Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World: System, Scale, Culture Edited by David Palumbo-Liu, Bruce Robbins, and Nirvana Tanoukhi (review)

This collection of essays reflects on the stakes of cultural criticism that apprehends a global perspective. The outgrowth of a conference organized to explore the consequences of “globalization” as the current dominant investigative paradigm in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, the volume explores what happens when scholars “[take] ‘the world’ … as a … unit of analysis.” Immanuel Wallerstein’s assertion of a world-system made up of interrelated core, peripheral, and semi-peripheral areas as the most relevant lens for social analysis offers a key organizing feature with which contributors to the book measure the kind of globality achieved by scholarly pursuits in humanistic disciplines. The work traces the benefits of this systemic focus in four parts that comprise investigations into the historical relationship of academic disciplines and the development of a capitalist world-system, as well as a series of case studies that examine the usefulness of Wallerstein’s conceptions of system for examining literature, history, law, and ethics on a global scale. [End Page e-6]

The “red thread” connecting the essays is the question of whether a Wallersteinian world-systems model or a humanistic focus on the contingent and “unsystematizable” offers the best mode for investigating global inequality. What several contributors propose—and Wallerstein concurs in a reflection titled “Thinking About the Humanities”—is that prioritizing historic and specific responses to global relationships risks reifying global asymmetries. According to Wallerstein, scholars are all, whether implicitly or explicitly, investigating the nature of the “capitalist world economy.” We would do well to reflect on the relationship of the contingent to the system, lest we end up celebrating the peripheral without making room to conceptualize the way out of the periphery.

Part 1, “System and Responsibility,” features essays by Richard E. Lee and Bruce Robbins that productively examine the interconnection of humanities—a particular way of knowing tied to specific methods—and world-system on a broad scale. In “The Modern World-System: Its Structures, Its Geoculture, Its Crisis and Transformation,” Lee charts the concomitant development of specific “knowledge structures” and “historical social systems” (27). Specifically, Lee traces how the creation of the “modern fact,” exemplified by a merchant’s balance sheet proving profit, not usury, relates to modern disciplinary formations dependent on “scientific” notions of objectivity and rationality separate from questions of value—a direction of inquiry relegated to the humanities. As the world economy runs out of peripheries that can be incorporated into a system of continued accumulation, Lee argues that we have also reached a transition point in terms of the knowledge structures constituted within world-capitalism that present us with a political choice, namely, whether to allow questions of value to inform new epistemologies. In his piece “Blaming the System,” Robbins challenges the humanities’ claim to a critical capacity that stems from its focus on the contingent, the nonsystemic phenomena that can signal agency and action against oppression. Without a recognition of the system from which it speaks, Robbins claims, the humanities run the risk of praising the evidence of inequality, even as its methods aim to critique it.

In part 2, “Literature: Restructured, Rehistoricized, Rescaled,” Franco Moretti and Nirvana Tanoukhi examine the scalar dimensions of global literary histories. In “World-Systems Analysis, Evolutionary Theory, Weltliteratur,” Moretti argues that both evolutionary biology and Wallerstein’s “world-systems” theory can help us properly historicize seemingly contradictory but “true” trajectories of literary progress: the development of distinct literary characteristics over time and the diffusion of similar literary modes across space. Evaluating world literature according to these models negates [End Page e-7] the antagonism between old, “quality” texts and contemporary, “relevant” works in debates on canon formation, since old and new texts entered and circulated in the world in historically distinct ways. Like Moretti, Tanoukhi calls for the need to historicize scalar models used to “measure...