Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, and: Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies, and: The Global Remapping of American Literature, and: Transnationalism in Practice: Essays on American Studies, Literature and Religion, and: Globalizing American Studies, and: Literature and Globalization: A Reader (review)

The "mobility studies" case Stephen Greenblatt made in his 2001 PMLA essay "Racial Memory and Literary History" struck many, at the time, as fresh and persuasive. Ambitiously reworked into a collaborative book a decade après, the piece has lost some of its original punch. This is somewhat understandable. When Greenblatt put it forward, "mobility studies" was, already, a smart way of piggybacking on what the journal symploke labeled, also in 2001, "the global turn in critical theory," arguably the paradigm shift revamping the post-Cold War U.S. humanities. In other words, in the 2010 Cultural Mobility essay collection "Racial Memory" becomes, along with the volume itself and especially in the last several pages authored by Greenblatt, the "manifesto" it should have been ten or fifteen years ago. Belatedly refurbished, according to the book's subtitle and to Greenblatt's closing "Mobility Studies Manifesto" (250-253), into a cross-disciplinary rallying cry, the self-styled proclamation does not have today much of a war whoop to it. It may disappoint the genre historian insofar as, if virtually all manifestoes are polemical, this one bends the rule. It is not that Greenblatt and his co-authors agree with others too much. But the avant-garde the Cultural Mobility critics could have been around the dawn of the 21^st century looks now more like the arrière-garde Marjorie Perloff talks about in her 2010 Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. That is to say, Greenblatt, Županov, and the other members of the Berlin Institute of Advanced Studies, which sponsored the project leading to the book, do not break new ground. They bring up the rear, walking, usually unawares, in the footsteps of John Urry, Timothy Cresswell, Peter Adey, and other big names in the post-2000 bibliography of global mobility.

Make no mistake: this is, or could be, important work although some of the language it presses into service sounds, to quote from a comment by Greenblatt himself on Goethe's Weltliteratur "hopes," a bit "shopworn" (4). To be sure, new comparatism, postcolonialism, Deleuze and Guattari-inspired "empire" theory à la Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, then post- and transnational, diaspora, oceanic, planetary, and global studies are just some of the fields in which this sort of cultural circulation-oriented research has been done for a while now, and it is not clear either why "mobility" is a better term than what we already have. It may well be, and I do believe the aforementioned post-1989 paradigm could use a more capacious if scarcely all-encompassing label; I have ventured one myself, and others have too. However, Cultural Mobility does not back up Greenblatt's broad pronouncements by analytic engagement with what has actually been going on across disciplines, specifically with how much said mobility and germane concepts, phenomena, occurrences, and practices such as travel, nomadism, itinerancy, circulation, flow, exchange, the rhizome, dissemination, and the like have dramatically changed over the past twenty years the way we do and interpret literature and culture. I know, this is supposed to be a "manifesto," but the format does not entail a dispensation...