1989), 84. Hereafter cited in text as RO, with page reference following.

7. Rosalind Morris is helping me wade through the large body of critical writing on this, although it does not touch the question of subaltern cultural formations.

8. It is at least as old as Friedrich Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (New York: International Publishers, 1972), first published in 1884.

9. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Imperatives to Re-Imagine the Plan et/Imperative zur Neuerfindung des Planeten, ed. Willi Goetschel (Vienna: Passagen, 1999).

10. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing, tr. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1978), 297.

11. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (New York: Penguin, 1999).

12. Benjamin Conisbee Baer has an excellent analysis of the Saatchi brothers’ role in the art world, with examples like “the defenses of artistic expression manifested at the Brooklyn Museum in response to Giuliani’s censorious threats … to ‘Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection,’” and “funding student places at art schools,” all of which he calls “the dominant producing the emergent” (private communication).

13. “Righting Wrongs,” in Nicholas Owens, ed., Human Rights and Human Wrongs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

14. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Post-Coloniality (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1993); excerpt in Joan Vincent, ed., The Anthropology of Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).

15. In his lecture series “The Politics of the Governed,” Partha Chatterjee has suggested that the part of the postcolonial polity that was kept out of the colonial subject production in colonialism proper has now found a political style that bypasses Enlightenment expectations of a civil society. His examples are fascinating, but I think, first, that they will not qualify as disrupting a global polity; and, second, that the lineaments of an ab-use of the Enlightenment (see his note 12) are already present there (Partha Chatterjee, “The Politics of the Governed,” Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures, Columbia University, November 2001).

16. I prefer this translation of Médecins sans frontières rather than the usual “doctors without borders” because their humanitarian mission makes it juridicopolitically easier for them to cross frontiers from above than for their beneficiaries to cross from below. I have no moral position on this. I merely wish not to celebrate the juridicopolitical transformation (translation?) of frontiers into borders in the English translation.

17. Roman Jakobson, “Concluding Statement,” in Thomas Sebeok, ed., Style in Language (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), 370.

18. By “transnational” I mean “U.S.”—ironically—as do the authors of “Constructing Global Feminism”—without irony (Valerie Sperling, et al., “Constructing Global Feminism: Transnational Advocacy Networks,” Signs 26 [4] [Summer ’01]: 1155–1186).

19. Gertrude Stein, “The Mother of Us All” (1946) in Last Operas and Plays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 80–81.

20. The Stream of Life, tr. Elizabeth Lowe and Earl Fitz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 3. Cited in Hélène Cixous, “Contes de la différence sexuelle,” in Mara Negrón and Anne Berger, eds., Lectures de la difference sexuelle (Paris: des femmes, 1994), 62, where she herself speaks of the fear of beginning.

21. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” in Shelley’s Critical Prose (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), 29.

22. Luce Irigaray, Democracy Begins Between Two (London: Athlone Press, 2000).

23. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, tr. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); Étienne Balibar, “Ambiguous Universality,” Differences 7 (I) (Spring ’95): 54, 61.

24. Joan C. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993), x. The next passage is from 2–3.

25. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India: 1885–1947 (Delhi: Macmillan, 1983), 310–311.

26. Jon Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens: Studies in Rationality and Irrationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 111.

27. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and the Secret Sharer (New York: Bantam, 1969), 9.

28. This is no more a cliché (“Kurtz’s degradation is an example of the familiar narrative cliché of the European who ‘goes native’,” J. Hillis Miller, “Joseph Conrad: Should We Read Heart of Darkness?,” in Others [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001], 129) than it is a cliché to “justify” the novel as literature by claiming that it is “literature in the modern Western sense” (114, 115): “‘Literature’ as we Westerners know it is a radically overdetermined historical product belonging only to Western societies” (113).

29. I am grateful to Robert Folkenflick for this insight.

30. “Out there…. On the edge of the world, in flaming deserts, mangled jungles, squelchy swamps, missionaries save the needy. Out there, the darkness. But for me, for Du, In Here, safety. At least, for now. Oh, the wonder, the wonder” (Bharati Mukherjee, Jasmine [New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1989], 21).

31. Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North, tr. Denys Johnston-Davies (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1970); hereafter cited in text as SM, followed by page reference. Mahasweta Devi, “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha,” in Imaginary Maps, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Routledge, 1995), 95–196; hereafter cited in text as IM, followed by page reference. Jennifer Wenzel’s “‘The Same Book Many Times’: Nostalgia, Africa, and Some Versions of the Third World” (paper presented at panel on “Who Needs the Third World?,” annual convention, Modern Language Association, 2001) makes this important comment: “Undoing the coevalness of Europe and the Congo erases the material links between the two places—Congo rubber in Dunlop tires, Congo coltan in the cellphone in your pocket—and transforms the Congo into a primitivist psychological playground, an ahistorical state of mind, a measure of the First World’s distance from its own pre-history.” Another kind of connection that must be foreclosed.

32. Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” in Hopes and Impediments (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 4.

33. Henry Staten, the first reader of this book in its manuscript form, suggests a reading of Heart of Darkness structured around the interruptions of Marlow’s narrative. This could be another indication of the intertextuality of that text with this. In Heart of Darkness, in Staten’s reading, the structure of interruption expresses the tensions in the question of collectivity that arise between Marlow and his companions on the boat around the issue of the bad loner whom he narrates. Although, as Staten knows, this reading engages only the Europeans, when cobbled to my reading of Salih, it can create an interesting exchange.

34. “Surmounted time.” I am reading this as a figuration of Levinas’s notion that “memory,” “thought … anterior to the world to which it is posterior … is precisely the achievement of this ontological structure … [of] a home … the feat of having limited a part of this world and having closed it off” (Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, tr. Alphonso Lingis [Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969], 169–170). Such a thought displaces the distinction between tradition and modernity by inscribing both in the phenomenology of the subject.

35. I am grateful to Joseph Massad for guiding me through the Arabic text.

36. The best nontechnical account of such a way of reading is still Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” in Image/Music/Text, tr. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press, 1988), 79–124.

37. Salih is a male author commendably grappling with the problem of tradition and modernity through the figuration of gender. In the last pages of “Moving Devi” (in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Other Asias [Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming]) I have indicated a failure of a comparable understanding of collectivity in Pankaj Butalia’s Moksha.

38. For a-chrony, see Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 66–68.

39. Ihar cheye hotem jodi arab-bedouin/payer toley bishal moru digontey bileen … (If only I’d been Arab-Bedouin rather than what I am/With the great horizon-kissing desert under my feet …), a line from a famous poem by Rabindranath Tagore learned as a child, long before I had any informed idea about Bedouin culture, already established them in the formative imagination of a Bengali child as the epitome of a free life. For a similar yet different appropriation of the idea of the nomad for theory, see El-Mokhtar Ghambou, “Nomadism and Its Frontiers” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2000).

40. For a provocative treatment of cultural imperatives, see Greg Urban, Metaculture: How Culture Moves Through the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 145. A reading imperative such as this assumes cultural change, forever around the corner.

41. Social Text 15 (Fall ’86): 65–88.

42. For other uses of this imperialist topos, see my discussion of Kipling, glossed by the historical account in David Arnold’s work, in Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 157–160.

1. In Wai Chee Dimock’s excellent piece, “Literature for the Planet” (PMLA 116 [1] [Jan. ’01]: 173–188), for example, the argument is that a classic of European literature may become timeless because people all over the world may feel moved by it at other times. The “Muslim” who seems to indicate planetarity is the great Muslim European Averröes. The contrast is between Osip Mandelstam’s eclectic Dante and T. S. Eliot’s Latin Dante. This good argument for the ahistoricity of literature, which echoes Shelley’s powerful argument in A Defence of Poetry, is not the effortful epistemic shift I am imagining. Dimock’s erudite essay remains confined to Euro–U.S. debates. The effort to learn the detail of other histories (the Gandhi–Irwin Pact for A Room of One’s Own) is dismissed as “an almost automatic equation between the literary and the territorial,” this identified with the “premise [of] the influential work of Benedict Anderson” (175). I am hoping for a collaboration with the social sciences (represented here by Anderson, say), so that both Comparative Literature and Area Studies can be transformed and prosper. Undergirding this joint venture is my prayer for planetarity. Insofar as she claims poiesis over istoria, I am in complete solidarity with Dimock.

2. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, eds., The Spivak Reader (New York: Routledge, 1996), 226.

3. Luce Irigaray, “Plato’s Hystera,” in Speculum of the Other Woman, tr. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 243–364.

4. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).

5. For the mismatch between morphology and narrative, see Jacqueline Rose, “Dora—Fragment of an Analysis,” in Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986), 27–47.

6. Frederick Crews, “Conrad’s Uneasiness—and Ours,” in Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Critical Method (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 42–62, offers a psychoanalytic reading of Heart of Darkness that relates to Conrad’s life and literary motives. He quotes Dr. Bernard C. Meyer, who reads Conrad’s heroes as “postponing their long-awaited return to a mother” (47). It is not clear to me that he is using specifically Freudian vocabulary when he calls “Marlow’s adventure” “an uncanny self-unfolding” (55). I am not qualified to read the textuality of Conrad’s life. And I am not suggesting that the book is a representation of the unconscious, assuming that there is an unconscious to be represented. I am suggesting that Conrad may share the permissible narratives of European gentlemen at the turn of the nineteenth century, and that Freud’s assigning of a definitive content to the uncanny is historical. Another permissible narrative offers the book its aporia: to render justice or fail to do so through a lie that is necessary to protect a woman, Kurtz’s Intended.

7. In his otherwise brilliant and well-documented essay on Heart of Darkness, J. Hillis Miller misrepresents Achebe’s essay by only “quoting” one passage from it twice (“Conrad was a bloody racist”), with no footnote reference to this complex and powerful piece. He also strongly implies that Achebe is incapable of reading the book “as literature, as opposed to [taking it] as a straightforwardly mimetic or referential work that would allow the reader to hold Conrad himself directly responsible for what is said as though he were a journalist or a travel writer” (Miller, “Joseph Conrad: Should We Read Heart of Darkness?,” in Others [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001], 108, 111, 123). By reading Schlegel, Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, Conrad, Yeats, Forster, Proust, Derrida, and de Man in the name “of a radical otherness mediated in multiple ways by literary works” (2), Miller almost justifies Moretti’s claim that the close readers read a small canon. It is not my position that the radically other can be mediated; but my position—that the radically other is impossibly figured, perhaps—I have developed repeatedly in my text. The point here is that, in spite of the carapace of multiple ironies, the passages I quote “mean,” as the passages indicating irony “mean” for Miller. And Achebe’s question is precisely that: Can we call a “classic” a work that requires such “meanings” of Africa in order for its ironies to operate? That question may be answered in many ways, each entailing a politics. But Achebe should not be dismissed without reference as an incompetent reader of a “‘literature [that] as we Westerners know it is a radically overdetermined product belonging only to Western societies” (113; I have quoted this sentence in the previous chapter as well)! That is part of the problem in Conrad’s text that we are discussing. In order to make its fictive case about an indeterminate position about imperialism, Africa must nonetheless be figured as inhuman, scary because it may not be.

8. Donald E. Pease, “US Imperialism: Global Dominance Without Colonies,” in Sangeeta Ray and Henry Schwarz, eds., A Companion to Postcolonial Studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 203–220.

9. Joan Scott, “Experience,” in Judith Butler and Joan Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political (New York: Routledge, 1992), 22–40.

10. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Teaching for the Times,” in Red Thread (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, forthcoming). As the Lexicon tells us, the second word is a much better derivation. What I was pointing at is that in contemporary metropolitan identitarianism, the distinction had collapsed. In this book, I have gone on to suggest that liberal multiculturalism, as uneasily espoused by the Bernheimer collection, allows the ethics of alterity to be overwritten as a politics of identity. I should mention that my knowledge of Arabic, classical Greek, and Spanish is minimal. I hope my attempt at “reading” them will show that we need not wait for expertise to question translation as the final solution or to valorize distant reading. For Arabic, I read painstakingly with a superb reader, not just a native speaker. For Spanish and classical Greek, I made the first attempt; my first reader corrected me. Such support must be sought in the academic community.

11. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, tr. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 14.

12. Wu Hung, “Public Time, Public Portrait, and the Renewal of Urban Monumentality,” “Photography and the Birth of a Modern Visual Culture of Fragments,” and “Reinventing Exhibition Spaces in Post-Cultural Revolution China,” conference on “Public Criticism and Visual Culture,” Hong Kong University, June 6–10, 2002. Leo Ou-fan Lee and Liuo Ping-hueh presented brilliant discussions of spectacular nineteenth- and early twentieth-century verbal and visual texts focused toward correcting views expressed in Benedict Anderson’s latest book, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, South East Asia, and the World (New York: Verso, 1998). The new Comparative Literature would find comparable efforts in other colonized countries, in India (there are parallels), and in North and sub-Saharan Africa, and make visible patterns in colonial production by the colonized middle class that would, incidentally, correct Anderson.

13. Charles Tilly, “How Empires End,” in Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen, eds., After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building; The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires (New York: Westview, 1997), 2.

14. Paper presented at conference on “Ten Years of Post-Soviet Historiography,” Ost und Sudosteuropa-Institut, University of Vienna, September 2001, and under consideration at American History Review.

15. Gregory Massell, The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia, 1919–1929 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974).

16. Hamid Dabashi, Truth and Narrative: The Untimely Thoughts of ‘Ayn Al-Qudat Al-Hamadhani (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1999), 109.

17. With the opening of the Oil Road, we will see a quick restructuring of Central Asian economies to accommodate aggressive financialization. Women’s microcredit initiatives without infrastructural involvement become a part of this. For my discussion of planetarity in tribal Islam, see Imperatives to Re-Imagine the Planets/Imperative zur Neuerfindung des Planeten, ed. Willi Goetschel (Vienna: Passagen, 1999).

18. For Muslim Europe, Reinhart Dozy, Spanish Islam, tr. Francis Griffin Stokes (London: Chatto and Windus, 1913); H. A. R. Gibb, The Influence of Islamic Culture on Medieval Europe (Manchester: John Rylands Library, 1955); and Jean Lacam, Les Sarrazins dans le haut moyen-age français (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1965) represent the tip of the iceberg, indicating the monumental, the secondary, and the orientalist tendencies. For Islamic cosmopolitanism, see George Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981), and The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West with Special Reference to Scholasticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univresity Press, 1990). I thank Hamid Dabashi for his help in compiling this brief checklist.

19. I hasten to add that these are excellent provocative essays. I am suggesting that they be supplemented by other histories. For the moment, the important examples may be Emily Apter, “Comparative Exile: Competing Margins in the History of Comparative Literature,” in the Bernheimer volume, 86–96; and Aamir R. Mufti, “Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism and the Question of Minority Culture,” in Paul A. Bové, ed., Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 229–256.

20. In Deniz Kandiyoti, ed., Gendering the Middle East: Emerging Perspectives (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 1–27.

21. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Acting Bits/Identity Talk,” Critical Inquiry 18 (4) (Summer 1992): 770–773; “Ghost-Writing,” Diacritics 25 (2) (Summer 1995): 78–82.

22. Spivak, “Acting Bits,” 793–794; “Three Women’s Texts and Circumfession,” in Alfred Hornung and Ernstpeter Ruhe, eds., Postcolonialism and Autobiography (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 21–22.

23. Diamela Eltit, The Fourth World, tr. Dick Gerdes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995). Hereafter cited in text as FW, with page reference following.

24. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Unmaking and Making in To the Lighthouse,” subsequently included in a revised version in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987), 30–45.

25. Miller, Others, 273–274.

26. Philip Foner, “Introduction” in José Martí, Our America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), 24.

27. The OED’s first index entry for Latin America is from 1890, the U.S. State Department’s “Reciprocity Treaties with Latin America,” but such a term enters official use when it has been around for a little while, of course. For its itinerary, see Angel G. Loureiro, “Spanish Nationalism and the Ghost of Empire,” forthcoming in the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies.

28. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Love, Cruelty, and Cultural Talks in the Hot Peace,” in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 329–348.

29. Marx had spoken of this combination in connection with foreign trade in Capital, tr. David Fernbach (New York: Vintage, 1981), 3: 344–347.

30. For mochlos, see Jacques Derrida, “Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties,” in Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 1–34.

31. Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (New York: Verso, 1983).

32. I am told that the “re” in “repartir” does not necessarily have the same force as the “re” in “redistribution.” This does not interfere with the idea that the blood rushes back to the heart and is then shared out—a figure of exchange.

33. I have discussed this in Spivak, “From Haverstock Hill Flat to U.S. Classroom, What’s Left of Theory?” in Judith Butler et al., eds. What’s Left of Theory?: New Work on the Politics of Literary Theory, (New York: Routledge, 2000), 1–40.

34. Jeffrey Belnap and Raúl Fernández, “Introduction,” in José Martí’s “Our America” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 6.

35. One such poem is discussed by Julio Ramos in “Migratories,” in Julio Rodríguez-Luis, ed., Re-reading José Martí: One Hundred Years Later (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 53–58.

36. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Signet, 1995 [1903]); hereafter cited in text as SB, with page references following.

37. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, tr. Walter Kaufmann (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963), 145. Cornel West has tracked this passage to Emerson in The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 144.

38. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).

39. Wole Soyinka, Arms and the Arts: A Continent’s Unequal Dialogue (Cape Town: University of Cape Town, 1999).

40. Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in African Society (London: Zed Books, 1987); V. Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). If in the case of Martí we had to circumvent the metaphor of woman-mother-earth proactively, concatenating Du Bois with feminism is a more labor-intensive task. The Black European is not only class-fixed but gender-fixed as well. For deep background articulated, see Brent Hayes Edwards, “One More Time,” Transition 89 (2001): 88–107, a review of David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), which discusses Du Bois’s sexuality in some detail.