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Epilogue The Spatial Turn and the Scale of Freedom [T]he challenge of the global is also that of rethinking time. —Ian Baucom, ‘‘Globalit, Inc.; Or, the Cultural Logic of Global Literary Studies’’ It has been intriguing to watch the spatial turn barnstorm the academy, but perhaps it is time to ask why the embrace has been so quick and eager. Why is it that the accommodation of old modes of humanistic study to this new one has proceeded so smoothly? What makes it possible for new curricular programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels to have such remarkable traction? In these final pages, I suggest very briefly that the answer might lie with the particular logic of social becoming that the spatial turn permits. I also propose a short list of questions that will need to be asked as we find our way through the spatial turn. As curricula and departments are restructured according to its demands, it might be worth asking: How will postcolonial studies fit into the new spatial scales overtaking literary studies? What does the term ‘‘print culture’’ signify in the context of the new spatial scales? What role will genre criticism play in our research and our teaching of them? Most significantly, does shifting the axis or scale of an analysis necessarily displace the logic of cultural nationalism ? On this last issue, most advocates of the spatial turn would answer in the affirmative. Yet I offer the cautionary suggestion that if the spatial turn ignores Ian Baucom’s injunction to integrate a ‘‘rethinking [of] time’’ into its basic premises, then it might turn out that shifting the scale and axis of the humanities effectively restabilizes the identitarian logic of nationalism. Why worry about nationalism if we’re not talking about nations? Because it just might happen that the spatial turn winds up being national identity’s new island in the stream.  Epilogue The Human in Time Much of the recent work encouraging the adoption of new spatial scales for the study of literature claims to move the field forward in two ways. According to these arguments, the spatial turn offers both an empirical improvement on and an ideological rupture with the traditional nation-based study of literature and the humanities. On the issue of the empirical, the assumption is that the national frame is simply inadequate to the task of understanding the global flows that define modernity and even the premodern . In terms of ideology, the spatial turn proposes to break with the nationalism of past intellectual formations. And as Pheng Cheah succinctly puts it, ‘‘We live in an era when nationalism seems to be out of favor in academia.’’1 In a recent special issue of PMLA titled ‘‘Globalizing Literary Studies,’’ Paul Jay touches on both of these issues. On the one hand, Jay indicates that the long-standing cultural nationalism of literary study obscures a long history of global intercultural engagement. He calls for a less rigid boundary separating the present as an era of globalization from the assumed national integrity of the past. Echoing Wai Chee Dimock’s arguments in Through Other Continents, he writes, ‘‘We need to bring [the] transnational perspective to how we present the history of literature in the West, moving away from a traditional division of discrete national literatures into ossified literary-historical periods and giving the history of global expansion, trade, and intercultural exchange precedence in our curriculum over the mapping of an essentially aestheticized national character.’’2 In a familiar refrain, he also offers that ‘‘the structure of American literary studies in United States universities has always been informed by a broadly nationalist ideal.’’3 Jay dates globalization to the early modern period, suggesting that the very idea of a national literature is and always has been bankrupt, and he also proposes that we ‘‘ought to focus less on identifying what seems inherently English or American in the literatures we teach and write about and more on understanding the functional relation between literature and the nation-state, how literary writing has been theorized and politicized in efforts to define and empower nation-states, especially from the Enlightenment onward.’’4 The spatial turn—realized here as a global literary studies—presents itself as a fresh alternative to these problems of nation-based thinking and as a passageway to a broader scale of freedom. There is some wiggle room here on one of the major issues introduced by this imperative: Were these merely ‘‘efforts’’ to empower nation-states...

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