Volume 13, Issue 1 - Editors’ Forum: Thinking the Global with Literature. Guest-edited by Heather H. Yeung

This article presents an original methodology of world literature that draws upon ecocritical thought to rescale and recenter literary networks. Working particularly to unsettle the center-periphery model of world systems theory, an ecocritical study of world literature turns to more-than-human scales and forces. It asks that we take our cues from world-shattering or world-shaping ecological events and work outward to track how these events influence cultural and literary life across national, regional, imperial, and even planetary boundaries. After proposing assemblage as a primary technique for conducting an event-based literary study, the article demonstrates this methodology in a culminating analysis of literary representations, through various genres and forms, of the 1883 Krakatoa volcanic eruption.

This article examines methods of tracing affiliations across transpacific critiques through a reading of Leanne Dunic’s To Love the Coming End and Ruth Ozeki’s The Tale for the Time Being . The article proposes that, rather than reproducing a nation-bound framing of the 2011 earthquake off the Pacific coast of Tōhoku that envisions it as a solely Japanese crisis, Dunic’s and Ozeki’s works explore what it would mean to read the earthquake and its aftermath as a transpacific event. It argues that these works facilitate new relations between national cultures and the global, suggesting that, by narrating the earthquake and recovering its transpacific resonances, both works recover and write transcultural links that are obscured in nation-bound narratives of events. By self-reflexively commenting on this process of creative forms of transpacific intimacy, Dunic’s and Ozeki’s works directly address the potential for literary narratives to implicate individuals from disparate nations in a global, historical, narrative of events

Through a reading of Teju Cole’s novel Open City (2011), this article argues that the exposure of black migrants constitutes the principal organizing conceit of global literary culture and knowledge production. The novel’s protagonist, a Nigerian emigre named Julius, is faced with ceaseless scrutiny as he traverses urban spaces in the US, Europe, and West Africa, meeting other migrants. In staging Julius’ encounters with others, the novel allegorizes a structure of racialized subjection continuous with the modern history of western epistemology and glaringly present in the contemporary. Yet it also provides grounds for a recursive ethic of opacity, which Julius eagerly endorses. The article surveys critical studies of race, migration, infrastructure, and world literature, in addition to Cole’s writings on photography. The aim is not only to uncover the logics of racialization at play in the enactment of culture, but also to conceive of culture itself as a historical infrastructure of privation and control.

As a growing number of contemporary American novelists take the world and its socio-cultural and geopolitical complexity as their subject matter, the contemporary novel’s form and sense of worldliness are shifting. Twenty-first century US fiction challenges normative models of the world proposed by theories of cosmopolitan relationality by projecting fragile worlds of strife and trauma, in which violence accompanies geopolitical turbulence. In these novels, discourses around human security—the everyday security needs of vulnerable populations—are increasingly prominent. Accordingly, contemporary US fiction often incorporates within its geopolitical imaginary such issues as human rights, humanitarian interventions, development, and how life is disabled by prejudice, civil war, scarcity, and health or other crises. In this essay, I range across a number of works by contemporary American novelists such as Dave Eggers, Jennifer Egan, Denis Johnson, Dana Spiotta, and Bob Shacochis in which state failures as well as human and geopolitical security concerns impact on the form given to the world by these novelists. In their novels, narratives concerning human security as well as threats to geopolitical stability produce transnational geographies in which global interconnections and circulation intensify feelings of insecurity.

Since its establishment more than a decade ago, the cultural and political debate on Afropolitanism has been characterized by several different positions. In particular, the Afropolitan opposition to any kind of essentialism (Eze 2014) has been counterweighed by the necessity of a connection to “knowable African communities, nations and traditions” (Gikandi 2011, 9). This debate has been reproducing a typical oscillation of postcolonial theory and criticism between the celebration of hybridity (Bhabha 1994) and the interpretation of postcolonial texts as “national allegories” (Jameson 1986). At the same time, Afropolitanism appears to be related to a more recent phenomenon, which has been defined as “national failure” in political analysis (Zartman 1995; Rotberg 2004) and “failed-state fiction” in literary criticism (Marx 2008). The latter sheds a different light on Afropolitanism, by showing its advantages and its limits both on a national and transnational level. In view of this, Afropolitan literature – including the paradigmatic works by Helon Habila (2002, 2007, 2010) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2006, 2013) here analyzed – appears to be based on the persistence of “old names,” or categories, in an uneven but fruitful coexistence with the “new” ones (Eze 2016).

In 2016, Duke University press published a book-length dialogue between two leading literary and cultural critics, Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller, Thinking Literature Across Continents , which provides the starting point for this discussion forum. Particularly pertinent both for this forum and, more generally, special issue, in the fifth chapter of Thinking Literature Across Continents , Ghosh examines the possibilities of “more than global” as a lens through which to assess the possibilities not only of literary but of all thought processes. Here, five scholars – Rob Wilson, Sandeep Banerjee, Frank Schulze-Engler, Zahi Zalloua, and Ming Xie – meditate on the potential of Ghosh‘s “more than global” thesis. Finally, Ghosh responds to these meditations in the light of his ever-developing thesis.