Debt in the Teaching of World Literature: Collaboration in the Context of Uneven Development

debt, n.

1. That which is owed or due; anything (as money, goods, or service) which one person is under obligation to pay or render to another: a. a sum of money or a material thing. b. a thing immaterial. † c. That which one is bound or ought to do; (one's) duty.

2. a. A liability or obligation to pay or render something; the condition of being under such obligation. b. in debt: under obligation to pay something; owing something, esp. money; in any one's debt: under obligation to pay or render something to him; indebted to him. So out of debt, out of any one's debt; to fall or run into (or in) debt; out of debt out of danger: see DANGER. † c. Obligation to do something; duty. in debt: under obligation, in duty bound. of or with debt: as a matter of debt, as is due or right; as in duty bound.

3. fig. Used in Biblical language as the type of an offence requiring expiation, a sin.

—Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., 1989

Debates about world literature—what it is, where it fits into the humanities curriculum, and how it should be taught—have intensified in recent years, serving as a convenient segue from the culture wars to the post-9/11 quandary of how best to accommodate our academic study and practice to the increasingly pressing issues raised by globalization. One of the immediate challenges facing those invested in "world literature" is that the term refers to literature taught in a number of different disciplinary contexts: most often comparative literature, postcolonial literature, and global Anglophone literature. For those interested in addressing their congruities, these contexts have vexingly disparate histories, goals, and objects of study. World literature encompasses comparative literature's focus on literatures in their original languages and its attention to local cultural contexts; the exploration of colonialism, of nation formation, and of colonial and postcolonial diaspora that informs postcolonial studies; and global Anglophone literature's comparative investigation of international literatures written in English. Significant voices in all of these fields, however, see world literature texts as those that circulate within a global system in which power is distributed unevenly. They are also concerned with how to recognize and, if possible, mitigate the consequences that this unevenness may have for how literature is read. For this reason, and because of the importance of interdisciplinarity as a solution to some of the pedagogical questions raised by the notion of world literature, we want to preserve the broadness of the term in this study.

Our essay begins by reviewing the shape that debates about world literature have taken in articles and books published since the start of the new century and argues that the idea of debt plays a key role in structuring the conversation. A metaphor that links the real-world debts imposed by global financial structures like the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund on third world countries to imbalances in the study and formation of literary traditions around the world, debt has rich resonance for the study of world literature. Yet debt is a debilitating concept as well, and our aim is to address the ambivalence and sense of anomie facing critics and teachers of world literature by making explicit, and attempting to reorient, the uses to which the term can be put. Our own use of the word debt, then, reflects its importance in recent criticism and addresses the anxieties it reveals: anxieties about how to be responsible academically to the breadth and newness of the field and about how to be responsible ethically to the unevenness that underwrites it.

Debt, to those interested in world literature, has all the connotations listed in the definition taken from the Oxford English Dictionary: material debt structures the relation of third to first world countries, while a sense of...