Making and Reading World Literature in a Pandemic

This essay intervenes in a debate about world literature that pits commodity circulation against normativity and literature’s causal force. By taking into account the history of book production and circulation as intimately linked with the history of global capitalism, this essay reads Severance (2018) by Ling Ma as a critique of the logic of global logistics and its labor relations. Reading the novel during a pandemic ironically draws attention to the reader’s own position in this global labor hierarchy, highlighting that the novel itself necessarily participates in the material injustices of global print capitalism. The essay argues that paying attention to book production and circulation – in the form of global supply chains, the world market’s global reach, and particularly the human relations this produces – is in fact not antithetical to, but instead a highly leveraged way of understanding literature’s potential for transformative agency.