The Dead Ends of Decolonization, or Faith in the Literary?

Abstract

NESCO is widely recognized as a formidable institutional protagonist in world literary culture, albeit at a remove from the day-to-day transactions of the contemporary literary world. Commissioning large-scale translation projects, intervening over legal copyright, appointing literary and intellectual heavyweights from Claude Levi-Strauss to the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, UNESCO has been a considerable force in the modern history of writing and reading. Its vulnerability to forces of politicization―notoriously, the threats of divestment by some member states after UNESCO decided to grant membership to Palestine in 2011―offsets its sheer size as an international cultural organization. Given these things, it is surprising that UNESCO rarely makes more than cameo appearances in literary studies.1 Sarah Brouillette, a critic who has led much of the recent debate on literature’s imbrications in global capitalism, is well positioned to respond to this situation. Her sociological diagnoses of contemporary literature and culture in Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007) and Literature and the