Full Description
In this collection of essays, leading cultural theorists consider the meaning and implications of world-scale humanist scholarship by engaging with Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems analysis. The renowned sociologist developed his influential critical framework to explain the historical and continuing exploitation of the rest of the world by the West. World-systems analysis reflects Wallerstein's conviction that understanding global inequality requires thinking on a global scale. Humanists have often criticized his theory as insufficiently attentive to values and objects of knowledge such as culture, agency, difference, subjectivity, and the local. The editors of this collection do not deny the validity of those criticisms; instead, they offer Wallerstein's world-systems analysis as a well-developed vision of the world scale for humanists to think with and against. Scholars of comparative literature, gender, geography, history, law, race, and sociology consider what thinking on the world scale might mean for particular disciplinary practices, knowledge formations, and objects of study. Several essays offer broader reflections on what is at stake for the study of culture in decisions to adopt or reject world-scale thinking. In a brief essay, Immanuel Wallerstein situates world-systems analysis vis-À-vis the humanities.Contributors. Gopal Balakrishnan, Tani E. Barlow, Neil Brenner, Richard E. Lee, Franco Moretti, David Palumbo-Liu, Bruce Robbins, Helen Stacy, Nirvana Tanoukhi, Immanuel Wallerstein, KÄren Wigen
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: The Most Important Thing Happening 1
Part 1. System and Responsibility
The Modern World-System: Its Structures, Its Geoculture, Its Crisis and Transformation / Richard Lee 27
Blaming the System / Bruce Robbins 41
Part 2. Literature: Restructured, Re-historicized, Re-scaled
World-Systems Analysis, Evolutionary Theory, Weltliteratur / Franco Moretti 67
The Scale of World Literature / Nivrana Tanoukhi 78
Part 3. Respatializing, Remapping, Recognizing
The Space of the World: Beyond State-Centricism? / Neil Brenner 101
Cartographies of Connection: Ocean Maps as Metaphors for Inter-Area History / Kären Wigen 138
What Is a Poem?: The Event of Women and the Modern Girl as Problems in Global or World History / Tani E. Barlow 155
Part 4. Ethics, Otherness, System
Legal System of International Rights / Helen Stacy 187
Rationality and World-Systems Analysis: Fanon and the Impact of the Ethico-Historical / David Palumbo-Liu 202
Thinking about the Humanities / Immanuel Wallerstein 223
The Twilight of Capital? / Gopal Balakrishnan 227
Bibliography 233
Contributors 249
Index 251
