Interactive Cosmopolitanism and Collaborative Technologies: New Foundations for Global Literary History

Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.

It occurs to me that I am America.

—Allen Ginsberg, “America”¹

Allen Ginsberg’s “America” (1956) playfully reminds us of the importance of rhetorical mode. Self-reflection and political critique merge in the poem as the speaker manages simultaneously to assert his opposition to and his complicity with the dominant world power of his day. This power happens to be his home country and the discursive regime that—he is dismayed to realize—has formed his habits of mind in the midst of cultural racism, the Red Scare, and metastasizing pop-culture consumerism. Yet conversing with a personified America, the speaker repeatedly asserts solidarity with ordinary working people across racial and ethnic boundaries, and the poem is at least partly about remembering what the abstraction of the political has obscured: “I am America.” For all his anger, horror, and sadness at U.S. internal and foreign politics, he finally asserts solidarity with the people and, ironically adopting an American “can-do” work ethic, vows to put “my queer shoulder to the wheel” in order to help get the country back on the right socialist path. Irony, self-reflexivity, and dialogic form enable Ginsberg to invert valences of what constitutes “the serious” in both culture and discourse; reflexively critique the notion of “proper” poetics; and reaffirm and potentially reconstruct an organic political identification with the very people often most scorned by purveyors of abstraction and global power.

Ginsberg’s poem came to mind as I reread the past few decades’ academic conversation about literary history, which is strikingly serious in tone, analysis, and prognostication, and also decidedly monologic and top-down in its quest for the proper subject of inquiry. Considering whether a global literary history is possible, I would like to consider an alternative approach, one that moves in Ginsberg’s direction, perhaps to reveal in the current discussion about literary history “a positive unconscious of knowledge: a level that eludes the consciousness of the scientist and yet is part of scientific discourse, instead of disputing its validity and seeking to diminish its scientific nature.”² I would like to consider how new technologies might enable a dialogic, interactive global literary history, understanding that, inevitably, this option will seem to stand outside a rubric of seriousness constructed by rationalized disciplinarity and professional culture.

The Medium is the Message

Current discussions of alternatives to national literary history parallel history’s move from political to social history some time ago. Taking cues from current debates about national literary histories versus literary histories categorized by race, class, or gender, those considering the question “is global literary history possible?” immediately confront a number of options. A global literary history could take the global itself as the topic of historical investigation. What literary forms were associated with the initial stages of globalization, with what changes in literary forms were these mutations associated, and what today comprise residual and emergent forms of globalization and its literature(s)? A very different tack would be taken if “global literary history” were understood to be the equivalent of “the history of world literature,” which would send discussion in the direction of comparative literature studies.³ A related but differently inflected course of study that investigated not the history of the global but the global characteristics of the literary might seek some literary category that seemed, if not universal, then at least massively cross-cultural and multinational, as in Michael Denning’s presentation of proletarian literature, or Thomas Pavel’s, Margaret Cohen’s, or Hans Gumbrecht’s discussions of themes and chronotopes (such as love, the seascape, or the road) as unifying generic touchstones in the international novel.⁴ A fourth course might be one more familiar to literary historians: a debate about the history of literary history, concerning the origins and development of literary history itself and addressing how definitions of history have changed and will change in a global field.⁵

Yet while all of these approaches can be effective at challenging existing subjects of study, they...