I

A single but radically uneven world-system; a singular modernity, combined and uneven; and a literature that variously registers this combined unevenness in both its form and its content to reveal itself as, properly speaking, world-literature – these propositions sum up the kernel of our argument. ‘World-literature’, as we understand it, is an analytical category, not one centred in aesthetic judgement. We find unconvincing those writings that seek to position the ‘world’ in ‘world literature’ in value terms, as signifying ‘world-class’ – as though ‘world literature’ were to be thought in analogy to those imaginary teams that sport enthusiasts love to argue about, in which the best players from everywhere and from all time are ‘selected’ to play together in some fantasy match or tournament: the Iliad, the Upanishads, Gilgamesh, the Divine Comedy, King Lear, Dream of the Red Chamber, Faust, Anna Karenina, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Things Fall Apart, for example. It is equally nugatory to think of ‘world literature’ as a kind of summit conference of great writers: exercises of this nature, as Bourdieu has pointed out, are both derealising (of time and place) and intellectualist. When we argue that it makes good sense to read, say, Wieland,Max Havelaar, Noli Me Tangere, Rickshaw and The Lost Steps together, we are not proposing any abstract connectivity linking them across time and space: our suggestion, rather, is that these texts should be considered together because they all bear testimony – in their own distinct ways, and in both their form and their content – to the ‘shock of the new’, the massive rupture effected at the levels of space-time continuum, lifeworld, experience and human sensorium by capitalist modernisation.

‘World-literature’ as we understand it is therefore a creature of modernity. Our definition differs obviously from that of Damrosch, who takes the category ‘to encompass all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language’ (2003: 4). Damrosch's formulation is self-consciously indifferent to historicity. Virgil's work circulates beyond its culture of origin; but so too do Petrarch's, Proust's and Murakami's. All four authors are therefore exemplars of ‘world literature’ for Damrosch. For us, by contrast, the ‘world’ identified in ‘world-literature’ is that of the modern world-system.

These are testing times for literary studies. The challenges confronting the discipline today are legion and multiform; they range from the field specific to the institutional, from the university to the wider spheres of politics and the economy. In addition to internal debates about the coherence and sustainability of the established forms of disciplinary literary studies, we might reference in this connection the ongoing subordination of culture generally to the laws of the market, the apparently declining significance, relatively speaking, of literature itself as a cultural form, and the steady assault on the autonomy of the humanities – and indeed of the university itself in its historical guise as, for better and worse, an ivory tower, a ‘world apart’ – by government, business and media regimes, all bent in their various ways on incorporation, control and instrumentally defined regulation.

The suggestion that literary studies is in crisis has been made before, of course. As long ago as 1981, for instance, Raymond Williams argued that English literary studies had stumbled into incoherence – on the one hand, because the idea of ‘literature’ no longer provided a stable evidentiary basis of study; on the other, because the connotations of ‘English’ were so densely problematical. Asking whether the ‘English’ in ‘English literary studies’ identified ‘the language or the country’, Williams wrote that ‘[i]f it is the language, there are also fifteen centuries of native writing in other languages: Latin, Welsh, Irish, Old English, Norman French.

In the 30 years since that Cambridge-centred ‘crisis in English Studies’, arguments as to the instability – indeed, on Williams's reading, the strict unviability – of disciplinary literary studies overall have been sounded with increasing resonance. Scholars in the field have been proposing that the received modes of procedure are in need of radical overhaul. Everywhere today, the institutionalised and consolidated methods, the structuring premises and principles, the coherence of the disciplinary object of study itself, are being challenged and opened up to reconsideration and sometimes searching and fundamental critique.

Recently, Stephen Shapiro has proposed a re-reading of forms of catachrestic narrative through the prism of world-systems theory in order to pinpoint how narrative devices and modes such as the gothic re-emerge at similar moments in the recurring cycles of long-wave capitalist accumulation (Shapiro 2008: 31). Similarly, anthropologist Michael Taussig has observed that cultural formations consisting of fantastic or magical reactions to ‘nonfantastic’ reality frequently arise in peripheral societies as a critique of their violent integration into capitalist modes of production, focusing specifically on the figuration of oil as ‘devil's excrement’ within countries converted to petro-regimes (Taussig 2010: 10, 18). The capitalist world-system, however, should also be understood as a world-ecology, in which the social transformations corresponding to different phases of capitalism are inextricable from the reorganisation of nature–society relations. Environmental historian Jason Moore argues that capitalism consists of ecological regimes, ‘those relatively durable patterns of class structure, technological innovation and the development of productive forces […] that have sustained and propelled successive phases of world accumulation’ (Moore 2010: 392). Under the compulsion of capital's expansionary logic, ecological regimes are periodically driven to exhaustion. These cyclical, systemic occurrences correspond to upswings in gothic and supernatural tropes that register the conjuncture of fading and emergent regimes, prognosticating a revolution in nature–society relations even more pervasive and traumatic than the last. Moreover, when ecological regimes are organised around the production/extraction of single commodities, as is often the case in peripheries and former colonies, the use of catachrestic narrative devices in speculative fiction serves to mediate the intense sensations of spectrality and phantasmagoria resulting from the hyper-commodity fetishism associated with monocultural socio-ecologies.

We have argued above that the ‘critical irrealist’ aesthetics of texts such as Salih's Season of Migration to the North register the impact of combined and uneven development in the colonial periphery.

Consider three moments in the life of one city:

• A 38-year old man is arrested in a shopping mall after he tries to sell a pair of blue eyes;

• A man is minding his own business in a bank, trying to withdraw some cash from an automatic teller machine, when his hands burst into flames;

• A giant, ramshackle spacecraft appears above the city. Its filthy and sick passengers – ‘aliens’ – are interred in prison camps, where illegal medical experiments are conducted on their dying bodies.

The city, of course, is Johannesburg and only one of these moments is non-fictional, but it may not be immediately obvious which one this is. Taking the first incident as a point of departure in their analysis of ‘postcolonial’ South Africa (the report of the arrest of a man for attempting to sell human body parts in a shopping mall was carried by the leading Johannesburg daily newspaper, The Star, in 1996), Jean and John L. Comaroff detect ‘symptoms of an occult economy waxing behind the civil surfaces of the “new” South Africa’ (1999: 283). This occult economy is characterised in their view by its fusion of cultural elements with long indigenous histories (such as witchcraft) with other cultural elements registering the particular velocities of contemporary ‘globalisation’. The fusion produces what they call ‘millennial capitalism’, one of whose distinguishing features is a pervasive double consciousness:

The Comaroffs are careful to point out that ‘millennial capitalism’ is a global, and not just a (postcolonial) South African, affair. The recent proliferation of vampires, zombies and witchcraft is surely evocative of a cultural logic of tragic historical contradictions generated by the sheer speed of systematic extraction, abstraction and alienation authored by capitalism in its contemporary, ‘globalised’ phase.

There is now widespread interest in identifying the particularities of peripheral modernism, even when this is rarely named as such and even though its provenance remains unexplained. In emphasising that the internally differentiated peripheries and semi-peripheries of core capitalism extended and still extend to a larger geo-political expanse than the once-colonised regions, we assume a world-system driven to expand into the non-capitalist worlds, whether through military conquest and occupation, or gun-boat diplomacy, or the export of capital. However, we also observe the extent and degree of the coercions visited on those societies that were seized for their natural and labour resources, or invaded for both material and political reasons. Such determinants, we suggest, inflect the singular accents of literatures from these locations, engendering a consciousness of a violent capitalism that we will not expect to find in the writings of Eastern Europe or Portugal. Moreover, most of the regions once occupied and ruled by the imperialist powers continue to function as the hinterlands of capitalism's power centres, even where spectacular economic development is taking place, and are home to the majority of the world's wholly dispossessed.

It is on such grounds that our reading of a novel from the peripheries departs from the assumptions of critics indifferent to the ways in which such literatures dramatise the trauma of modernity: for here the precipitate and selective introduction of capitalist productive and social modes into a non-capitalist environment produced incompatible material and existential situations, generating aesthetic forms encoding these disjunctions and constituting their stylistic peculiarities. Consider then the implication of Susan Stanford Friedman's (2006) challenge to the received conception of modernity as a ‘western’ invention. In attempting to reverse the systematic rexclusion from the critical literature of ‘the creative agencies of colonial and postcolonial subjects as producers of modernism’ (428), she refers us to the ‘indigenization’ and ‘cannibalism’ of cultural traditions from the ‘west’ made possible by ‘contact zones’ (430–33). Yet while she complains about the ‘curse of derivativeness’ attaching to colonial and postcolonial modernisms (432), she herself situates ‘Western aesthetics’ (431) as the source and origin of the (‘non-western’) innovations she sets out to celebrate.

Bratislava, 1989

Not much is explained about the woman who strips naked in public in Peter Pist'anek's Slovakian novel Rivers of Babylon. ‘A nervous breakdown’ is offered as a possible reason for her disrobing, which occurs in front of the Hotel Ambassador on a busy street in central Bratislava, on a sunny August morning in 1989 (2007: 17). Impervious to the consternation of passers-by, and to a gypsy who robs her, she is eventually taken away in a police car, in one of the few civic gestures made by representatives of a rapidly vanishing state.

Initially, the woman's anguished gesture is focalised through the public's reaction to an apparently random ‘extraordinary situation’ that ‘has brought them together, just as a calamity to be overcome brings people together’ (17). But as quickly as the collective expressions of sympathy, outrage and anxiety appear do they subside and disintegrate. The vaporisation of empathy or even adequate response in Rivers of Babylon indexes the transition from an exhausted communist system to what Peter Petro and Donald Rayfield, in their introduction to the novel in English translation, call ‘another world, of rampant robber barons’ capitalism’ (Pist'anek 2007: 5). But public atomisation and exhaustion are consistent features not only of Rivers of Babylon but also of the fiction of post-communist ‘transition’ in general. As the neoliberal ‘shock doctrine’ rapidly privatises space (urban or otherwise) entirely, alien civic and cultural environments are formed, leaving individuals dangerously exposed in their fungibility and portability, cut off and disconnected from one another: ‘an individualistic society of transients’, in David Harvey's evocative summary of the contemporary – putatively ‘postmodern’ – capitalist lifeworld at large (1989: 288).

Of course, the representation of urban space as both baleful and liberatory is a familiar feature of all literary modernisms. But Bratislava's shift to free-market capitalism impresses a particularly contemporary stamp on this representation. Pist'anek's narrative has uncertainty coded into its very structure. The received modernist narrative modes seem inappropriate for the unbounded world of the post-communist ‘transition’. While many characters ‘lose the plot’ like the stripped woman, others emerge to rig the system criminally – and often brutally – in their favour. Among the spectators at the strip scene are several characters central to the novel's satiric perspective on the new economy born out of the Czechoslovak ‘Velvet Revolution’.