Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies

National Literatures in the Shadow of Neoliberalism

37 National Literatures in the Shadow of Neoliberalism Jeff Derksen At the same time as national literatures are deeply temporal and spatial, and are produced by contested histories and spaces, they themselves produce national narratives and the spatial imagination of a nation.Yet both of these big categories—space and time—have been reconfigured by the concept of globalization as a surging movement of ideas, people, capital, and images and by neoliberalism’s contested “end of history.”While this may appear to fulfill Marx’s outcome that the creative destruction of capitalism annihilates space with time,globalization theory and the temporal aspects of neoliberalism work to blur the antagonistic edges of counter –narratives and oppositional spaces within globalization.Investigations of the nexus of the spatial and the temporal are therefore crucial today to grasp national literatures within the long moment of neoliberalism and the geography of globalization.A “strategic interdisciplinarity”1 troubles the strain of the cultural language of globalization that is quick in proposing that nation-states and national literatures would dissolve upwards into a global culture.To agitate this language is not to recuperate nation space and nation narratives after globalization, but to turn to an interdisciplinary method to locate the role culture plays within this spatiotemporal knot. Shifts within the definition and possibility of culture as well as historical changes in the role of nations in this post-euphoric moment of globalization—a moment distinguished by the ideological software of neoliberalism—play dialectically off of theories of the cohesive and unitary nation that can be,simultaneously,the anchor and site of critique in critical theory. 38 Derksen Culture, and the analysis of culture, builds and circulates the “spaces of representation”(Lefebvre,Production 42–43) that give an image to globalization . Cultural theory is tugged through a narrative of globalization that carries the tensions of process, policy, and development.AsTimothy Brennan poses the question: “Is globalization theory about describing a ‘process’: that is an amalgam of material shifts, spatial reorderings, anonymous developments and movements, the inexorable concatenation of changes in communication,transportation,demographics and the environment? Or does it describe a ‘policy’ whose purpose is to project a world order that a small group of national and/or financial interests ardently desires for the rest of us?” (129) Between the openness of process and the closure of policy (paralleling Antonio Negri’s categories of “constituent” and “constituted” power),2 a developmental strain of cultural thought regarding globalization accepts the model of globalization as determined by capitalist trade and a world market. As Imre Szeman points out, “[t]he critical agenda is thus set by the operations of globalization qua global capital: the need for criticism to concentrate its own energies on movements and border-crossings, while not entirely misplaced, comes across as a rearguard manoeuvre to catch up with phenomena that have already taken place at some other more meaningful or important level”(“Poetics”155).The economic determinates on cultural theory may place it in a belated position, but tracing the role of culture in globalization and neoliberalism, through the reorderings of time and space, can bring us to the unstable present. Michael Denning has identified a “nation turn” in cultural theory that focused on “the concepts that produce a people” (89), a turn that signifies a“break between the theme of the national-popular and those of hybridity,flexibility,and the diasporan”(10).This narrative of solidity and fragmentation, or of unity and de-territorialization that Denning points to, does not encompass existing cultural practices within and above the nation,yet it has become a touchstone within cultural theories of globalization .And, as Denning asserts, it can lead to a pairing of a global “culture of transnational corporations” and an “alternative global culture” that are then both read through a “relatively ahistorical logic of global cultural flow, produced, commodified, consumed, hybridized, co-opted, and resisted” (32–33).This view of global flows, springing from Manuel Castells’s critique of Henri Lefebvre and understood as a“spaces of flows” model,can splice with a view of globality shaped by a market model that National Literatures in the Shadow of Neoliberalism 39 speeds up global processes at the expense of the nation. Despite having the advantage of engaging with the reach of capital and the intensification of globality as a form of knowledge (as well as a form of trade), this position gives up the strategic space...