Informal empire is a difficult political structure to theorize. No longer marked by direct occupation or administration, imperialism has adopted the stealthy procedures of financial and cultural influence, made allies with transnational corporations, and burrowed into the everyday operations of globalization, all while continuing to limit the sovereignty of nation-states around the world. Parsing the operations of informal empire requires a careful attention to form--to the intersecting hierarchies of power, or the artifacts of what Laura Doyle calls “inter-imperialism,” that now structure social life.

This panel suggests that the Anglophone novel is in fact an excellent “theorizer” of informal empire, because its forms are uniquely suited to registering the multifarious, subterranean, generational, networked hierarchies of our unequal life. A new formalist approach, drawing on critics such as Anna Kornbluh and Caroline Levine, enables critics to view literary forms and social forms as sharing a semantic vocabulary, both attempting to make sense of the world through form. Our panelists attend to the specifics of novel form--its adaptations of other genres, its dense population of characters, its ability to span generations, its transnational gaze, and its capacity to register the mundanity of contemporary life--to suggest that the Anglophone novel can at least partially crack open the elusive structures of informal empire.

Building on its partner panel (“Literature and Informal Empire: The 19^th Century”), which focuses on how literature marked the nineteenth-century emergence of informal empire as a world structure, this panel instead uses novel form as a lens through which to view some of the transhistorical continuities of informal empire’s troubling forms. Jessica Valdez begins by reading Anthony Trollope’s prodigious 1875 novel The Way We Live Now as built upon a triangulated relationship between Britain, the United States, and China, in which “the way we live now” is explicitly inter-imperial. The novel’s plot revolves around two fictional geopolitical events: the Chinese emperor’s visit to London and the “floating” of a fictional North American railway, an allusion to the first transcontinental railway built by Chinese contract labor. Although contract labor is absent in the novel, an inter-imperial approach reveals that it is structurally constitutive in its hidden relation to both the American railway and Chinese emperor plots. The Way We Live Now therefore ironizes informal empire and the liberal contract, even as it is structured by and a product of inter-imperialism. Valdez’s paper offers an early example of how the novel can render visible the often diaphanous, multifarious global networks of informal empire.

The problem of informal empire’s invisibility has only grown more difficult over time. As our second panelist, Arielle Stambler, notes, twenty-first-century informal empire frequently hides its status as imperialism both because it is no longer fashionable to label one’s foreign policy as imperialist and because its invisibility ensures its perpetuation. But once again, the novel provides a savvy formal intervention. Marlon James’s 2014 novel A Brief History of Seven Killings traces decades of CIA involvement in Cold War Jamaica, revealing how a combination of internal and external challenges threaten Jamaica’s tenuous independence. Stambler’s paper shows how the novel’s cacophonous form – containing over seventy characters and spanning generations -- attempts to hold in a single frame the myriad Global North-South entanglements that constitute the new imperialism.

If the novel’s form can bring informal empire to the visible surface, then it can also provide unique insight into how informal empire is itself formed. Our third panelist, Philip Tsang, asks these very questions: How do we understand informal empire as a set of portable forms that are both unpredictable and indispensable? How does informal empire envision hypothetical futures through sustained repetitions and synthetic abstractions? In other words, how is informal empire itself literary, and how does the novel grapple with these shared forms? By reading Zadie Smith’s 2008 essay “Two Directions for the Novel,” in concert with Joseph O’Neill’s The Dog (2013) and Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (2015), Tsang suggests that the genre of the “global anglophone novel” is a distinct formalist project that is both imitative and critical of today’s empire—the political program of mobilizing and managing heterogeneous populations beyond national boundaries.

Each panelist will speak for fifteen minutes, followed by a short response from Ross Forman, leaving plenty of time for group discussion of the issues raised. Collectively, our panel aims to highlight the critical importance of understanding informal empire’s transhistorical and particularly formal nature. By focusing on the unique formal properties of the novel, they remind us that the literary remains an invaluable place to turn for answers.