Worlding Comparative Literature: Beyond Postcolonialism

Edward Said is one of the iconic comparative literature scholars of the second half of the twentieth century, particularly known for his almost single-handed invention of postcolonialism as a critical method. Part of Said's method consisted of re-reading and commenting upon colonial classics. Such reinterpretations not only addressed classics of fiction, but also engaged with the works of historians and geographers. In what follows, I will focus on Said's handling of the work of the British geographer Halford Mackinder, whom Said mentions three times in Culture and Imperialism (1993),¹ albeit only second-hand, so to speak, as each time this happens via references to Neil Smith's 1984 Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space. In 1904, Mackinder published an influential paper in The Geographical Journal, the official organ of the British Royal Geographical Society. In this paper, Mackinder labelled all of European and Asian Russia and much of Central Asia, then also under Russian rule, as "The Geographical Pivot of History." Mackinder's views represented what we would now, following Heidegger's coining of the term, and especially the use Said himself and Gayatri Spivak have made of it, call a "worlding" of the world according to the dictates of colonialism and imperialism prevalent at the time. My argument will be that Said's reading of Mackinder likewise amounts to a specific worlding for a specific moment in time, and that perhaps now we should move on from there.

Although he never mentions the term in his paper, Mackinder reasoned from the British "Great Game" perspective that had also inspired Rudyard Kipling to write Kim, his novel of imperial India, published just a few years earlier, in 1901. Towards the end of the novel, Kim O'Hara, the novel's boy-protagonist of Irish descent but born and raised in India, faces a Russian and a Frenchman who, under the guise of "sportsmen," are scouting and surveying the high passes of India's North-West frontier region. France and Russia, and soon also Germany, were Britain's main imperial rivals at the beginning of the twentieth century. Russia's push south through the Caucasus and Central Asia was especially seen as a threat to the British commercial and political interests in Persia/Iran, and to British India, the Jewel in the Crown of Imperial Britain. Perhaps surprisingly, given Kipling's reputation as a British imperialist and jingoist, Said provided a highly appreciative introduction to the 1987 Penguin edition of Kim. Said labels Kim "a masterwork of imperialism" ("Introduction" 45) and hence "a great document of its historical moment" ("Introduction" 46) but also insists that it is "one of the greatest of novelistic ironies" ("Introduction" 45) that Kipling's "aesthetic integrity" laid bare the impermanence of Britain's hold on India, thus turning Kim also into "an aesthetic milestone along the way to midnight 15 August, 1947" ("Introduction" 46), that is to say, Indian independence and partition.

The first mention Said makes of Mackinder, whom he calls "an explorer, geographer, and Liberal Imperialist" (CI 23), concerns a series of lectures on imperialism Mackinder gave at the London Institute of Bankers at the end of the nineteenth century. This mention of Mackinder occurs in a parenthetical aside in which Said discusses the opening paragraphs of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, in which Conrad's narrator Marlow starts to tell his story of the ruthless exploitation of King Leopold II's colonial Congo Free State to "a group of listeners […] drawn largely from the business world" (CI 23). Said speculates on whether Conrad may have known about Mackinder's lectures while writing his great novella in 1898-99. Conrad, of course, was the subject of Said's earliest book-length publication, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966). The way Said discusses Heart of Darkness in Culture and Imperialism very much resembles the way he discusses Kim in his introduction to the latter. He also considers Heart of Darkness imperialist and revelatory of imperialism at the same time, and of the latter's transience. Moreover, as with Kim, he locates this quality...