scholarly journals World Literature and the Problem of Postcolonialism

2021 ◽  
pp. 57-74
Author(s):  
Lorna Burns
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
A Priori ◽  
World System ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Bruno Latour ◽  
Jacques Ranciere ◽  
The World ◽  
Literature Theory ◽  
Research Collective

This essay identifies in the materialist strand of world literature theory, especially Pascale Casanova and the Warwick Research Collective, a reliance upon a priori structures (the world-system) and prioritisation of the literary registration of inequality. By contrast, I contend, world-literary critics who wish to maintain the dissident spirit of postcolonialism ought to demonstrate a shared equality. By reference to the philosophies of Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière, this essay sets out the case for an alternative to world-systems critique: one that maintains literature’s potential for creating new forms of resistance, dissent, and, crucially, equality.

METAPHOR OF «DESTROYED WORLD» IN THE POLITICAL PROJECTION OF WORLD-SYSTEM ANALYSIS

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-86
Author(s):  
V.E. BAGDASARYAN ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
System Analysis ◽  
Political Process ◽  
World System ◽  
World Order ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
The World ◽  
Global Catastrophe ◽  
Systemic Nature ◽  
World Center

The purpose of the article is to present an analysis of modern global political processes characterized by the unipolarity of the destruction of the former world system. The current situation of political transit is assessed as a failure of technologies of controlled chaos and transition to a state of turbulence. The basic approach of the research was the methodology of world-systems analysis. The article provides arguments that substantiate the systemic nature of the crisis of the World Center, the problematic nature of the restoration of the unipolar system of the world order. Four scenario perspectives of further development of the world political process are considered: 1. restoration of the leadership legitimacy of the World Center; 2. change of the core of the world system; 3. transition of a state of chaos to a global catastrophe; 4. the establishment of a system of a multilateral world of civilizations. It is indicated that the West-centered world-system has paradoxically diverged at some stage from the values of the Western civilization itself. And it is obvious that the transition to a multilateral world should be linked to the basic civilizational values of the world-systems, their differences from the values of other communities. As a result, practical recommendations are presented for the activity steps of building a system of multilateral world order as a desirable prospect for overcoming the state of turbulence and preventing a new geopolitical hegemony.

Jewish American Writing and World Literature

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saul Noam Zaritt
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Global Market ◽  
Global Network ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
Global Circulation ◽  
Isaac Bashevis Singer ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Literature Theory

Jewish American Writing and World Literature studies Jewish American writers’ relationships with the idea of world literature—how they place themselves within its boundaries, outside its purview, or, most often, in constant motion across and beyond its maps and networks. Writers such as Sholem Asch, Jacob Glatstein, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anna Margolin, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley all responded to a demand to write beyond local Jewish and American audiences and toward the world, as a global market and as a transnational ideal. At the same time, their work is deeply informed by an intimate connection to Yiddish, a Jewish vernacular with its own global network and institutional ambitions. This book tracks the attempts and failures, through translation, to find a home for Jewish vernacularity in the institution of world literature. Beyond fame and global circulation, world literature holds up the promise of legibility, in which a threatened origin becomes the site for redemptive literary creativity. But this promise inevitably remains unfulfilled, as writers struggle to balance potential universal achievements with untranslatable realities, rendering impossible any complete arrival in the US and in the world. The exploration of the translational uncertainty of Jewish American writing joins postcolonial critiques of US and world literature and challenges Eurocentric and Anglo-American paradigms of literary study. In bringing into conversation the fields of Yiddish studies, American Studies, and world literature theory, the book proposes a new approach to the study of modern Jewish literatures and their implication within global empires of culture.

Technologies of Critique

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Willy Thayer
Keyword(s):  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Bruno Latour ◽  
Critical Practice ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Critique—a program of thought as well as a disposition toward the world—is a crucial resource for politics and thought today, yet it is again and again instrumentalized by institutional frames and captured by market logics. This book elaborates a critical practice that eludes such capture. Building on Chile's history of dissident artists and the central entangling of politics and aesthetics, the book engages continental philosophical traditions, from Aristotle, Descartes and Heidegger through Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, and in implicit conversation with the Judith Butler, Roberto Esposito, and Bruno Latour, to help pinpoint the technologies and media through which art intervenes critically in socio-political life.

Notes from the Editors, November 2019

2019 ◽  
pp. c2-64
Author(s):  
The Editors
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
World Economy ◽  
World System ◽  
Modern World ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Monthly Review ◽  
The World ◽  
Immanuel Wallerstein

buy this issue Immanuel Wallerstein, the celebrated world-systems theorist and longtime contributor to Monthly Review and Monthly Review Press, died on August 31, 2019. Wallerstein first achieved international fame with the publication in 1974 of his The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (the first in a four-volume masterwork on the Modern World-System. We pay tribute to Wallerstein in this new issue of Monthly Review.

On Maoist Conceptualizations of the Capitalist World System

1979 ◽  
Vol 80 ◽  
pp. 806-837 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Systems Approach ◽  
World System ◽  
State Power ◽  
World Market ◽  
Market Force ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The World ◽  
Capitalist World

One of the less emphasized strengths of a world systems approach to national societies is its critical comprehension of the limited possibilities of ruling groups transforming their societies into ones of socialist relations. One limit placed on the part by the whole, on nation states by a capitalist world market, is the impossibility of building “true” socialism. The imperatives of the world market force state power-holders to act in a capitalist manner, that is, to organize their society for competition in world exchange.

Polysystems Redux: The Unfinished Business of World Literature

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 272-281
Author(s):  
Debjani Ganguly
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Unfinished Business ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Systems Model ◽  
Literary Space ◽  
The World

AbstractIn responding to Muhsin al-Musawi’s two-part essay on the Arabic Republic of Letters, this essay proposes a rethinking of the world systems model in global literary studies in terms of a polysystems framework. Rather than trying to fit literary worlds—ancient, premodern, modern—within a single Euro-chronological frame culminating in a world capitalist systems model—where the non-European worlds appear as invariably inferior—it is worthwhile to see them as several polysystems with variable valences within a heterotemporal planetary literary space. This approach offers a comparative reading of the emergence of three language worlds—Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic—and urges us to rethink the totality of the world literary space as a diachronic field that generates overlapping, multiscalar, comparative histories of literary polysystems.

A Critique of ‘Literary Worlds’ in World Literature Theory

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 354-372
Author(s):  
Ryan Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Literary Systems ◽  
Literature Theory ◽  
East West

Abstract Recently, critics of world literature such as Alexander Beecroft, Eric Hayot, and Haun Saussy have argued that a multitude of possible literary worlds make up the world of world literature. Literary worlds theory provides a richer and more relativistic account of how literary production and analysis work than do similar models such as Franco Moretti’s and Pascale Casanova’s world literary systems. However, the theory runs into two difficulties: it downplays the socio-historical situation of the critic and the text; and it has difficulty accounting for the cross-world identity of characters and how logically inconsistent worlds access one another. To refine the theory, I modify G.E.R. Lloyd’s concept of the “multidimensionality” of reality and literature. Strengthening Lloyd’s concept through reference to recent work in comparative East-West philosophy, I contend that the addition of Lloyd’s theory resolves the problems presented above while still allowing for a relativistic critical approach to world literature.

Chichen Itza and Its Hinterland

1994 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Kepecs ◽  
Gary Feinman ◽  
Sylviane Boucher
Keyword(s):  
World System ◽  
Settlement Pattern ◽  
Single Site ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Systems Perspective ◽  
The World ◽  
Systems Framework ◽  
Chichen Itza

AbstractFor too long, Mayanists working in northern Yucatan have retained a focus on the single site. Although a few recent papers have begun to examine this area in regional terms, the world-systems perspective has yet to be applied. In this paper the world-systems framework is used to examine the post-Teotihuacan core center of Chichen Itza and its hinterland. Various lines of information are combined to achieve the fullest possible picture, including new settlement-pattern data, related ethnohistoric material, and a brief consideration of existing iconographie studies. Comparative examples from contemporary sites in other parts of Mesoamerica are provided to illustrate the systemic interconnections that characterize a “world system.”

scholarly journals Puzzling Politics: A Methodology for Turning World-Systems Analysis Inside-Out

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-82
Author(s):  
Leslie C. Gates ◽  
Mehmet Deniz
Keyword(s):  
Systems Analysis ◽  
Political Process ◽  
World System ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
Social Bases ◽  
The World ◽  
World Systems Analysis ◽  
Inside Out

Can world-systems analysis illuminate politics? Can it help explain why illiberal regimes, outsider parties, and anti-immigrant rhetoric seem to be on the rise? Can it help explain any such nationalchanges that seem destined to shift how nations relate to world markets? Leading surveys of historical sociology seem to say no. We disagree. While there are problems with Wallerstein’s early mode of analyzing politicsin the capitalist world-system from the outside-in, historical sociologists have been too quick to dismiss world-systems analysis. We propose an alternative inside-out approach anchored in a methodology for selecting what to study: those national political transformations which constitute puzzling instances within a given world-historical political process. We recommend promising theoretical lineages to guide empirical research on the selected puzzle: those that specify the elite social bases of politics. We thereby  turn  world-systems  analysis  inside-out.  Our  inside-out  approach  advances  the  project  of  world-systems analysis as a methodology, rather than a theoretical prescription in several ways. First, it addresses an important but largely overlooked question: how to select what to study. Second, it devises a methodology that can, but does not have to, pair with the methodology of incorporated comparisons. Third, it offers a methodology that stimulates, rather than forecloses, theoretical flexibility and fresh interpretations of politics and the world-economy. We illustrate the strengths of this new approach with three books, two of which won the best book award from ASA’s Political Economy of the World System (PEWS) Section.

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