Articles – World Literature

‘All that is solid falls from the sky: Modernity and the Volume of World Literature.’ Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 9.1 (February 2022), pp.1-25.

This article pits two conceptions of modernity—that of the Marxist humanist Marshall Berman and the ANT (Actor-Network Theory) sociologist Bruno Latour—against each other, exploring the implications of each for postcolonial and world literary criticism. The article begins by explaining “modernity” in the terms of both theorists, focusing on the “split” between subject and object, text and world. It then identifies a wider Latourian turn in postcolonial and world literary studies that has emerged in response to the prescriptively structural approaches of groups such as the WReC. In response, the article offers in turn a Latourian reading and then a structural critique of the Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s fifth novel, The Sound of Things Falling (2011, trans. 2013), probing their possibilities and limitations. In conclusion, it suggests Berman’s more expansive definition of modernist practice as one way in which postcolonial and world literary criticism might more effectively mediate between structural critique and close reading. Read more.

‘Terrestrial Realism and the Gravity of World Literature: Joe Sacco’s Seismic Lines.’ Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 8.3 (September 2021), pp.301-322.

Through a close reading of Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land (2020), a graphic novel about the struggle of the Dene people in Canada’s Northwestern territories, this article shows how Sacco effects a “peripheral realism” that draws the systemic continuities of different phases of colonial modernity into view. The article then describes Sacco’s “terrestrial realism,” which combines his peripheral realism with the dialectical participation of the reader as well. Finally, in a concluding theoretical discussion, I consider how the practice of drawing allows us to think through a response to modernity’s combined and uneven development that is both materialist and decolonial at the same time. Although the former typically insists on singularity and totality, and the latter promotes a contradictory plurality, the peripheral and terrestrial realisms of Paying the Land suggest a way for theorists of world literature to find a point of methodological solidarity that is both in and against capitalist modernity’s gravitational force. Read more.

‘Against the System: Postcolonialism, Humanism, and the Humanities.’ Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings 20.2 (2021), pp.113-128.

This essay argues for a postcolonial humanism and a humanist postcolonial studies that is rooted in both the institutional and methodological space of the disciplinary humanities. It argues that for decades two opposing intellectual positions have long been consolidated through the elision of a third: on the one hand, there are the materialists who read the world through an international division of labour, and on the other, the theoretically anti-humanist and poststructuralist postcolonial scholars (a position almost always epitomized in Homi Bhabha). Meanwhile, the humanists remain ‘sentimentally’ committed to an underlying universalism, dismissed by postcolonial critics for their essentialism and materialist critics for their liberalism, all in spite of the fact that ‘humanism’ had been a keyword used by leading anti-colonial writers and activists throughout the twentieth-century to summon the sense of collective agency that underpinned mass movements for decolonisation. Read more.

‘Terrestrial Humanism and the Weight of World Literature: Reading Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black.’ Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 8.1 (January 2021), pp.1-23.

Through an extended reading of Canadian author Esi Edugyan’s novel, Washington Black (2018), this article aims to revise and reinsert both the practice of close reading and a radically revised humanism back into recent world literature debates. I begin by demonstrating the importance of metaphors of weight to several theories of world literature, before tracking how, with the same metaphors, Edugyan challenges Enlightenment models of earth, worlds, and humanism. The article draws on the work of several theorists, including Emily Apter, Katherine McKittrick, Steven Blevins, Edward Said, and Frantz Fanon, to argue that “terrestrial humanism” might provide a framework from which to develop a grounded, politicized, earthly practice of close reading world literary texts. The aim is not to arrive at a prescriptive or “heavy” methodology, but to push instead for a reading practice that remains open to the contrapuntal geographies, affective materialisms, and radically humanist politics of literary texts themselves. Read more.

‘A Conversation with Elleke Boehmer’. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 51.6 (December 2015), pp.737-748.

Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature at the University of Oxford, is the author of several novels, including Screens Against the Sky, Bloodlines and Nile Baby, and a collection of short stories entitled Sharmilla and Other Portraits. Her most recent novel, The Shouting in the Dark, was published by Sandstone Press in July 2015. Set between South Africa and the Netherlands in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, it tells the story of Ella, a young girl growing up in a claustrophobic family household dominated by her damaged and often drunken father. In this conversation, which took place at the University of Oxford in August 2015, Boehmer discusses her reasons for writing this, her latest novel, its imagery and themes, and how it relates to her previous literary work. Read more.

‘Critiquing Global Capital and Colonial (In)Justice: Structural Violence in Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913) and Economic Imperialism (1920).’ Journal of Commonwealth Literature 50.1 (November 2014), pp.45-58.

By drawing on theories of structural violence and applying them to Leonard Woolf’s first novel, The Village in the Jungle (1913), this article argues that the fictional work allowed Woolf to think through certain political, legal, social, and cultural issues that would later inform and enhance his extensive engagement with, and critique of, global capital and colonial and international judicial systems. Whilst some critics have argued that The Village in the Jungle’s perspectival infiltration into the daily lives of colonized subjects operates as an extension of colonial discourse, this article argues that in fact it is this unusual if not, at the time of its publication, unique perspectival orientation that enables the novel’s interrogation of structural violence. Written from a victim-oriented perspective, the novel excavates the varying layers of structural violence as they are spread both socially and also geographically to show how the colonial administration and its legal system are complicit with, if not actively facilitating, the exploitation of Ceylon by the structures of global capitalism, as well as highlighting the ramifications of the unevenly developing capitalist economy that slowly sutures the island into these cross-national networks. The article concludes by arguing that the novel’s excavation of structural violence is directly related to, and lays important foundations for, Woolf’s thought on exploitative imperialisms and the international judicial system, The League of Nations (of which he was an architect) — as articulated in his later polemic work, Economic Imperialism (1920). Read more.

‘“Simple as the black letters on this white page”: Nadine Gordimer’s Grey Politics in No Time Like the Present (2012).’ Études Littéraires Africaines (ELA) 38, Special Issue: South Africa and Post-Apartheid Literature (1994-2014) (July 2014), pp.83-92.

Nadine Gordimer's last novel, No Time Like the Present (2012), revolves around the central theme of the conflict between the pursuit of political commitment, on the one hand, and the weariness or disillusionment that politics induces, on the other. This conflict is a hallmark of the socio-political landscape in post-apartheid South Africa. By comparing Gordimer's final novel to her first, The Lying Days (1953), and drawing on Fredric Jameson's work on national allegory, this article demonstrates how No Time Like the Present describes and critiques, in a self-reflexive manner, the changing relationships between literature and politics in a South African context. The complex political landscape of the post-apartheid era, no longer divided between black and white—between pro- and anti-apartheid—has been formally reconfigured through a narrative ambivalence that also deconstructs the barriers separating public life from private life. The novel pushes to the extreme the limits of the allegorical constraints imposed by the political context in order to reveal that nothing is as "simple as black letters on a white page." The result is a formal ambivalence that expresses the absence of a clear post-apartheid political direction— a difficult situation that I describe as the novel's "gray zone." Read more.

‘The Kipling Scrapbooks and the End of Empire.’ The Kipling Journal 88.353 (March 2014), pp.21-31.

The Kipling Scrapbooks show how Kipling made available a lexicon that newspapers, and both popular and high culture more broadly, would use to speak about the British Empire. Of course the way in which this vocabulary is used is always evolving and shifting, being transformed through the forms of satire, critique, resistance, and so on. But the fact that these divergences nevertheless take something of Kipling’s vast oeuvre as their starting point, even when misquoted, or even misattributed, demonstrates the influence of Kipling on twentieth-century thought about the British Empire, and empire in general. Read more.

‘Spaces of Domination and Resistance: King Solomon’s Mines (1885), Ula Masondo (1927), and Literary Geographies of South Africa.’ HARTS & Minds: The Journal of Humanities and Arts 1.2 (October 2013), pp.1-17.

This article is concerned with the geography of Johannesburg at the turn of the twentieth century as produced by William Plomer’s novella, Ula Masondo (1927), one of the earliest literary explorations of that city. This text operates in reaction to, and as a subversion of, the generic conventions of the imperial romance; a genre which is embodied by the novel that is generally perceived by critics to have established the prototype for that genre: Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885). The imperial romance depicted the South African landscape as both empty and thus easily penetrable for the imperialist, and as embedded with mineral wealth available and accessible for profitable resource extraction. The romance was involved in the production of an idealised geography of South Africa for the metropolitan imagination, writing the presence of emerging urban spaces such as Johannesburg out of its cartographic representations. By inverting a number of the key genre-defining tropes, Plomer’s Ula Masondo (1927) shifts the focus of this body of colonial literature from the empty space of the South African veld to the infrastructural place of the Transvaal’s mining-centre turned industrialised city: Johannesburg. This spatial re-configuration of the South African landscape, from rural idyll to bustling urban environment, enables certain polemic and anti-imperial qualities of Plomer’s novella to come to the fore, conceptualising Johannesburg’s cityscape as a site of racial and economic contestation. Ula Masondo formally deconstructs the confident, linear narratives of the romance, a shift in narrative style and construction that exposes the socio-ideological borders of the romance and maps the new geographical and political terrain of the emerging urban environment. Read more.

‘Olive Schreiner’s Spatial Narratives: Resisting Patriarchy and Empire from the Margins.’ Politics of Place, Issue 01: Maps and Margins (August 2013), pp.25-39.

This article explores how Olive Schreiner’s self-conscious meta-narratives illustrate a powerful historiographical awareness that challenges patriarchal and imperialist grand narratives. She acknowledges her debt to metropolitan intellectual discourses while emphasising their limitations. The spatial disjunction of her location in the South African periphery allows her to unravel the narratives that cloak the realities of a violent, male-dominated colonialism. Through close readings of her novel, The Story of an African Farm, alongside other essays and writings, the article argues that Schreiner was a “resistance writer” many decades ahead of her time. Read more.