Peripheral Convergences

When I sat down to write these brief notes on Insurgent Imaginations, my first temptation was to juxtapose its project for world literature to liberal accounts. But this would only prove what readers of books like this already know, that is, the abysmal difference in relevance between Marxist and liberal discussions of the subject. The latter tend to be marked by the notion that world literature has transformed the globalized supermarket of written works of art into an Amazon, in which we can comfortably access cultural artifacts from the Aztecs to the Sumerians, and then consume them as an isolated experience. Rather than praising difference and variety, which do not relate, the effort here is to formulate the usefulness of the new discipline for a project of social transformation. Indeed, “the point is to change it.” To further this historical task, the book sets out to demonstrate the critical and political possibilities available to a reading of world literature from a peripheral point of view. This demonstration is carried out in constant dialogue with the Marxist tradition. To use a term coined by Fredric Jameson, the book presents an exercise in “cognitive mapping,” a way of doing what globalized capital denies, that is the possibility of coordinating local cultural productions with national or international ones, thus enabling perception of the totality that rules them all. This is accomplished by way of the invention of categories that guide the analysis of cultural products in such a way as to render visible structures of the specific conjunctures that frame them. As such, it is yet another example of the ways in which cultural materialism is a position that turn analysis into an instrument for discovering and interpreting social reality, to adapt Antonio Candido’s apt phrase.1 The aim is to contribute to turn world literature into a strategy of resistance. The result, once more, confirms that Marxism is the untranscendentable horizon of productive thought. There is no point, then, inwasting timewith comparisons with other approaches.