World Theory: Amitav Ghosh on Being at Sea

At this point, the last thing to do would be to limit in advance the shape, size, heterogeneity, and combination of associations.

—Bruno Latour (2005, 11)

ONE

Is world theory possible? If it were would it offer secure gr ounds for thinking in a troubled world? In general, those who champion an idea of world literature have found it prudent to eschew theoretical speculation or synthetic abstraction in favor of close attention to specific cases.¹ For example, in a recent article, Wai Chi Dimock, who has long been making an eloquent case for relocating literary studies from the nation to the world, uses Gilgamesh, the ancient Sumerian Epic familiar to those interested in World literature, as a case study of a literary afterlife with a global dimension.² Dimock is intent to detranscendentalize the literary, while not limiting the significance of the work of art to the immediacies of any one temporal or spatial context. Dimock rejects the synthetic distance and formalizing abstraction that theory, classically, entails. To understand Gilgamesh, and by implication, any literary work, she argues requires "an empirical lens," a focus on "specific instances of translation, citation, and….recycling that bring it back, break it up, and redistribute it across a variety of locations and platforms" (2015, 126). The optics of empiricism, the metaphor of the lens that Dimock deploys, suggests that whatever its aversion to theory, empiricism nonetheless requires a theoretical intervention or speculation. Rather than abstracting or explaining, theory, as its oft cited etymology (from the Greek for vision) suggests, might best be considered a making visible, a magnification more than an abstraction, a putting into focus, making something not previously apparent evident. What might world theory, as an empirical lens, reveal or make visible about world literature and the experience of living in the world between the time of Gilgamesh and the present day? The cultures, languages, and literatures that populate the globe have been uncannily intertwined for a very long time. Yet, however intertwined circulations of cultures and peoples and tales have been, human beings do not form one continuum of experience and expression. The challenge and charm of world literature and global studies lies in difference. With differences come misapprehension, misprision, and misunderstanding, and these aspects of the experience of globalization figure largely in world literature today. World theory appears within world literature which focuses on these confusing aspects of human experience and which forms an important feature of the life and afterlife of literature.³

In the decades since Frederick Jameson's notorious, cold-war theory that described third world literatures as national allegories, such global theoretical pronouncements have come to seem ill-advised or impossible.⁴ For one thing, the locale and limits of the third world are no long certain. Former superpowers in the first and second worlds appear to contain third world nations within their borders—in the impoverished boroughs of New York City, the oppressed banlieues of Paris, or the industrial slums of Moscow. Moreover, a lot of interesting literary art today tends not to explore the dynamisms of nation formation or national identity—as one might have said that work by Wai Thong Ngugi, Aimé Caesar, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez did. Instead, writers like Amin Mahloof, Amitav Ghosh, Isabella Hammad, Bharati Mukherjee, Yann Martel, who might constitute an emerging canon of global literature, in distinctively different ways depict diasporic experiences, experiences of being scattered and confused, literally or figuratively at sea in the world. These experiences of being at sea—of disorientation and being in between, of confusion and misunderstanding, of lacking stable grounds or organic access to the autochthonous—constitute the experience of globalization and diasporic existence. One might regard the communicative and intercultural glitches, the mistranslation of languages and the misprision of cultures that these novels recount as barriers to relationships among different cultures that must be overcome. World literature and world theory might be imagined as one way through and beyond the misunderstandings and conflicts of globalization. But first these writers, who each write for a global audience, ask their readers to take a more...