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  • WReC’s Reply
  • Warwick Research Collective (bio)

Warwick Research Collective

We are grateful to Comparative Literature Studies for mooting the idea of, and for providing journal space for, this discussion, and to Alexander Fyfe for convening it. We would like to thank our respondents—Sarah Brouillette and David Thomas, Maria Elisa Cevasco, Joshua Clover, David Damrosch, and Barbara Harlow—for their suggestive and challenging engagements with our work. We appreciate the candor and robustness of their assessments, and hope that our own responses to them in turn—equally robust, as befits the occasion—will be taken in the collegial spirit in which they are intended.

Our book attempted to resituate the problem of “world literature” as one better defined as the literature of the capitalist world-system, that is, “world-literature.” We sought to address world-literature by pursuing initially the literary-cultural implications of the theory of combined and uneven development. The implications of this theory for cultural analysis have received relatively little attention, even though it might be said to draw attention to a central arc or trajectory of modern(ist) production in literature and the other arts worldwide. It is in the conjuncture of combined and uneven development, on the one hand, and the recently interrogated and expanded categories of “world literature” and “modernism,” on the other, that our book looked for its specific contours. The first two chapters argued for a single, but radically uneven world-system; a singular modernity, combined and uneven; and a literature that variously registers this combined unevenness in both its form and content to reveal itself as, properly speaking, world-literature. The four substantive chapters that follow explored a selection of modern-era fictions in which the potential of world-literary comparativism is dramatically highlighted. We treated the novel paradigmatically, not exemplarily, as a literary form in which combined and uneven development is manifested with particular salience, due in no small part to its fundamental association with the rise of capitalism and its status in peripheral and semi-peripheral [End Page 535] societies as a “modernizing” import. The peculiar plasticity and hybridity of the novel form enables it to incorporate not only multiple literary levels, genres and modes, but also other nonliterary and archaic cultural forms.

Because David Damrosch’s response is the most openly adversarial of the five, it might be best to begin with his. He laments our “monocular anglo-centrism,” which he sees as limiting what we are able to say. In developing his argument, he singles out our analysis of Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North for particular criticism. The facts that none of us knows Arabic and that we have therefore not consulted any untranslated Arabic scholarship on Salih are for him definitive. We have, of course, examined the work of such critics as Sabry Hafez, Saree Makdisi, and Waïl S. Hassan, as well as the standard reference, Mona Amyuni’s Casebook, whose contributors—with the exception of Barbara Harlow, herself a distinguished writer on Arabic literatures—are all native Arabic speakers. While engagement with Arabic writers in addition to Salih might have added another layer to our commentary on the novel’s complex narrative forms, its schema of spatial and temporal tropes, and literary style, we are not persuaded that the absence of such an additional tissue of literary-biographical or intertextual commentary undermines or qualifies our reading of Season.

Damrosch writes that our “anglo-phonic” reading is only able to reproduce the banality that Salih’s novel is “wholly concerned with an irrevocable conflict between the capitalist-imperialist West and the anti-imperial, anti-capitalist Sudanese.” In fact, we explicitly oppose ourselves to this line of third-worldist argument, proposing instead that the excess of various kinds of violence (patriarchal, ethnic, and racial, as well as imperialist and capitalist) that Salih accommodates in his style is an expression of the structural logic of historical capital’s combined unevenness, one that does not permit Sudan to be reproduced in the novel as homogeneously anti-imperialist or anticapitalist. Indeed, it is precisely in the representation of the cataclysmic divisions within Sudanese (and also English) society as a “deadly germ” of world-historical...

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