Planetary Time and Global Translation: "Context" in Literary Studies

What is the appropriate scale for the study of culture and, in particular, the study of literature? How far back should we go to trace its roots and how wide a net should we cast to take stock of its extensions and translations? On what map should we break down this massive corpus into meaning-bearing contexts or units of analysis: the map of a locality, the map of the nation-state, or a map still larger—continental, hemispheric, even planetary in scope? ¹

These questions, until quite recently unasked by literary critics, might turn out to be the most important ones facing the field today, linking it to other disciplines also wrestling with the question of scale: law, economics, political theory, even the sciences. Immanuel Wallerstein observes, "In most writing today, the unit of analysis is usually merely implicit. It is not specified, and virtually never justified. It thereby becomes a highly questionable a priori assumption." ² Wallerstein, of course, is not exactly a neutral party here. His purpose, in exposing this methodological blind spot, is to highlight the inadequacy of the nation-state as a unit of analysis, its failure to bear the explanatory weight of large-scale developments, such as capitalism. Those developments, in his well-known formulation, can be studied only as a "world-system." ³

Whether or not we agree with Wallerstein in substantive terms, it is worth taking up his procedural challenge: to foreground the unit of analysis as a deliberate choice, specifying the boundaries attributed to it and making a methodological claim on its behalf. My own conclusion is that literary studies requires the largest possible scale, that its appropriate context or unit of analysis is nothing less than the full length and width of our human history and habitat. I make this claim from the standpoint of literature as a linguistic form with agency in the world, a linguistic form compelling action. This action gives rise to a jurisdictional order whose boundaries, while not always supranational, are nonetheless not dictated in advance by the chronology and territory of the nation-state. As a set of temporal and spatial coordinates, the nation is not only too brief, too narrow, but also too predictable in its behavior, its sovereignty uppermost, its borders defended with force if necessary. It is a prefabricated box. Any literature crammed into it is bound to appear more standardized than it is: smaller, tamer, duller, conforming rather than surprising. The randomness of literary action—its unexpected readership, unexpected web of allegiance—can be traced only when that box is momentarily suspended, only when the nation-state is recognized as a necessary but insufficient analytic domain, ceding its primacy upon scale enlargement.

That scale enlargement has usually been given the name "globalization" and is assumed to occur along one particular axis: space. David Held gives voice to this standard assumption when he writes:

Globalization is best understood as a spatial phenomenon, lying on a continuum with the "local" at one end and the "global" at the other. It denotes a shift in the spatial form of human organization and activity to transcontinental or interregional patterns of activity, interaction and the exercise of power. ⁴

Defined as a spatial phenomenon, globalization holds out the hope of new forms of collective life, horizontally extended, organizing an ever wider geographical expanse into ever wider jurisdictional units. As Bruce Ackerman points out, the idea of "world constitutionalism" no longer sounds wishful or exotic even among scholars of the United States Constitution. ⁵ Among international lawyers, this development is more obviously the case. The classic "Westphalian" model—with its operative landscape defined by territoriality, recognizing only sovereign states as legitimate players—is increasingly seen as outmoded, ill-suited for the civil societies of the twenty-first century. ⁶ The lexicon has admitted numerous terms (including NGO, nonstate actor, and transnational adjudication) appropriate to post-Westphalian conditions. ⁷

It is in this...