Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures by Aamir R. Mufti (review)

Why should Germanists read a book with the imperative “Forget English!” in its title? As I compose a review for Monatshefte, a journal dedicated to “deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur,” let me begin by listing three main reasons. The first, and most obvious, is the book’s critical engagement with the term Weltliteratur and its reincarnation in English as “world literature.” Mufti underlines how a term that was given traction by Goethe in the “German” linguistic and cultural space was, from its very outset, connected with the larger traffic (Verkehr) of world literature initiated and facilitated by British and French colonialism. Second, Mufti traces the genealogy of the term to the production of multiple forms of Orientalism—in literary criticism, philosophies of world history, and translations of non-European literatures—that emerge in the nineteenth century. And finally, the book compellingly demonstrates how the Orientalist origins of world literature in the nineteenth century cast their long shadow on literary production, reception, and circulation, as well as scholarly debates well into the twenty-first century. By evaluating the complicity of Eurocentric, Anglo-centered modes of reading world literature in our current century, Mufti offers one of the most sophisticated readings and most stringent critiques of the business of “global Anglophone literatures” that has plagued the term through its institutionalization in the US academy.

But that is not the sole accomplishment of the book. From the Orientalist projections of German thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel and Herder to the Orientalist reflections of Salman Rushdie in his anthology on Indian literature (1997), Mufti offers multilayered mappings of world literature. Mufti’s study seeks to “ensure the critical intelligence of the concept” of world literature (xi, original emphasis). To develop that critical intelligence, Mufti identifies political issues at stake that, he claims, are absent from some of the current debates and discussions on world literature: “origins of bourgeois modernity—the culture of capitalist society—within a history of imperialist violence” (xii). This very triangulation distinguishes this book from a growing stack of monographs on world literature that have appeared in the last decade and a half. An insistence on carefully examining the rise of the Anglophone in the nineteenth century in order to understand its hegemonic status in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries grants Mufti’s project its special critical dimension. This book’s lines of inquiry, especially its investigation of political stakes of capitalist literary production, are partially shared by two recent publications: Pheng Cheah, What is a World? (2016) and Debjani Ganguly, This Thing Called the World (2016). However, these works read structures of capitalism in which “world literature” is embedded primarily through the global Anglophone novel, which is challenged by Mufti in theory and practice.

For those more familiar with German scholarship on Weltliteratur, Mufti’s book can be read along with interventions in world literary debates from scholars and critics of German literature and culture: John Pizer’s The Idea of World Literature (2006) and Peter Goßens’s Weltliteratur (2011) [ed. note: see reviews of Pizer in Monatshefte 100.4, Winter 2008, 616–618 and Goßens in Monatshefte 105.4, Winter 2013, 721–724]. In addition, there are volumes aimed at students and a larger reading public, such as Dieter Lamping’s Die Idee der Weltliteratur (2010) and Meilensteine der Weltliteratur (2015), as well as the Austrian journalist Sigrid Löffler’s Die neue Weltliteratur (2014). For Lamping and Löffler, the entry of Asian or African literatures into the list of literary “milestones” or the catalog of the “new world literature” respectively largely rests on their production in the English language. While Mufti’s study does not directly engage with these two works, it questions that very paradigm and provides ample historical and political context to understand how English as a “cultural system” gained a hegemonic status.

Forget English! raises two sets of questions. The first pertains to the “rhetorical and epistemological conditions of possibility of the concept...