Compressions of Scale: World Literature in Miniature

Fifty years ago, in 1966, Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey published a famous book called The Tyranny of Distance that argued how spatial distance from other centers of civilization had been the most important factor in determining the trajectory of Australian history. Now, under the impact of communications revolutions and environmental theory of various kinds, such tyrannies are more likely to be those of propinquity, with scholars of world literature and culture intent upon examining ways in which different parts of the globe are now, and indeed always have been, tightly imbricated within one another’s orbits. Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents is a distinguished contribution to these contemporary critical discourses of planetary scale, with Lowe being particularly incisive in her deconstruction of what she calls “the violence of liberal universality” (7). One purpose of her book is to show how it was an Anglo American cultural tradition, “best exemplified” by John Stuart Mill (106), that provided a key rationale not only for the expansion in the nineteenth century of an international trade in manufactured goods and migrant labor, but also, more implicitly, for styles of writing that worked as a corollary to such rhetorical invocations of liberty. Lowe has an excellent discussion in her second chapter of Olaudah Equiano, where she challenges the received idea of “transition” upon which his Narrative (1789) is predicated, along with its associated suggestion “that the system of slavery was gradually superseded by a new system of free wage labor” (46). She argues instead that slavery and “free” wage labor are closely intertwined with each other, with autobiography, “the liberal genre par excellence,” performing “the important work of mediating and resolving liberalism’s contradictions” (46). Lowe has done much productive research for this project in colonial archives, and she illuminatingly juxtaposes Lord Aberdeen’s 1841 declaration, in a letter to the first governor of Hong Kong, that “a secure, well-regulated trade, not conquest, is all we desire” with the twentieth-century “imperial governmentality” of the US, which was similarly less concerned with “direct conquest or occupation of territory” than with “managing the biopolitical circulation of goods and peoples within an expanded international market” (132).

Lowe is generally convincing in the way she describes how settler colonialism, native removal, and racial dispossession all fell afoul of the “Anglo-American settler imperial imaginary,” and she is also persuasive in her theoretically sophisticated exposition of how the cultural histories of her “four continents”—Europe, America, Asia, and Africa—are intimately interwoven with one another (8). One of the methodological premises of this book is that the division of knowledge into “separate scholarship about single societies, peoples, or regions” (1) has generally been counterproductive, and the author aims here to challenge the conventional shape of epistemological as well as geographical boundaries. This leads also into an “unsettling” (3) of traditional gender zones, through which a “feminized space of domestic intimacy” and a “masculine world of work and battle” were situated antithetically to each other (29). In Lowe’s revised configuration, intimacy is thus associated not with a private, interiorized space, but with the “political unconscious” of modern fiction (36). Overall, the intellectual paradigm shaping The Intimacies of Four Continents works well, and as an extended essay in critical theory it makes for a thought-provoking and plausible intervention. Indeed, one of the great strengths of this book is the manner in which it tracks commercial transactions across different territorial formations and suggests their repercussions within a cultural realm, showing (for example) how the figure of the South Asian “coolie” became as integral to the construction of British colonial fiction as the African slave was to white American narratives. The fact that these slaves and Asian laborers were symbiotically conjoined in the nineteenth-century liberal imagination adds another dimension to the global patterns delineated here.

Nevertheless, there does seem to my mind something a little too schematic about Lowe’s argument. Its less compelling aspects perhaps derive from a relative lack of empathy with the more erratic trajectories of cultural production, and from the way Lowe tends to compress a complex, multidirectional world...