There is an emerging body of scholarship on the relationship between representations of local space and global systems of social and economic organization. While Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova have delineated a world system of literary production and circulation, recent scholarship by Neil Lazarus, Alexander Beecroft, Alison Shonkwiler, and others, has sought to explore how literature responds to interlocking global systems of ecology, finance, migration, etc. Saskia Sassen has defined a network of “global cities,” nodal points on which these systems converge, and through which our experience of them is mediated. Literary criticism has mostly emphasized the limitations of narrative in representing such dispersed systems; because social and personal experience in one place is often determined elsewhere, Fredric Jameson has observed that “the truth of individual experience no longer coincides with space”, and the world system is thus incomprehensible to traditional literary representation. The papers in this panel challenge this interpretation, and emphasize how writers attend to the intersection of local space and the horizon of global capital.
Much of this debate has focused on the challenge the world system presents to realism, as its complexity strains the format of socially representative characters interacting within a delimited, metonymic space. Liam Lanigan’s paper, “Finance, citizenship, and realism in John Lanchester’s Capital” will consider how that novel navigates the contradictions between a global financial system, and classical realism. Enabled by London’s position as a command center in the global economy, and the point where many circuits of the world system converge, Capital adopts a realist aesthetic in which the city does not function metonymically for the whole world system, but gestures towards larger, intersecting forces not contained within the city/novel. London remains a nodal point within the world system, not a synecdoche of it. The novel’s “omniscience” is circumscribed, giving expression to experiences determined by global networks of labor, capital, and geopolitics, while those networks remain beyond its perspectival horizon.
Samuel Perks’s paper, “Singaporean social realism and the global city unconscious” resituates the realist debate in contemporary Singapore. Shifting focus towards ecological rather than financial dynamics, Perks emphasizes the capacity of the social realist novel to represent the flows underpinning combined and uneven development. Responding to Singapore’s position as an intersection point between the global North and its regional hinterland, Perks will explore how Singaporean authors narrate the global processes and flows the city internalizes. Perks seeks to delineate a very different mode of global realism than the one that takes shape in London, informed by the spatiality and geopolitics of a city-state defined by its interstitial position within the world system.
In his paper “Toward a New Language of the World City” Eric Prieto further destabilizes our perspective on the world system, and engages a broader range of literary-aesthetic responses to its effects. He draws attention to the ways that discourse around global cities privileges centers of finance and excludes equally important cities in the Global South. These are typically characterized by explosive population growth, economic, political, and spatial inequalities, and a dearth of resources for planning, housing, and infrastructure, making it impossible to understand them using existing tools of (Western) urban planning. A growing number of urbanists have emphasized the need for a new language of world cities, one able to learn from the Global South. Prieto argues that literature has a vital role to play in that search for a new language of urban representation. His paper looks at Tierno Monénembo's Un attiéké pour Elgass, which depicts the city of Abidjan using geo-spatially inspired representational innovations, including a dialogical emphasis on decentralized power structures, a search for a decolonized/African urban logic, and implementation of a dialectical or "transductive" (Henri Lefebvre) exchange between experiential and theoretical modes of knowledge.
Cristina Rodriguez’s concluding paper ‘“Relentless Geography”: Los Angeles’ Imagined Cartographies in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange’ takes up this focus on the tension between official cartographies and the lived, experiential production of urban space. She argues that Yamashita’s text mirrors this disjuncture, shrinking LA’s uninhabited Downtown and expanding over-populated, underrepresented neighborhoods, shifting geographically until its mapping matches the social space of those on the ground rather than those who map it from above. Yamashita, Rodriguez contends, offers a different map, perceived by the subsets of LA’s population that fall through the cracks of the city’s grid. Tropic of Orange’s unorthodox formal structure, and its narrative surrealism, transform the novel into the Los Angeles imagined by its anonymous users. In doing so, Rodriguez draws attention to the ways in which the communities of Los Angeles, themselves created and shaped by transnational displacement and circulation, provide an evolving counter-narrative, and alternative spatiality, to those produced by the world system.
A key assumption informing these papers is that the world system operates according to a unified structural logic of combined and uneven development, articulated differently across the globe. In order to reflect these differences, and establish patterns in the socio-cultural and aesthetic responses to them, this panel will contain four papers. However, the objective is not to provide definitive, closed readings, but to prompt dialogue around the common issues the papers raise. Therefore each paper will be limited to under fifteen minutes, leaving at least fifteen minutes for discussion. The intention is to articulate a set of coordinates for understanding how literature responds to the world system while remaining responsive to the highly differentiated ways in which that system operates across space.