The Stakes of Internationalism

Abstract

The centrality of internationalism is among the most rewarding points of emphasis in Auritro Majumder’s Insurgent Imaginations. There is even a kind of intellectual daring in his proposing internationalism as a defining concept for reckoning with peripheral literature, given that categories such as cosmopolitanism or globalization are far more apt to catch the attention of contemporary readers. Nonetheless, it is to the internationalist orientation of writers and artists from outside the “West” that Majumder returns, not out of a hoary commitment to preserve the old or the outmoded but to keep faith with the actual histories of cultural and political struggle spurring the vast output of artistic creativity in the global south. Majumder focuses specifically on the literary and cultural forms that articulate this peripheral worldview, unified by a singular ambition: to “push the boundaries of humanist emancipation.”1 The first thing that strikes me as salutary in locating internationalism as a universal aspiration which finds expression in locations such as Cuba, India, Mexico, or Brazil (among other places) is the author’s decision to avoid what Theodor Adorno’s translator, the philosopher Robert Hullot-Kentor, calls the “gratuitous plural.”2 That is, Majumder is guided by the understanding that locating a desired plurality simply by designating it (e.g., “internationalisms” instead of “internationalism,” “racisms” instead of “racism,” “modernities” instead of “modernity”) cannot in fact render it real. Even though this move is evident everywhere in criticism today, it involves a category mistake—geared less toward demonstrating the equality between ideas or isms than in virtue signaling. At the end of the day, such nominalizations only succeed in shunting