We Are All Administrators Now: Contemporary Governmentality and Its Novel Genealogies

This article reviews John Marx’s Geopolitics and the Anglophone Novel, 1890–2011, a study of how the novel has sought to intervene in global administration over the long twentieth century. Adopting a genealogical approach, Marx aims to identify the discursive conditions through which literature came to have something to say about global governance. The anglophone novel, he argues, has evolved in conversation with a sociological discourse of professionalized governmentality that took root in the age of imperial British liberalism and reinvented itself through successive stages of post-World War II globalization. For instance, Marx’s chapter on failed-state fiction shows how certain novels engage with competing professional knowledge about states in crisis in order to reassess who is truly qualified to administer in those zones—including those who do not fit traditional, class-based notions of “professionalism.” In this and other chapters, Marx attempts to tease out the positive political potentials that emerge from the novelistic engagement with these complex discursive systems. Ultimately, he offers a measured optimism for a reinvented liberalism in our present moment, one that is needed to contest neoliberalism’s claim to be the sole heir to liberal ideas. Novels, he concludes, can indeed work incrementally in collaboration with social sciences to set new agendas and frameworks for global governance. Overall, Marx’s book offers a fresh perspective for theorizing literary agency on a global scale, while simultaneously revealing the need for a more thoroughgoing analysis of interdisciplinary exchange within governmentality.