“Closely mapping on the European expansion in the colonialist era” is a thinly camouflaged euphemism for imperialism. “World Literature” is imperialism in literary theoretical terms. Zhang Longxi further admits, “From Goethe and Marx to Casanova, Moretti, and Damrosch, the concept of world literature has been theorized mostly in the context of Western literary studies.”5 Indeed—in fields theoretically contingent and coterminous with European and now American imperialism. Very little can or need be added to these concluding remarks in a volume summarizing the history of “World Literature” theories. That whole spectrum of “World Literature” as has been thus theorized now appropriately belongs to a literary theory museum with a fine and shiny glass cover for posterity to spend a fine Sunday morning beholding and marveling at the momentous history of an ideological movement at the service of a Euro-American imperial imaginary that considered itself “World Literature.”
As is evident in Emily Apter’s excellent volume Against World Literature,6 even when these eminent literary theorists write critically about their discipline and field the idea, practice, and theorization of “World Literature” are nonetheless very much a closed-circuited speculation among a handful of quite erudite North American and Western European theorists very limited and in fact myopic in their preoccupations with what they know and yet entirely oblivious to the even more they do not know—but genuinely care to know and appropriate and assimilate backward to what they know. But what they do know and call “World Literature” has nothing to do with the real world, with the multifaceted, multilingual, multicultural worlds rising and rooted around them. What they do know quite well is their world, their North American and Western European world, which they imperially cast upon the real world from their respective offices in a department of English and comparative literature. As David Damrosch says aptly about Emily Apter’s book Against World Literature: “Herself a leading figure in the opening up of comparative literature toward global perspectives, notably as author of The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006), as contributor to several collections on world literature, and as a founding board member of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature, Apter is well situated to assess the field from within.”7 And one might as well stay there, “within,” and never venture out into the real world, the world outside departments of English and Comparative Literature.
In Against World Literature, Apter makes a very simple and even obvious point, that there is a power and politics, a blatant epistemic violence, perpetrated in any and all acts of translation from any language into English or French or any other European language. But she remains rather oblivious to the fact that all these European languages are in fact colonial languages for the world at large. What am I doing writing these lines in English, or Fanon in French, or Spivak and Said in English? None of us are European or of European descent. We are all colonials turned into postcolonial theorists. When they translate a Chinese or Arabic or Persian literary text into English or French they have not translated it into a European language but into a colonial language, a language read and understood far more by Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans than by Europeans—or those of European descent. The world did not learn these languages at a Berlitz school, or on an Ivy League campus. The world learned these languages at colonial gunpoint, in the trenches of anticolonial battlefields—the way Native Americans learned English from their European colonial tormentors, long before—just like my own university, Columbia—European colonialists built Ivy League universities on stolen Lenape lands. The dubious project of an English translation of a French speculative self-indulgence on “untranslatability” of philosophical terms, as in Barbara Cassin’s Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (2006), with which Emily Apter has been affiliated, is the limit of these European and North American theorists’ imagination to come to terms with the fact that they are indeed globally irrelevant and provincially trapped in one or another colonial language they falsely think is theirs. This whole project, again as Damrosch rightly calls it, is “speciously unified via a Euro-universalism projected onto the globe at large.” That “Euro-universalism” remains at the heart of this imperial theory they call “World Literature.” Within that “World Literature” no non-European poet or theorist can ever stand up and say “I” with a confident voice of her own subject positions and pride of place. To paraphrase James Baldwin on a similar occasion, the minute a non-European person stands up and says she too has a right to exist the entire edifice of “Western civilization,” or, in this case, “World Literature” will crumble. My consistent search for the particularities of a postcolonial subject comes to this edifice of “World Literature” and must either prostrate to it in obedience or crush it in defiance. I do not believe the world has ever been in the mood for prostrating to any imperial ideology in obedience.
Nodding toward a “planetary geography,” as Apter does,8 is a nice political gesture but has no literary significance so far as the very practice of “World Literature” as this limited number of Euro-universalist theorists perform it—a mode of theorization that by their very professional practices suppresses any alternative worldliness of literatures about which they know very little or nothing at all. Taking the Palestinian conceptual artist Emily Jacir out of her Palestinian context of dispossession or the Moroccan literary theorist Abdelfattah Kilito out of his multilingual milieu and assimilating them backward to familiar tropes represent literary and artistic cannibalism not “World Literature.” To be sure, North American and Western European practitioners of “World Literature” are perfectly liberal minded and openhearted literary critics whose company you will much prefer to Euro-universalist literary critics who have scarcely heard of or care to hear about any Chinese or Arab or Iranian writer. But it is precisely in their open-mindedness that the cul-de-sac of their “World Literature” as a defunct theoretical practice has become most evident—for it is precisely in their collegial liberalism that you discover the impossibility of any other alterity they fathom to become a self to their own worldliness. My bone of contention therefore with the whole enterprise of “World Literature” from Goethe to Damrosch and Apter is neither ad hominem nor Europhobic. Their theoretical practices ipso facto posit a negative dialectic toward the very existence of worlds beyond their literary horizons.
Replacing the term “world” with “planetarity”—or pointing out that Chinese or Japanese literary scholars are joining the “World Literature” club—will not solve but in fact exacerbate the fundamental flaw in the very assumption of “World Literature. The practice keeps assimilating backward into the limited but self-indulgent quagmire of the very idea of “World Literature” and its flawed worldliness. Noting the tokenism of Apter toward the Moroccan literary theorist Abdelfattah Kilito, Damrosch rightly notes,
It is refreshing finally to find some discussion of a theorist based outside Paris or the United States, and yet like many Moroccan intellectuals, Kilito does much of his critical writing in French, appearing in such journals as Poétique; he recently published in Paris a kind of sequel to his 2002 volume, Je parle toutes les langues, mais en arabe (Actes Sud, 2013). In discussing the work of a Moroccan theorist who holds a PhD from the Sorbonne, recipient in 1996 of the Prix du rayonnement de la langue française of the Académie Française, Apter has not moved so far from the Rive Gauche after all.9
Damrosch then concludes with an apt observation and yet a facile hope for sustaining the idea and practice of “World Literature” he still champions:
The world is a large and various place. Those wishing to chart new planetary cartographies are finding many languages to study beyond the French–German–English triad that long dominated Western comparative studies, and they are developing new methods appropriate to the expanded scope of our field. The tough linguistic and political analyses that Emily Apter rightly wishes comparatists to pursue will best be carried forward by widening our cultural and linguistic horizons, and by em
ploying the full variety of critical and theoretical approaches that can be included in our cartographic toolboxes today.10
This last plea is alas futile and regurgitates the selfsame Euro-universalism about which Damrosch rightly complains and to which he has in his own long and illustrious career contributed significantly by arguing that “World Literature” dwells in “an elliptical space created between the source and receiving cultures,” thus reducing other worldly literature to national literatures and sustaining his and his colleagues’ theoretical speculations as pertinent to the continued legitimacy of the “World Literate” project.11 But the way these distinguished theorists have understood “World Literature” is an impossibility. The very idea of it emerges in and remains confined to an incurable Euro-universalism, whether via Goethe’s literary ecumenicalism or Moretti’s world-system model; it is there for the theoretical entertainment of European and U.S. literary theorists, and as such as an ideological camouflage for Euro-American imperialism, and by and large they have a good time feeling superior to their even more belligerently Eurocentric colleagues. But the epistemic violence they ipso facto perpetrate upon the worldliness of non-European literary traditions, beginning by casting them into the ghetto of non-European, is irreparable. But that is not a merely literary theoretical flaw. That is the ideological domain where the moral agency of non-Europeans is stigmatized and made impossible.
My purpose here is not to rehearse the deepest flaws in the theory and practice of “World Literature” as these leading scholars understand it, and as I have had other occasions to discuss in some details.12 Books and innumerable learned essays have been devoted to that task. As a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University I have had the institutional duty of getting to know and teach this literature in detail. I am, as you might say, an outsider-insider to the project. There is a foreignness to my familiarity with this field. In the United States, this field is still very much an appendix to English departments. That fact at once enables and disables the field beyond reproach or repair. There are serious advances and insurmountable dead ends in the discipline as we know it now. I am neither the first nor the only one to think so. The field is in a creative crisis and keeps chasing after its own tail. In Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters (2007), for example, she opts to read “the world” metaphorically, as “stylistic refinements” of political and economic realities, and sees the hegemony of any such culture over others as merely linguistic and aesthetic. This to me is pure Paris-centered literary romanticism disguising the innate violence of Eurocentric theorization. Her model of “literary capital” is preternaturally Paris and could not be possible be Cairo or Delhi. Paris is the Mecca and the Ka’ba of literary art for her—all the power of course to her and her beloved city. To me, however, as much at home as I am in Paris as in Istanbul, Delhi, Tehran, Cairo, or Mexico City, this is delusional chauvinism.
Yes, as Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein, among others, have argued the capitalist economy is global—but by the same token it is polyfocal. Mumbai is as important on its map as Cairo, Istanbul, Paris, or Buenos Aires. This French self-universalism is medieval in its nativism of the village cartographer. Inevitably Casanova’s three totem poles of “World Literature” are “Latin, French, and German.” All the power to her—there is nothing wrong with these three magnificent languages and their literatures. But no French or American theorist has the right (except for the imperial might they exude) to cut Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Japanese, or Persian languages and literatures to limited horizons of their provincial imagination. Casanova sees Kafka, Joyce, and Faulkner as key figures in her reading of this “World Literature” and in her systemic disregard for any other world she indeed offers some brilliant insights into the literary worlds she examines. We read these insights and learn and wonder. What is Hecuba to her or she to Hecuba? The Shahnameh, Mahabharata, or any other literary work from “oversees” has no place in her literary dreams. They are all “Greek” to her. Even when such vertiginous Eurocentrism is challenged it is challenged from the selfsame unconscious imperial imaginary. In their edited volume Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (2007), Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell offer a model of how an imperial literature can be recast as “national literature” and reflected upon from its peripheries. The result is geared toward detecting “alternate geographies, alternate histories”—though only in theoretical speculations rather than factual basis in those literary alterities.13 My concern is not just to map out other worlds that have existed and that continue to exist outside the limited imagination of their “World Literature” but also to stress that within those worlds there is a cosmogonic universe in which real human beings have stood up and said “I,” and yet that agency is now systemically violated by the imperial imprimatur of this “World Literature.” The task at hand is not to force-feed those literary worlds into this “World Literature” and apply for a legal residency permit for them as “aliens” (get them a literary “Green Card” as it is called in the United States). The task is to see, recognize, acknowledge, celebrate, and critique at the same time, those alienated worlds.
Beyond that imperial imaginary that has historically enabled both the theorization of “World Literature” and certain liberal reforms within it there is a vastly different, and epistemically enabling, world—the world critical thinkers like the Argentinian-Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel have explored and theorized in such groundbreaking works as Philosophy of Liberation (1980). Dussel links the philosophical hubris of this Eurocentric theorization (from which the very notion of “World Literature” has emerged) directly to the imperial arrogance of military conquest and colonial exploitation. “Spatially central, the ego cogito constituted the periphery and asked itself … ‘Are the Amerindians human beings?’ that is, Are they Europeans, and therefore rational animals? The theoretical response was of little importance. We are still suffering from the practical response. The Amerindians were suited to forced labor; if not irrational, then at least they were brutish, wild, underdeveloped, uncultured because they did not have the culture of the center.”14
That “culture of the center” is not just in the normative and material foundations of the imperial cosmogony that has called itself the West and centered itself globally but even more decidedly in its epistemic hubris. That “ontology,” Dussel adds, “did not come from nowhere. It arose from a previous experience of domination over other persons, of cultural oppression over other worlds. Before the ego cogito there is an ego conquiro; ‘I conquer’ is the practical foundation of ‘I think.’ ”15 Opposing this epistemology of conquest is the ontological predicate of categorically dismantling “World Literature” via a head-on collision. Any and all debates with “World Literature” are geared toward epistemically dismantling it—for good. All other liberal kinds of “provincializing Europe” or “alternate geographies, alternate histories” simply cross-authenticate that imperial hubris and all its epistemic formations. “The center has imposed itself on the periphery,” Dussel rightly says, “for more than five centuries. But for how much longer? Will the geopolitical preponderance of the center come to an end? Can we glimpse a process of liberation growing from the peoples of the periphery.”16 Yes we can. We indeed must—for the idea and practices of a construct like “World Literature” as one particularly poignant ideological arm of Euro-American imperial imaginary have no room for any of its epistemic alterities. The instant it recognizes their presence and veracity it must denounce itself and join the ethics of their liberation.
Serious scholars of the Shahnameh, without whose monumental work the very idea of this discussion would have been impossible, object to the very proposition of bringing the Persian epic into this debate. They could not care less, they tell me, if the theorists and practitioners of what today passes for “World Literature” consider or do not consider the Shahnameh part of their incurable parochialism. My purpose
here, as is quite evident, shares that sentiment and completely dismisses that plea to bring the Shahnameh into the pantheon of this “World Literature” as it is theorized today. My first and foremost purpose is once and for all to dismantle the very idea of this “World Literature” as we have received it, from Goethe to Damrosch and beyond, and put the masterpieces of world and worldly literatures, outside any scare quotes, after we have ascertained why is it that they are masterpieces, on an equal footing for a renewed global reading on the fertile ground of what Spivak rightly calls “the death of a discipline.”
The Shahnameh Page 24