The Eidaesthetic Itinerary: Notes on the Geopolitical Movement of the Literary Absolute

Whoever hasn't yet arrived at the clear realization that there might be a greatness existing entirely outside his own sphere and for which he might have absolutely no feeling; whoever hasn't at least felt obscure intimations concerning the approximate location of this greatness in the geography of the human spirit: that person either has no genius in his own sphere, or else he hasn't been educated yet to the niveau of the classic.

—Friedrich Schlegel, Critical Fragment 36

What is Anglophone literature? The question has two parts, and it is only apparently the first that is easier to answer. Anglophone would, if taken absolutely á la lettre, mean something quite other than the signification it takes on in ordinary usage. The -phone suffix refers to speech, not writing; writers like Chinua Achebe, who has "spoken more words in Igbo than English but [has] definitely written more words in English than Igbo," testify to the fact that this linguistic quibble has actual content. ¹ Often it seems that the -phone suffix does not primarily refer to language at all but instead functions as a kind of shorthand for referring to the old colonial geography: thus a nation may be Francophone, Anglophone, or Lusophone without having a majority of French, English, or Portuguese speakers. This -phone suffix, then, is originally bound up with a colonial ideology that viewed diverse geographic spaces as (asymptotically) culturally coterminous with the metropole. ² Thomas Babington Macaulay's famous call for a "class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect" demands, in essence, the kind of world that would be necessary for the -phone suffix to be strictly accurate. ³ The anglo- prefix, meanwhile, is an ethnic determination before it is anything else. Although the meaning of Angle as distinct from Jute or Saxon is largely forgotten, the trace of this origin remains in other common uses of the prefix, which seems indissolubly bound up with the creation of an ethnically distinct administrative class—"Anglo-Irish," "Anglo-Indian," "Anglo-Arab"—by the British imperial project. "Anglo-American" has a somewhat different genealogy, but its usage confirms the point.

This etymological moment is, perhaps, trivial. We all know what we mean by Anglophone, and it plainly includes writers like Achebe who fit neither half of the word perfectly. (This does not mean, however, that the word is ideologically neutral: we must consider, for example, the extent to which the institutional form of "Anglophone literature" is a cultural by-product of a Cold War–era attitude of benevolent stewardship over the nonsocialist third world, and thus the direct inheritor of Macaulay's to us shocking and absurd idea.) Nonetheless, this moment serves as the occasion to question the differential insertion of texts—the second question, that of "literature," which we have not yet begun to address—into an apparently uniform "Anglophone" space.

The most efficient way to stage this question might be to rehearse a much older formulation of the problem, which has, despite the vicissitudes of the field of the literary, lost none of its currency. It is commonly said that the theory of world literature, Weltliteratur, originates with Goethe:

For some time there has been talk of world literature, and properly so. For it is evident that all nations, thrown together at random by terrible wars, then reverting to their status as individual nations, could not help realizing that they had been subject to foreign influences, had absorbed them and occasionally become aware of intellectual needs previously unknown. The result was a sense of goodwill. Instead of isolating themselves as before, their state of mind has gradually developed a desire to be included in the free exchange of ideas. ⁴

It is not difficult to discern the traces of this cosmopolitan multiculturalism in our own current discourse, where preexisting cultures develop...